Beam by Merit Circle DAO (BEAM): The Ultimate Gaming Ecosystem

Gaming is one of the fastest-growing niches within the blockchain industry. The play-to-earn (P2E) concept, first popularized by Axie Infinity (AXS) in 2021, continues to fuel growth in this highly competitive area. While blockchain gaming is currently dominated by the likes of The Sandbox (SAND), Decentraland (MANA) and Gala Games (GALA), there’s a brand-new contender on the block ready to take on these established giants.

Earlier this month, the gaming-focused decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) Merit Circle opened up public access to the Beam blockchain, its new platform. Beam aims to revolutionize the way blockchain games are developed and played. Operating as a subnet (subnetwork) of Avalanche, Beam offers fast execution times and low transaction fees for in-game asset trade and other common gaming-related operations.

Key Takeaways:

• Recently launched as a public subnet on the Avalanche network, Beam is a blockchain platform by Merit Circle DAO dedicated to gaming and game development.

• Beam and its native token, BEAM, are enjoying early popularity on the market, with more than 180 crypto games already listed on the platform.

• BEAM can be bought on Bybit as a Spot pair and a USDT Perpetual contract.

What Is the Merit Circle DAO?

Merit Circle is a leading decentralized organization that supports and promotes web3 gaming platforms and initiatives. Using a completely decentralized governance model, the Merit Circle user community votes to invest treasury funds in various gaming projects and support the development of blockchain games. The DAO maintains four key verticals in its operations.

• The first vertical, Merit Circle Investments, focuses on maximizing treasury value via investments in promising tokens, NFTs and yield farms. 

• Merit Circle Studios supports the development and incubation of new gaming projects. 

• Merit Circle Gaming provides gaming libraries, tools and industry education to aid the ongoing development of user and developer communities for existing games. 

• Sphere, Merit Circle's Marketplace, facilitates efficient trade in game assets by providing a marketplace and trading tools for player communities.

What Is Beam Subnet?

Beam (BEAM) is a gaming-focused blockchain recently launched by Merit Circle. One of the DAO’s major undertakings, Beam revolutionizes the way that blockchain is used for game development, player experience and gaming assets trade. Beam operates as a subnet on Avalanche (AVAX). Since it’s integrated with LayerZero, an interoperability omnichain protocol, Beam allows the minting of all game assets as omnichain NFTs so they can easily be transferred across chains.

Avalanche’s architecture can be used to launch subnet blockchains, which are sovereign network environments that leverage the base features of the Avalanche main chain yet are separate from it. The subnets maintain their own validator networks and core operational rules. At the same time, they utilize Avalanche’s core security mechanism and take advantage of the chain’s key features, such as fast transactions and low fees. Beam is among the most ambitious gaming projects launched as an Avalanche subnet.

The initial news of Merit Circle’s active work on a gaming platform surfaced in early 2023. In August, the DAO opened access to Beam to a limited cohort of game developers. Then, in early November, the project team announced the removal of a permissioned mode, with Beam finally becoming a public blockchain.

Note: Merit Circle’s Beam project should not be confused with an older crypto platform with the same name, BEAM (BEAM), a privacy-focused blockchain. The two projects use the same token ticker, BEAM, but differ with regard to the brand name capitalization (Beam for the focus of our article, and all-caps BEAM for the privacy platform).

How Does Beam Work?

Thanks to its leveraging Avalanche’s base architecture, Beam offers users an environment with fast processing times and low fees. Both advantages are critical for players and game developers alike, given the fast-paced nature of modern P2E games and the wide variety of in-game assets traded on them.

As a typical Avalanche subnet, Beam maintains its own set of validators. At the moment, there are only eight block validators on the platform’s mainnet. Since Beam has been open to the public for less than a month, the number of qualified validators will likely grow as the platform matures. While Avalanche subnets have their own validator sets, any validator on the vast public network can offer their resources to any subnet. As such, Beam might draw on the resources of the broader Avalanche platform to attract quality validators.

During the permissioned mode, when Beam was open to a select group of developers, it used the proof of authority (PoA) block validation method to process transactions. With PoA, a group of validators with a strong reputation or trusted credentials are given the responsibility of validating transaction blocks.

Early in its public mode era, Beam continues to operate as a PoA chain. Later in the year, Merit Circle plans to move the platform to the proof of stake (PoS) validation model, the default block validation method used by the Avalanche blockchain.

Beam Tools and DApps

Being such a new platform, Beam currently has a small ecosystem comprising a few essential tools and applications. Over the coming months, as Beam grows and establishes itself on the market, its ecosystem will expand.

At the moment, the platform features:

• Beam AMM Swap — An automated market maker (AMM) decentralized exchange

• Beam LayerZero Bridge — A bridging solution to transfer tokens between Beam and other blockchains

• Beam Block Explorer — A tracking platform for all BEAM transactions and statistics

• Sphere — An NFT marketplace

• BeamOS — A portal for exploring tools and apps on the chain

Games on Beam

Despite being in its early stages of operation, Beam is already attracting pronounced interest from the gaming community. The blockchain’s gaming hub lists over 180 games, which will undoubtedly rise in number over the coming weeks and months.

The first game to launch live on Beam was Raini: The Lord of Light, a card game set in a fantasy world. This was quickly followed by a rush of other titles and genres populating the platform. Currently, some of its popular games include Genopets, a move-to-earn (M2E) mobile game that encourages an active lifestyle; Big Time, an action role-playing game (ARPG) in which players traverse time and space; and Shrapnel, an AAA first-person shooter (FPS) whose players compete to survive and extract valuables in a band around the Earth known as The Zone.

What Is the BEAM Token?

The BEAM token is the Beam blockchain's native cryptocurrency. All the transaction fees on the network are paid in BEAM. When Beam fully transitions to the PoS validation model, BEAM tokens will also be used for staking. The platform's staking rules specify that BEAM holders will be able to delegate funds to their preferred validator node and receive a portion of the block rewards generated.

Merit Circle DAO maintains its own crypto token, MC, which is crucial for the governance of the organization. However, upon launching Beam, Merit Circle announced a migration of MC tokens to BEAM at a fixed ratio of 1 MC to 100 BEAM. MC Holders will be able to migrate their funds to BEAM until Oct 26, 2024. After the migration is complete, BEAM token will acquire governance function as well, replacing MC in this capacity.

The BEAM crypto was launched on Oct 26, 2023, with a total supply of slightly less than 63 billion, of which over 44 billion are already in circulation. BEAM is a supply-capped token, with its maximum supply specified at exactly the same number as its total supply. In other words, minting additional BEAM isn’t in the cards of Merit Circle’s governance community.

Merit Circle (BEAM) Price Prediction

As of Nov 24, 2023, the Beam token (BEAM) trades at $0.00853 (about $8.53 for 1,000 BEAM), which is 26.68% lower than its all-time high of $0.01163, attained on Oct 26, 2023, and 96.57% higher than its all-time low of $0.004338, registered on Oct 29, 2023.

BEAM is still taking its first steps in the market, but the token’s long-term outlook is already quite optimistic. DigitalCoinPrice forecasts BEAM will reach $0.03 in 2025 and $0.089 in 2030, and CrowdWisdom predicts nearly the same rates ($0.0202 in 2025 and $0.0862 in 2030).

Is Merit Circle (BEAM) a Good Investment?

Although a very recent entrant in the market, BEAM is already shaping up as a major crypto gaming token. With a market cap of about $378 million, BEAM already features among the top 10 gaming-related cryptocurrencies — an achievement that has taken less than a month since its launch. Clearly, the gaming niche of the market is paying close attention to this newcomer. Some key factors pointing to the token’s good investment potential are as follows:

1. BEAM is among the first comprehensive gaming and game development platforms on the market. While projects like Decentraland, Axie Infinity and The Sandbox are leading the charge in the GameFi space, these platforms are focused environments, dedicated to a single game. In contrast, the Beam blockchain is an all-in-one portal with scores of different games across a multitude of genres. The Beam platform is, therefore, well-positioned to become a major portal for P2E games, a kind of Google or Amazon of blockchain gaming.

2. Beam is also positioned to leverage the technical and cost efficiencies of the Avalanche environment. Most of the abovementioned crypto gaming platforms are based on Ethereum (ETH), a blockchain notorious for its network congestion and high gas fees.

3. Beam’s core business, crypto gaming, is an area poised for profound growth over the coming years. As the concept of the metaverse matures and more games choose blockchain as their primary hosting environment, the BEAM token will benefit from this niche-wide expansion.

Where to Buy BEAM

You can buy the BEAM token on Bybit, both on the Spot market (BEAM/USDT) and via a USDT Perpetual contract (BEAMUSDT). If you don’t yet have a Bybit account, you can easily sign up for one to trade hundreds of crypto assets and products in both Spot and Derivatives markets.

Closing Thoughts

Beam by Merit Circle presents a novel way of using blockchain technology to facilitate game development and in-game asset management. This innovative project brings the capacity, expertise and ambition to act as a major crypto gaming portal/aggregator. Instead of focusing on one game, genre or category, Beam aims to become a comprehensive blockchain gaming universe. Supported by Merit Circle and its unique governance model, Beam is also poised to attract the interest of decentralization purists, crypto users and gamers who value truly community-driven platform management.

The market is already reacting positively to Beam's entry. In less than a month since its launch, Beam's market cap has skyrocketed to levels comparable to (if not yet the same as) established gaming coins. Early indicators are that Beam is about to take the market by storm. The year 2024 will be fascinating for Beam by Merit Circle — and the overall crypto gaming niche!

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