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Beam Going Permissionless: Decentralizing L1s Thru Node Sales
Recorded: Dec. 23, 2024 Duration: 0:34:36Space Recording
Full Transcription
For more information, visit www.fema.org
It is so absolutely fantastic to see all you lovely folks here.
We're going to go ahead and get this thing started, my friends.
I see you, Kyle, I see you, Kyle 9000.
I see you, Capital.
Oh, NY Crypto's in the building.
I see you, Mountain Doji.
Oh, we got some lovely faces in the building, man.
And I'm just really, really excited to go ahead and get this thing on started for you folks.
We got some of the agenda.
We got some of the agenda.
We're going to be talking about the beam node mint, my friends.
We're going to be talking about the team, and we're going to be talking about the era, and we're all going to do it, but this is going to be talking to us.
And we're going to be talking about this, my friends.
I'm going to be talking about this is going to be a little bit of the foundation, which is going to be absolutely huge, my friends.
world of new possibilities for decentralization and allow anyone to participate and secure in
the network. This is going to be absolutely huge, my friends. So we're going to talk a little bit
about the, of course, we're going to talk a bit about the node mint. We're going to talk about
what Beam is building. We're going to talk about the impact. What does this all mean overall for
Avalanche? Then we'll go ahead and open things up for some closing remarks from our panel of
speakers, and then we'll get our folks on out here. But I guess I'll go ahead and introduce my
lovely panel of speakers. I'll introduce myself first. Hey, everybody. I'm Brevi. I'm your host.
I'm Senior Social Media Manager over at Avalabs. Very, very happy to go ahead and host this thing.
And I'm joined here by a couple of amazing, amazing people. First off, I'm going to go ahead
and introduce Coop, Senior Growth Marketing Manager over at Avalabs. Say what's up, my friend.
Hello, Brevi. Thanks for having me. Did you say this is your first space for us?
Yeah, dude. This is, uh... I'd be lying if I said I was not nervous.
You do it all the time. You're just on a new account. It's all good.
Yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. This is my same vibe, different kind of situation. But
I don't know. For some reason, I got some nerves working up here. But we're going to go ahead and
dust these things on and off, my friend. I appreciate you for joining us today, Coop.
Really appreciate you. I'm also joined here by, uh, Mark, who is the head janitor over at
Beam. Say what's up, my friend.
Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Um, I'm one of the co-founders of Beam, but just use a different
title because we are not really used to very formal C-level titles. So just gave it a good
swing this time. Hey, love it, man. Head janitor it is, man. What did Eminence say? I am whatever
you say I am. So really, really appreciate you for popping on today, Mark. I guess just
to kind of get things kicked off, Mark, could you just kind of tell us what you folks are
building over there at Beam? Yeah, for sure. So we started back in 2021. Uh, we did a very
large LBP at the time. So we had a lot of like community, um, involvement from day one.
And, um, we have been investing mainly in the Web3 gaming ecosystem at the start. And after
a while, we expanded a bit more to AI, cloud compute, and some more infrastructure plays as
well. Um, in essence, we have been focused on the gaming industry since day one. And
after a while, we know that we need to start building more infrastructure ourselves to make
this, make this work, like not solely investments. Um, so we started to build our AVEX subnet,
I think slightly more than a year ago, um, where we heavily focused on a kind of very natural
user experience for gamers coming to the space. And, um, that has been our main thesis since the
start. Is that like, to make this work, we need to have a way more, um, unified experience for
people coming into the industry because like, we are used to crypto UX. Um, the majority of the
people aren't. So, um, it has been our main thing since the start. We're working with around,
I would say 25, 30 game developers quite closely. And we're finally coming at the stage where we will
see a few of those games coming, coming alive and launching on, um, the Beam layer one and like Q1.
Um, some other context, like I think we have one of the largest non-native token treasuries in
crypto. So the, uh, the, the treasury of the Beam Foundation is approximately 250 mil,
which excludes the Beam token itself. So we have a very diversified portfolio of liquid assets,
venture investments, and that all across the space. So, um, that's also one of the core elements
of the, uh, the, the note means where we're going to chat about later, but, um, this is the
TODR for now, just feel free to shit any questions if it's not clear, but, um, this has been us in
like a nutshell.
All right. So you, you got to tell me a little bit about, um, how you expect the impact to be,
right? Like, why do you think that like the gaming industry could benefit from Web3 in general?
And then Coop, after Mark answers, I'm going to pick on you too, my friend.
Yeah. I think you see it with everything in life to be completely fair. So like self-ownership of
things, or at least the decision to decide yourself, it's just a very easy one. Like if you can play the
same game, but actually, or capitalize or at least own the stuff and the progression in the game itself,
I think that's a kind of no brainer to everyone. And obviously not per se for every game type, but in
assets, I think everyone would be happy to self own his own time B assets. Um, and if you want to
leave a game and you can sell your assets and basically move on to the next game again, I think
there's no gamer that's really against that, that aspect. I think the biggest issue we have had so
far is that the first wave of crypto game have been more DeFi with nice frontends and weren't really
proper games. And that's also why I, the main toxicity from like the Rep2 game industry comes,
if it comes down to crypto, but I think with, uh, with the last few titles that we have seen and just
actual very fun games that are, um, way more comparable to Rep2 games, I think we're closing
that gap, but, um, over to Coop.
Yeah. Um, Mark, Mark made a good point. And definitely like ownership is, is nice when you
like the game already. Why wouldn't you want to own your things that you're earning in it?
It does require that you like the game. I think the other one is, um, speculation. You know,
it's just a growing trend in the world. I think that, you know, we like speculation. I think it's
like a human nature kind of thing that we like to speculate. Our lives are just full of little
gambles that we make. And so, uh, speculating on things you own in game is kind of a natural,
uh, progression. And we have that in web two in a, in a little bit, like you can use the
steam marketplace. And so you say like, well, why not just do that? Well, there's a lot of
problems with that marketplace. It's not very close to your money, meaning like, you know,
if you, if you want to exit that it's, uh, it's difficult. And so I also see web three as just like
the fastest way to add speculation to your game without building an entire steam marketplace.
This is like, since so much of this is open source, um, it's a lot easier to build your own thing.
You can plug into ones like beam and, uh, just provide a better user experience for that speculation
that people love. I was actually surprised by kind of like the web two gaming normies initial reaction
to kind of web three gaming, especially since when we kind of think of the way games are right now,
they are in a way already utilizing, uh, the system in a way they already, like, let's say in
the example of fortnight, they already have to grab some V bucks, which, you know, you can consider to
be a token in some sort of way. Um, and then use that in order to buy skins, which, you know,
in the web three kind of term could just be an NFT. So I was actually kind of surprised that there was
kind of a little bit more, uh, pushback from the web two community. Um, when web three kind of started
building, but yeah, yeah. Cool. What did you have to say? Sorry. Yeah, no, all good. I just wanted to
comment on that. I think it's mostly like just, um, the overall mindset that crypto is a scam and
there have been a lot of scams. And so it's just this reputation right now that these, these things
are tied to terms that people associate with scams. And so like, even though it's not that crazy,
uh, compared to how they currently play games, just big stigma around it. And I think that continues
to fall like, um, off the grid, you know, you definitely saw some more positive comments from
some of the big streamers and like, it's going to take a number of those before there's just broadly
like a normal thing for people to see. Yeah. I think to add it, uh, when the evil
evil line and I just came out there, Reddit was spam with like a lot of extreme negative stuff,
right? But in general, first of all, any forum, most of the replies are negative. Like people aren't
generally commenting, Oh, what a cool idea. I'm going to play it when it's online. So
that's the first thing. But the second thing is if the game is actually fun,
all the people that hate it will come back as well. Right. Because in the end,
they love the game for it and you can ignore some of the other elements. So
I think it's also a bit more the noise of just negative replies in general, because
we went like three, three years in a row to GDC in San Francisco. The first year was a survey and it
was like, Oh, 90% doesn't even want to talk to like Web3 developers or Web3 funds or whatever. And when we
were there, we just, we couldn't find anyone that was kind of against it. I mean, most of the
booths of Web3 companies were actually way more crowded than most of the panels were fully slammed.
So I think the, the public perception is also a bit different than some of the replies you
see below games or tweets or Reddit posts.
100% agree on that one as well, Mark. Actually you, so you had said earlier that
you have some things that are going to be releasing and some games that can be releasing in Q1.
Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what we could expect?
Yeah. So I think we're finally arriving, like we've been investing in, in Web3 games basically
since the last two and a half years. Right. But you finally see a wave coming of those
initial developers that have been building for like two years, where it's like alpha tests,
beta tests, or actually some of them going just full game release. And I think that's,
that's basically where we're finally arriving at. And we have a few of them testing stuff out on
our current beam subnet, but I think the Q1, um, the Q1 for launch for us for the layer one is like
basically the ideal timing versus a few of those launching on mainnet. So, um, and a nice one is
like a few of those actually getting to a stage where they're finally releasing, right? Because
you know, those games that have like an endless alpha testing period, but, uh, we're finally getting
into a stage where a few of those goes live. And, uh, we've been playing a few just with, uh, the beam
team in the last few, last few weeks. And I think a few of them are actually very promising and at
least we'll do numbers comparable to Web2. And I think the most exciting part for us is to see if
the LTV ratios and if like, if there's actually a value add for a game developer on a financial
perspective, um, building in this space compared to building a Web2, because if that's the case,
it obviously opens up a very interesting page to like basically any Web2 developer. So that's
mainly the exciting part that we will see in the next few months. And I think trial extreme is
probably the one I'm most curious about because they, they have so much data on like the last
five, six years that they've been building trial extreme one, two, and three. And, um,
they currently live like three countries in a beta test and just the numbers itself looks so much
more promising that they had in their best case scenario. So, um, it's just very interesting to see
if we, if we can make this work with them. And I think the, the launch of our layer one is quite
well-timed for a few of those teams finally shipping.
Coop, I saw you had raised your hand.
Yeah. I don't mean to like derail us too much, but it didn't like what Mark was saying
just brought up a question. Like trial extreme is an awesome example. Um, because of that,
like Web2 audience that they have, how do you think about marketing games for beam? Like,
is it largely like focused on the normal Web2 audience or is it Web3 and Web2? What do you
think about that Mark?
Yeah. So I think their, their, their base, their base players will be the ones that have
been playing this for like the last, what is it? Six years. Right. So like it's a very
nostalgia game that a lot of people recognize probably as soon as you see it. Uh, I mean,
another realistic scenario though, is that like most mobile games live on like 1% of their player
base, right? Like it's basically whales and mobile games as well that bring in like 99% of their
revenues. I mean, making sure that it works in this industry where with all due respect,
there's a very high concentration of whales that you can reach that are happy to spend on board
names and a few other things of amount that we're not used to. Right. So I mean,
if there's an audience where you could definitely tap into that are maybe a bit,
a little bit less time, but definitely a higher average spend. So TriStream is definitely focusing
on both, but the, the kind of floor player base will definitely come from their prior database.
Interesting. Yeah. Thanks.
But, but, but I mean, very simple, like just, just deploying a Web2 game in Web3 is not going to
change the outcome, right? So like they way more focused on like interesting economies within the
game itself that it never did before. You obviously need to have something else because
just a standard Web2 mobile game also won't work in this industry, right? If you have terrible numbers
in Web2, like it's not that just deploying crypto will make it work somehow.
On my end, Mark, I'm super curious about your, your decision specifically to build L1 on Avalanche.
Can you talk a little bit about, um, what factors kind of went into you making that decision?
Sorry, you dropped off for 10 seconds. What did you ask?
Yeah. Sorry. My bad. Um, no, I, I'm, I'm just curious about your decision to build
like an Avalanche specific L1. Can you talk a little bit about like what factors kind of like?
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah.
No, so, so very simple. Like beam never really started off as a kind of network token. So like when we
wanted to build more infra, it was basically Avalanche with like, OP wasn't out with their
role of structure. Um, I mean, Arbitrum obviously came up, but like at the time that we, that we
started with beam, it was by far the kind of easiest go-to solution for us. Like we're not
core protocol engineers. Like we're way more focused on the investment, the marketing side,
the community side of things. So we basically wanted to build out the kind of proof of concept
as easy as possible with something that is probably working for games. Um, and Avalanche
obviously has a core focus on the gaming side, which makes it easier for us as well. Um, I would
say that's the deal there. Like it was a good test. I think we're quite happy with the initial outcome.
And now it's time to basically come out with a version 2.0.
Yeah, because so, you know, obviously everyone out there, Avalanche released the, the Aetna upgrade,
um, you know, which gave us the ability for permissionless L1s. And Mark, you guys
dove like head first, like straight on in and became the first ones to decide to go permissionless.
Um, let's talk a little bit about the, the node mint as well. Can you, I mean, for everyone that's out
there, one, can you talk about like what the node mint is, you know, just in case folks don't really
understand what it is. And then, um, two, can you also talk a little bit about like the different
reward systems and phases that are going to be going on as well? Yeah, for sure. Um, I mean,
we always try to figure out how we involve our community more in, in stuff that we do. And I think
the initial subnet structure is actually a good example, which is like, it's currently POA. It's
basically Avalanche and us running like the majority of the nodes. And when the Aetna upgrade
came up and I knew that the Avalanche Foundation also was keen to basically decentralize its validator
base more. Um, we started to like think internally, how can we, how can we make this appealing for,
let's call it a bit more retail folks as well to participate in decentralizing the network and not just
exclusively do it for like larger validators or like parties that in general you see with most of those
um, validator structures. So, um, basically what we did is it's very simple. So we minted, I think,
I think we're actually above 50,000 no tokens as we call it, which is way more than we, um, initially
thought. And, um, basically what we're doing is like you, we will have around 100 or 200 that's called
full validators, um, which partly is going to be the Luga nodes, go, go pools of the world. So
they basically make it very easy as like node as a service to spin it up yourself or delegate to them.
And we have like a few of the A41, for example, like the more professional validators that will
participate. Uh, but then also we are basically opening it up to, or beam holders or non beam holders,
yeah, but basically the community to a, or launch their own validator, or basically just delegate
or no tokens to the existing validators. But the nice part is, I think if you, if you go back to
like the early D five farm periods, I think the feeling for people to participate in something,
and it could be just harvesting your rewards in a D five farm, but also in this scenario, just being
part of an actual validated that secures and gaming chain, I think it's just a very attractive
proposition for a lot of people in this industry. Like you can hold tokens in your wallet, which is
all fine, but with all respect, you don't do shit. Right. And in our scenario, you're basically just
participating and securing a network and you get rewarded for it. I think that just makes it way
more appealing for people to a contribute in the community, be the teams building on top of the
layer one, have an army of people that want to beam succeed. So, I mean, if you're part of that,
you basically have a kind of initial fan base as well for your game. So we just try to leverage
the kind of community that we already have, but the fun part of this no means, which definitely
I didn't expect it is like how many people outside of the beam community basically participated. So
we had like, I think above 4,000 unique people that participated. And we went through a lot of
the wallets and most of them aren't per se related to beam, at least not in that specific wallet. Like
a lot of them were just probably C chain traders, or even people from Arbitrum and base that
bridged in and bought the notes in the end. So the idea was to widen our community,
but also to have something for them to actually participate. And most projects have it more on
the governance side, but I think being part of an actual validator itself makes it just way more
appealing to a lot of them. So it was a very good timing with the Edna upgrade, obviously,
which makes this way more accessible for us to do as well. But so far, it has been an amazing
response by our community, but also be on the Avalanche side. We had a lot of positive feedback
on our plans.
Coop, I saw you raise your hand. You got it, my friend.
Yeah. The part about like enabling the community to really be a part of the network's success is so
big. I know it should be obvious, right? Like that is a big part of why you decentralize in many ways.
But I think about the validators for the AVAX network, the ones that typically like got in
at ICO or something, and they've been validating ever since. And they're like some of the
biggest supporters of the network because of that opportunity. And they just feel like they're part
of it. And so what Mark said about, you know, having thousands of fans that want to see you succeed is
so huge.
Yeah, it's absolutely, it's actually super major. And correct me if I'm wrong, Mark,
you said 50,000 node tokens minted, correct?
Yeah, even above. I'm not sure what the latest is because someone in the community made a telegram
bot to track the smart contract. And probably if I, wait, let me look right now. Since the,
since the space has started, it's probably like they're, they're 58 more since we started is
basically the last day. So I mean, it's very good to see how, how does it receive by like the broader
community. But I think it's even 53k or something right now by, I think, above 4.5k unique wallets.
Dude, this is absolutely massive. Like this is, this is something that I'm watching because I feel
like there's going to also be a lot of other L1s watching, you know, this, this node mint kind
of go down just because this is kind of the framework for the, the best way in my, in my
opinion to actually kind of decentralize your L1. And I do kind of want to talk a little bit about
your decision to kind of go permissionless. And like, why did you find that, you know,
extremely important because you, you dove, you dove head in my friend, like you, you went straight
for it. Like, why did you feel like it was extremely important for you to go permissionless and
centralize in this way? No, I think the main thing why we're very quickly excited is like
the gaming chain in itself is just quite boring from a user perspective, right? You play games,
you trade some assets probably in a mobile app. So you don't even know it's on like a
marketplace on a blockchain, but like the home base it was before was just quite boring for
a hour holders and B there was no way to even participate in being a validator, right? Because
it was a, a POA chain at that time. So I think the main angle for us was just like the, the chain
itself has very little attractiveness to a crypto users and B beam holders currently. And with this
structure and basically some form of gamification around the whole reward structure itself just makes,
makes a being way more attractive. And I think also it's a very good home ground for developers
to get early attention from people that believe in Web3 gaming, because otherwise you wouldn't be a
validator or otherwise you wouldn't be a beam holder. So I think we just create a very interesting
kind of marketing loop for everything that we do and everyone we collaborate with in an industry,
which are quite a few parties.
100, 100% agree, my friend. And also before we head out, I wanted to talk to you a little bit like,
you know, about the future, you know what, because obviously you have like the AI integration that's
popping up and then the geographic expansion to like Abu Dhabi. Can you kind of talk a little bit
about the impact that you're kind of expecting from those?
Yeah, definitely. I think the, I mean, we had to explain a bit what we exactly were going to do
do in Abu Dhabi, but like we started a few months back, got approached by someone and the government
there basically has the, the goal to basically be a top 10 country if it comes down to gaming in the
next few years, which they currently definitely far out of. So basically what we're going to do,
it's going to be an 150 mil fund and accelerator that's basically focused on gaming and the
intersection of gaming and AI, which obviously is just a very positive feedback loop to the
beam layer one as well, because teams that will go through the accelerator, we're not obligating them
to build on beam. But with all respect, if you, if you spend a few weeks of your time in Abu Dhabi with
us, it's obviously a very easy choice for most of them. So the idea is obviously to just expand the
kind of offering for teams. And I think capital is quite easy to attract in the space. If you're
A, have a good page and B, are building something attractive. But I think the basically day-to-day
advice of a team that has been building in this space for three years, it's just so hard to copy for,
for most of them. And we know that with trial extreme, like we've been working very closely when he said,
listen, you guys are exactly what we need and what any web 2 developer that comes to this industry
basically needs, because we can prevent them making every mistake that we made in the last 10 years,
right? Which probably were quite a few, but I think the accelerator and the fund will just
make the proposition for us to basically tier one game developers, which is way more attractive. And
we're doing a lot of research on the AI side as well to see where AI gets a very good use case for
gaming in itself. And we released the first paper, which was basically just a starting point, but we
got a lot of good feedback from some of our portfolio companies that actually read it and wanted to
participate in some capacity to it. So I think both basically combined, plus the nodes that we minted,
will just make a very interesting home ground for Beam in the next few years. And the speculation
side of things obviously isn't what could mention on like why battery gaming is interesting. Like also
on the crypto side, you always need to come up with new things to be appealing for the large audience,
because maintaining mine share in this current market and this current industry is quite hard.
So yeah, a lot coming up. I think the Enobium was a first next big step for us, but obviously that's
just a starting point for the network itself. So it comes down to our shipping from here.
Well, Mark, I want to say one thing, dude. I really, really appreciate you for popping on today. I'm
gonna start like closing this thing on down and asking folks for closing remarks. On my end,
hey everybody, my name is Brevi. Make sure you go ahead and hit the follow on the Avalanche account.
And if you're not already, make sure you put on bell notifications, my friend. Reason being,
and that's a pro tip, my friends, make sure you put on the bell notifications, because if you don't,
you can't get notified about every single post, my friends. Make sure you're following my friend,
Mark here, as well as Coop. And then also, I see all of the different Beam Twitter profiles as well.
Make sure you're following all of those. And again, make sure you're hitting, doing the bell
notifications. I'm gonna go ahead and open this thing up for closing remarks. I'm gonna go ahead
and pick on Coop first. And Mark, we're gonna save you for last, my friend.
Yeah. Seeing all the Beam profiles reminds me just the, I think everyone at Avalabs was like,
oh man, this website is sick. So, uh, another great call out from the node sale or node mint.
And, uh, closing remarks. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Mark. I was just thinking we should do this more,
because I, I don't get to hear your thoughts on where we're at all the time. And
I think Brevi is going to spend more time doing spaces. So it's probably an opportunity.
Yeah, definitely up on more after, like, I just had 30 minutes today because I've been glued to my
screen for the last three days and like the node sale or the node bit is still, still open for the
next, what is it, three hours. So there's enough work to do in the last few hours, because we have
a lot of people still asking, uh, especially more like on the technical side, how this is all going
to work. So, uh, I'm going to run back to my PC and, uh, see you guys next time.
For sure. Mark really, really appreciate you for popping on today. And one more time for everybody
out there, please make sure you're following everybody that's up here, including the Avalanche
account, Mark, Coop, myself, and then make sure you're, there's three different Beam accounts,
three different ones. So make sure you're following every single one of those so that you
can make sure you stay updated about everything that's happening, my friends. I'm gonna go ahead and
end this thing. Uh, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm in this thing with, in my usual way, actually,
by saying you don't have to go home, but you got to get up on out of here, y'all. Peace.
Peace.
Peace.
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