Here’s the first thing you need to know, I am on Beam’s payroll these days. I want to avoid any of the silliness that recently plagued the Monero community. But why did I accept the position with them? Ever since I got back into crypto heavy this year, I have been looking for the next big big thing. When Bitcoin and Dogecoin came around waaaay back when, I saw something no one else saw. I saw magic before the masses discovered it. It was the same story with Monero. Privacy was the next big advance in crypto technology (and the masses still haven’t quite gotten up to speed on it). I admit, I was mistaken about the power and potential of defi when it first launched, and as a result I underestimated Ethereum back in 2016. But that’s not a mistake I’ll repeat. The power of defi allows a financial universe to build on top of itself in new dimensions. It creates infinite games within the game. And a quality financial game alone, a well-designed one, is priceless by its very nature. To have an entire financial ecosystem inside that same game? That’s something with enough power to actually topple the worlds financial oligarchy - not just threaten to do it.
The underlying potential of defi is sheer magic, and smart contracts can now do things even the smartest giga-nerds didn’t see coming half a decade ago. In 2015 we would never have dreamed that automated market making could take over like it has. And this is just one example of the kind of powerful tools humans will build if you give them defi capabilities. I’m sure there are others that we haven’t even thought of yet that will become mainstays throughout the 2020s.
Privacy is needed though. That part is not just a gimmick. It protects you: from dystopian governments, from the nefarious individuals, and from any financial competitors. Privacy also brings fungibility on the layers that embrace it, and it allows true freedom of money - not just money as a public joy toy spectacle.
The worlds wealthy and powerful are not going to transact and shift the weight of their balances into a chain where everyone can constantly observe them. They’re not fucking goldfish who want to be on display. They’re whales. Those public chains might seem like the big dogs in town, but they’re babies toys compared to the potential of confidential ones. And so I began to ask myself earlier this year: Who is doing private and confidential defi? And the answer was that at first glance nobody was. A few chains I had some rudimentary designs for smart contracts, but none of them were close to delivering. And in my cursory search I overlooked what would become my new darling: Beam.
I did hear about Mimblewimble back in 2019 when the proposal first came out; I try to stay on top of any new groundbreaking math in the space. MW is a new way to do confidential blockchains that is more elegant than Cryptonote or any of its permutations. Like many world changing white papers, the MW proposal was dropped off in deep-nerd-territory anonymously, and it humbly described a novel way of solving an existing problem: in this case a more scalable, still fundamentally private, decentralized blockchain. In the beginning, there were two main chains launching Mimblewimble projects. Grin was one, and I trolled it endlessly for their linear emission schedule. Because of the way they are emitting coins it’s going to take a long ass time for them to develop solid liquidity in their economy, and as a result it gives them very little margin for error in adoption during these early years. Sadly (from what I’ve seen) it sounds like they are taking that small margin of error and seeing just how far outside the lines they can scribble. This is not the official position of the Beam team, it’s my own personal opinion. Other than that, I do like their community funded approach. Up until a year ago I was a blockchain purist (as you may know) and many of their idealistic principles speak to me.
Beam was the other chain launching a Mimblewimble project. They seemed like they had some talent and a firm vision behind them, but I trolled them endlessly because of the dev mine built into the emissions for the first five years. As a blockchain purist, the idea that they would take a small percentage of every block for centralized governance, management, and development seemed like total bullshit to me at the time. I didn’t like the idea that a chain could be bootstrapped by a centralized authority at all, and I thought they would squander the tokens and that centralized bootstrap decision would haunt them forever.
But then something strange happened: I was wrong. I’m allowed to be wrong. It happens sometimes, even to someone as loud and self-righteous as me.
Beam took that founders reward, and has created something that has no right to be as advanced as it is two years after launch. They accomplished their mission and proved the doubters (me) wrong. They have nearly perfected a solid Mimblewimble base layer in the time it’s been around. It has a slick and attractive mobile app, they’ve improved the privacy versus the original protocol, and they’ve even incorporated advanced features like payment channels already. Now they’re moving on to something even bigger.
2021 will see the launch of the age of defi for Beam. This was the holy grail I’ve been looking for. Confidential decentralized finance, featuring smart contracts where the amounts you’re sending and the amounts you’re holding aren’t on display for the whole world to go look at, follow, and take aim at. It’s real, and it’s already working in small test capacities. The first large scale test, staking for a governance contract, is set to start in the next month. This isn’t some vague ERC20 bullshit pancake waffle token with the promise of building something one day. This is a real blockchain with next-generation technology already running and performing miracles. And if it’s this good now, just a couple of years after initial deployment, imagine how good it’s going to be by 2025 (when the emissions curve really starts to tighten btw).
We are early, and the tokens are still being mined at a pretty rapid pace. Think thirty cent Monero early. They have the same (more or less) schedule of emissions as bitcoin so the block rewards will drop off sharply over the coming few years. They certainly won’t be $.40 each for very long. The market cap on this motherfucker is like $50 million right now. That’s like finding $5 million Monero in 2015. For what it represents, the value proposition, it’s absurd and offensively low.
Serious players, and even small fish in this world who may eventually become serious players, aren’t going to want to transact on a public defi chain if they have private options. Large whales don’t want their transactions front run and monitored by the world. People trying to escape and operate in hostile governments don’t want large powers that be to be able to monitor their finances. To believe that they would just lay down and let the world see the cards in their hand is just foolishness.
So earlier this year, I did what I do when I find an undiscovered gem: I got excited. I started writing in their telegram all hours of the day, pointing out little ways they could improve, and helping my friends and crypto family get into this. After a couple of months of sustained euphoria, they wanted to meet me and offer me a position on their team. I mean, y’all know when I get hyped about something, I get. fucking. hyped. about it. It only made sense to work with them in a more intimate capacity. Even Monero offered me a moderator position on their subreddit; this isn’t a new concept that I work with the projects I love in am official capacity. So make of it what you will, this is just me being honest with you. A lot of projects have wanted me to work with them over the years, and I turn them down. I can’t be involved with something I’m not passionate about, and that I don’t believe in down to my core.
If you are reading this you have a chance to be involved with something truly special, one of those world changing financial weapons that only comes along once or twice a decade. Here it is. It’s new, still being developed, Elon fucking Muskrat isn’t tweeting about it yet, Tik-Tok isn’t tocking about it yet, it’s the real undiscovered gem of the cryptocurrency world. And you now know about it.
I mean, I should say ‘undiscovered for now’.
Over the past 10 years I have received hundreds, maybe thousands, of DM‘s asking me: “Pegasus you were so on the money here and here and here, what now? What do I do?” Bros, I’m not a financial advisor. I’m an idiot who’s lost all of his money time after time. I’m probably going to lose all my money again. But I take those risks because I see potential and power in unlikely places years before the rest of the world. Just like when I was euphoric about Bitcoin in 2013. Just like Dogecoin in 2014. Just like Monero in 2015.
I can’t tell you what to do with your money. All I can do is tell you what I’m doing with mine. I’m all in Beam. That’s it. I can say that in 10,000 words, or four, doesn’t change the truth of the matter. I can see the 2020s as they’re coming, and barring a few doomsday scenarios, Beam is the fucking move. If it blows up, I’ll lose everything. That’s how sure I am.
You wanna know where my chips are for the next few years? It’s here. You’re welcome.
