On Monday (February 18th), Japan’s Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd, which owns Indeed, the world’s No. 1 online job search engine with over 200 million unique visitors per month, announced that, via its recently launched blockchain technology fund, it had invested in Beam Development Limited.

RSP Blockchain Tech Fund, Recruit’s Singapore-based $25 million blockchain-focused venture capital fund, was established in November 2018 by Recruit Co., Ltd., an intermediate holding company of Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd.

So, why did Recruit decide to invest in Israel-based Beam Development Limited, the company that carries out the development of the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Beam? Here is how Recruit explained it in its press release:

“Recently, with the increase in settlement services and exchange services using tokens, there are great expectations for the use of blockchains in corporate activities. However, with existing tokens, there is a challenge of potentially confidential transaction data information being leaked to third parties. While securing Auditability of transactions by allowing transaction data to be verified by a specified third party, Beam token provides a blockchain with a function that prevents the divulgation of transaction data to third parties and protects the user's transaction information. “

The Mimblewimble protocol, on which the cryptocurrecies Beam and Grin are based, was originally proposed in 2016 by anonymous cryptographer “Tom Elvis Jedusor”, which, according to Motherboard, is “Voldemort’s real name in the French edition of the Harry Potter novels (equivalent to the English ‘Tom Marvolo Riddle’).” This technology was designed to address the issues of privacy and scalability in Bitcoin.

Here are some of Beam’s core features:

  • “All transactions are private by default”
  • “No addresses or other private information are stored on the blockchain”
  • “Opt-in Auditability”
  • “Confidential Assets”
  • “Supports online and offline transactions, atomic swap, hardware wallets integration”

The development of Beam started in March 2018, and the Beam mainnet launched at 01:40 UTC on January 3rd. Since then, Beam has faced some technical issues. For example, on January 21st, the Beam blockchain stopped at block 25709, and was down for around 2.5 hours.

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