Introducing the Beam Bridge: A confidential two-way bridge to Ethereum

Published in

BEAM Privacy

3 min readMar 1, 2023

TL;DR Blockchains cannot communicate directly with one another, making them isolated silos that are disconnected from the broader multichain crypto ecosystem. Beam Bridge enables interoperability between Beam and Ethereum by allowing users to seamlessly move across assets.

Building Bridges

The Beam Team is excited to announce the launch of Beam Bridge, a two-way bridge between Beam and Ethereum that facilitates cross-chain crypto asset transfers.

Beam Bridge connects Beam’s private DeFi (PriFi) to Ethereum’s vast DeFi and Token ecosystems. Currently, supported assets include ETH, DAI, WBTC, and USDT. When bridging assets over from Ethereum, tokens are locked with an Ethereum Smart contract and minted on the Beam blockchain as wrapped Confidential Assets (CAs).

Open-source code lets developers run their own bridges

Beam Bridge is open-source and designed to be easily portable, and open to any modifications, enabling developers to customize it and run their own bridge for any EVM chain. Over time developers planning to run their own bridges may add support for any ERC-20 tokens they wish, allowing users to bridge any tokens from the Ethereum blockchain to trade, lend, borrow, earn, stake, and vote on the Beam blockchain and vice versa.

Initially, Beam Bridge will allow users to only bridge their own tokens, meaning when moving an Ethereum asset into Beam and back, a user can only move up to the same amount they sent to the bridge (for example, a user sent 1ETH via the Beam bridge, they can only claim up to 1ETH when moving back to Ethereum). This may change in the future as the team continues to improve the Beam Bridge feature by improving locked liquidity mechanisms, cross-chain privacy, and more.

We expect the Beam Bridge to play a key role for a number of reasons:

Cross-chain Liquidity: Beam Bridge will bring additional liquidity to the Beam ecosystem for the upcoming launch of numerous private DeFi Dapps, providing opportunities to liquidity providers.
Privacy Gateway: Opens the door for Ethereum users to leverage industry-leading blockchain privacy to secure crypto assets.
Fully Decentralized: Beam Bridge is an autonomous self-custodial protocol that functions without requiring any human input reducing points of failure and improving censorship resistance.

If you’re new to using blockchain bridges, refer to our step-by-step guide and start bridging digital assets across Ethereum and Beam (and vice versa).

What’s Next?

The Beam Bridge has successfully completed auditing and is currently undergoing documentation. In the future, developers will also be provided with the ability to rapidly port Ethereum DApps to Beam’s industry-leading privacy blockchain (a guide is in the works and will be published in the near future).

With key DeFi building blocks such as an on-chain Voting DApp and Beam Bridge complete, and an upcoming DEX and asset minter in the works; BeamX is well-positioned to lead the development of the private DeFi ecosystem, allowing developers to seamlessly create blockchain use cases, private DApps and decentralized communities.