We Asked, You Answered

Published in

BEAM Privacy

3 min readMay 28, 2020

Earlier this week, we asked the community an important question regarding Confidential Assets, which will be activated in the upcoming Hard Fork, with integration in the GUI wallet to soon follow.

This is an important milestone for Beam, in paving the way to a fully fledged confidential DeFi ecosystem. Confidential Assets will benefit from the scalability, privacy, and usability that Beam benefits from. They will also be easily tradable via atomic swaps, with both Beam, and supported currencies, right from within the wallet.

Not only do the Confidential Assets benefit from Beam’s already sensational features, but those introduced post fork, and into the future. They will also open the doors for some incredible use cases to come to fruition. From Confidential Synthetics like gold, to digital assets like stocks, and bonds, to Confidential Wrapped Assets such as BTC and ETH, the possibilities are endless.

This being said, they also introduce the possibility that the chain is bogged down with needless assets, with little use and innovation, much like the thousands of erc20 tokens on Ethereum. In order to combat this, an amount of BEAM will be required to issue a new asset on top of Beam, and this is where we took it to the community.

We opened a survey, to get the communities input on how many Beams should be locked in order to create an asset. Let’s take a look at what the community said…

The numbers:

Range:

0.01 BEAM - 1000000000 Beam :D

Weighted Average (with outliers removed):

3143.902439

The Questions:

There were a number of great questions regarding the lock amount, and ideas on how to make it work. Below are the most common questions that the community asked.

Can the lock amount be denominated in USD, rather than BEAM?
This could not be done without introducing a central point of control and potential failure. For this reason, we did not consider this as a viable option for asset issuance.
Can the lock amount reduce over time?
This adds more complexity to the lock model, and in a sense, potentially disincentivizes early adopters of Confidential Assets, as the amount of BEAM required would reduce with time.
What if the price of BEAM is to increase and thus make confidential asset issuance unaffordable?
The BEAM lock amount for Confidential Assets will be set after the upcoming Hard Fork. This does not mean the amount will stay the same forever, but to change it will require a Hard Fork.
What if developers are unable to put up the lock amount for confidential asset issuance?
If this happens, there will be the opportunity in the future to provide grants for serious projects looking to issue assets on Beam.

So with all that out the way… what is the lock amount?

Given that the question was put to the community, the best decision seems to be to make that voice heard.

The lock amount for Beam Confidential Assets will be set at
3000 BEAM.

This figure is inline with the weighted average from the community survey, putting the outcome in all of our hands. It is an absolute privilege to have such a strong, supportive community, willing to engage in discourse of the pros and cons of such things, and this is something that will be happening a lot more moving forward.

Team Beam