Announcing the Beam Foundation

Published in

BEAM Privacy

4 min readNov 25, 2019

After over 18 months of living and working as a company, Beam is today announcing the first step towards decentralization — the official launch of the Beam Foundation.

As we have stated from the get-go, while Beam started the project as a for-profit venture, our long-term goal always was to pass the control to a non-profit Foundation. This moment has now come.

The Foundation will use the funds allocated to it in Beam Treasury in order to continue the development and promotion of Beam protocol and to advance the wider privacy-related agenda.

Who and Where

The Beam Foundation is registered in Singapore as a Company Limited by Guarantee — this the preferred way of registering a non-profit body in Singapore. We chose Singapore not only because it is crypto-friendly, but also because it is a truly global city, a place where East and West meet .

The Foundation will be governed by a Board of up to 7 members. Initially, the Board will consist of four members. Here they are:

Guy Corem — Professionally involved in the cryptocurrency industry since 2013, Guy co-founded and was the CEO of Spondoolies-Tech. In addition, Guy co-founded DAG Labs.
Bo Dong — a veteran crypto trader/entrepreneur since 2016. Dong has a deep understanding in token economies and liquidity. Dong is the founder and CEO of Altonomy, a well-known liquidity provider in cryptocurrency space.
Ferdous Bhai — highly-respected Bitcoin advocate, has established Canada’s largest Bitcoin OTC brokerage, YapCX, and started a high-performance cryptocurrency exchange, ChainRift. Ferdous is an acclaimed proponent of the Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer decentralized permissionless governance.
Wilke Trei — a mathematician with specialization in computational discrete math and a freelancing mining software developer with a focus on memory-heavy algorithms that run on GPUs.

All of the initial Board members served as advisors to Beam and have been supporting the project for quite some time now. They all have the best interests of the project in their heart.

We are actively looking for 3 additional members to join the Board. In the future, the number of Board seats may be increased if the Directors decide so.

In addition, Beam COO Amir Aaronson will be taking up the role of the COO of Beam Foundation, charged with operational aspects of the work.

The Foundation website is available here: www.beam-foundation.org

The Funds

As stated in our Emission Schedule, the Beam Foundation is endowed with 20% of the Treasury, i.e. 4% of total coins emitted in the first 5 years of existence of the protocol. The total number of Foundation coins over the 5 years stands at 6,307,200 Beam.

In January 2019, we performed a forward sale of 1 million of Foundation tokens at $1 per token. That was done as a hedging move. As all other investors, the investors participating in the forward sale will be receiving their coins in monthly installments over the course of five years.

Initially, a large part of the development will be done by the Beam Core Group. In the future, the Foundation will also be launching a community portal to allow anyone to submit requests for funding.

Besides development, the Foundation will also support global awareness and business development for Beam, as well as a wider privacy agenda.

Governance

The Governance of the Foundation will be performed by the Board, and all the decisions will be taken by a simple majority of votes.

In the future, the Foundation will strive to change the decision making to be more distributed by creating a DAO-like governance system. This is not in the immediate plans however.

The Beam Core Group

In the coming months, the Beam Company will be transforming into Beam Core Group. Beam Core Group will be the development arm of the Beam Foundation.

Beam Core Group will continue to work on the previously announced roadmap and to deliver on the Beam vision. We are committed to the same high standards of engineering and research that we were following until now.

It is our goal that with time, more and more independent developers start working on Beam. We expect however that in the first 6–12 months of the existence of the Foundation, most of the work will be done by the Beam Core Group.

As the Beam Company transforms into a more loosely organized Beam Core Group, the roles of the original executive team may be shifting — we will be updating the community as it happens.

Transparency

The Beam Foundation will be providing financial reports of its activity. Those reports will be published on the Foundation website, along with other information.

Our goal is to be as transparent as possible.

Into the future

Setting up the Beam Foundation and establishing an independent Board is an important step towards further decentralization of Beam. It is of course just the first step — in the coming years, the Foundation’s will work to build a fully decentralized global community that will continue to contribute to Beam and that will make Beam development and maintenance fully decentralized and resilient.