_{I designed this, just so you know}

---

Hey guys, excited to be participating in this contest. Also, old-new guy here, whatever that means.

I have been an active educator and investor in cryptocurrency since 2016. Recently, I transitioned to become more of a trader than an investor. However, I still do hold a few coins and for this contest, I'll love to talk about one of them. The name is Beam.

Currently, I have about 30% of my portfolio in Beam and I've been holding for a little over 9 months now. Sure, we've seen a few rough months but the tech is sound and it is picking up a lot of momentum, ready to go.

Why I Chose Beam?

I think I'm more excited about the recent DeFi trend and how Beam is adapting to it. First off, Beam is an exciting project that targets an important factor in everyone's life; The sacredness and importance of financial privacy. Hence, Beam is a privacy coin with a great team of designer, developers and amazing community members. They also have an eye for cutting-edge and innovative products. Recently, Beam developed and launched the testnet for a unique product/platform for Confidential DeFi and I am absolutely thrilled about its potential. It is called BeamX.

BeamX is a new Confidential Defi platform launched by Beam. Confidential Defi is a new term for DeFi products and services that are privacy-focused or built on a privacy blockchain, such as Beam. BeamX is the first platform that is merging the concept of decentralized finance with a privacy-centric blockchain.

Before I continue on BeamX and its features, it can be helpful to give you a brief explanation of what DeFi is all about. As a side note, if you would like to know what privacy coins are, you can see my short tweet by following this link here.

DeFi is an abbreviation for Decentralized Finance, an umbrella term that describes a variety of financial applications in cryptocurrency or blockchain geared towards the independence on single financial intermediaries. Essentially, every financial product/service that isn’t solely controlled by a single organization/group, like traditional financial services, can be categorized under DeFi.

Let’s get one thing straight. Even though the term ‘DeFi’ is pretty new and misunderstood in the crypto space, it isn’t an entirely foreign idea. Rather, it is the culmination of years of experimenting with traditional products and services on the blockchain that has all led to this point where we are. Some of these features have existed for some time now. A good example would be DEXs.

However, DeFi is distinct because it expands the use of blockchain from simple value transfer to more complex financial use cases. Its products give crypto users more control over their finance and investment choices by allowing them to perform financial activities without going through custodial intermediaries. On DeFi platforms, One’s age, credit rating, or location in the world cannot prevent them from accessing such financial services, which is often not the case with traditional financial institutions.

Some of these financial products include the ability to borrow and pay back on loans directly using collaterals locked up by code, decentralized exchanges, direct purchases, prediction markets, investment vehicles such as farms that payback ROI over time, etc.

Currently, the Ethereum network is home to most of the DeFi applications and services around today. But it is not without problems. There are often reports of hacks, rugs and exploitations that are caused by a variety of reasons such as malicious actors, the faulty codes, and more subtly, the excessive lack of financial privacy on Ethereum. We are beginning to see the importance of adapting DeFi to other verticals in the crypto sphere.

And that is why today, there are experimental and innovative concepts such as confidential DeFi, with the potential to take Financial Privacy Mainstream by bridging crypto privacy to current DeFi products and services. Confidential DeFi is currently being implemented on the BeamX platform.

What Is BeamX

BeamX is the first, simple and highly scalable platform for Confidential DeFi. It was developed by Beam Privacy, a privacy-centric blockchain community and privacy coin.

How BeamX will work:

BeamX is launching with the ability for developers to design and implement DeFi products and services on Beam Blockchain, just like the ones we have on Ethereum. We’re talking AMMs like Uniswap, smart contracts, Algorithmic Stablecoins, DEXs, Lending and Yield Pools, bridges with other blockchains, wrapped assets, Collaterals, Farming and Staking, easy tokenization of anything, NFTs, etc.

As a decentralized platform for DeFi, BeamX is run by the community and the platform is open to anyone with the technical know-how to build products and Dapps on it by using BeamX’s Smart Contracts (called ‘Sharders’), which is very similar to Smart Contracts on Ethereum. Users can create tokens in a matter of minutes and Confidential Assets on Beam’s Mainchain can easily be represented on BeamX as well.

Additionally, every token created on BeamX are privacy assets by default and will be able to utilize the suite of tools already available on Beam such as the fully functional wallet, the ability to trade/transfer these tokens using Atomic Swap, etc.

Currently, Beam X has already launched its Testnet on November 19th, 2020. Mainnet is set to be launched within the first quarter of 2021, after Beam’s Hard Fork at that time.

There is a lot more information about BeamX that I have not mentioned in this post. However, I will be including links to other detailed articles as well as the official BeamX documentation for folks who are interested in digging into it.
Thanks for reading.

An introduction to BeamX: https://medium.com/beam-mw/beam-launches-beamx-bringing-privacy-to-defi-a8a8db195944
BeamX documentation, Github: https://medium.com/beam-mw/beam-launches-beamx-bringing-privacy-to-defi-a8a8db195944
What is DeFi: https://www.coindesk.com/what-is-defi