Changes Coming to minting Confidential Assets!
Confidential Assets
Confidential Assets (CAs) are an integral building block of the Beam ecosystem and lay the foundation for the BeamX Confidential DeFi Infrastructure. Anyone can issue CAs for a variety of different use cases. Confidential Assets, being first-class citizens of the network, benefit from the same incredible usability, privacy and scalability that we see with $BEAM and $BEAMX.
When confidential assets (CAs) were first introduced in 2020, a community vote was conducted to determine the amount of $BEAM needed for lock-up to mint a new token. The initial intention was to protect the network from being plagued by meme coins or spam tokens with little value. The result of the vote and as it stands currently, the amount needed to mint a new confidential asset is 3,000 $BEAM.
Enter Smart Contracts!
The Beam hard fork at block 1,280,000 introduced shaders (a.k.a smart contracts) bringing new functionality and potential use cases such as Bridges, DEXes, staking in Liquidity Pools (LPs) & DAO participation.
New DeFi use cases like DEXes and bridges will require many new confidential assets to be minted. DEXes make swaps easy and automated but only become popular if they support a wide range of tokens. Bridging assets from other blockchains also requires the minting of a new token. For example, whenever Ethereum ($ETH) is bridged over to Beam, a confidential asset is minted such as Beam Ethereum ($bETH), which is a 1:1 representation of $ETH on the Beam blockchain with similar functionality.
We foresee that with the creation of additional bridges and Dapps, the need for minting confidential assets will increase dramatically in the time to come. The current requirement to lock up 3,000 $BEAM to mint a new confidential can certainly be reevaluated to figure out a good balance between not spamming the network, whilst still ensuring the mint amount is cheap enough to mitigate entry barriers for ecosystem growth.
Your Voice Matters!
In line with Beam’s vision for community governance and a strong belief in transparency, we believe that the Beamer community should decide the new mint amount for confidential assets. After the results are tallied, the new $BEAM lock-up amount for minting confidential assets will be implemented in the upcoming Beam hard fork around June 2022 (Block height to be announced).
Express your thoughts about $BEAM lock-up amount to mint a new confidential asset in this forum post.
What’s Next for Beam?
Join us as we dive headfirst into Q2 2022 with new features and DAPPs in the works. Beam Bridge, a bidirectional bridge to Ethereum is currently undergoing auditing. This will bring new liquidity and users to BeamX’s private DeFi (PriFi).
The BeamX DAO voting dapp is in development allowing $BEAMX holders to create and vote on proposals. Word around the Beamer community circle is that a DEX and confidential stablecoin might pop up anytime soon! For a complete look at what’s coming this year, refer to the BEAM Roadmap Update.
