Beam Foundation (@BeamFDN): Beam Finance: building and maintaining a resilient web3 treasury

Beam Finance: building and maintaining a resilient web3 treasury The Beam ecosystem treasury is an industry-leading crypto-native treasury. How have we achieved this, and how do we keep it in such a healthy state? Beam Foundation’s finance team took time out from their real-time dashboards to give us the lowdown Expanding to the frontiers of tech is no mean feat. It takes vision, determination, know-how – and cold, hard cash. Or, in Beam’s case, cold, hard stablecoins, native tokens, tokenized assets, liquidity provider tokens and NFTs. Oh and a few cold, hard equity positions here and there, some fund investments, and a handful of off-chain financial instruments for good measure. That’s because we run a different kind of treasury. Ours is a treasury of the web3 variety, and that’s a very different kettle of fish. The headline news about Beam’s web3 treasury is that it’s in a very good state. We’ve been cultivating it for quite some time now and are proud to be able to say it’s one of crypto's largest – all courtesy of some very canny strategic investments, cutting-edge DeFi innovation and careful nurturing. A rock-solid treasury Beam’s top-performing assets include Aethir Nodes ($18M), Sophon ($22M), Aethir ($17.9M), Trial Extreme / Gameplay Galaxy ($12M) and Tactical Compute $6.4M. With some of our investments, including Sophon, Forgotten Playland, Flaunch, Noon, and most recently Dreamcash we’ve been there from day one, putting us in an especially advantageous position. To reach decisions about where to allocate treasury funds, we follow a tried-and-tested process. First, the treasury team identifies an opportunity, then core contributors and leadership are looped in for feedback and approval. Following this process has generated a treasury that’s in a very healthy state. What do we mean by healthy? Its size, sure, but also its composition. A healthy web3 treasury needs a good balance between liquidity, security, and long-term growth. It should have enough stable and liquid assets to last a long-lasting bear market. Our team achieves this by diversifying as smartly as possible. Good internal controls and Fort Knox-like security are also vital: multisig wallets, clear rules on who can access and use funds, separating wallets by purpose, and regularly reviewing who has signing authority. Signers are also geographically diversified, to navigate potential issues – anything from regulatory changes in specific countries to natural disasters. Tools like real-time dashboards help track cash flow. These checks and balances are vital: web3 is maturing, but it’s still pretty wild out there! We’ve also made sure to go beyond just holding crypto by also investing in funds, startups, and joint ventures, while balancing opportunities such as staking and yield strategies with the security of fiat-pegged assets. Working in a transparent financial world The big difference between a regular treasury and a web3 one like Beam’s is that ours is fully transparent. Natively, web3 treasuries are also fully transparent, with wallet addresses and transaction histories visible on-chain. Additionally, we have a treasury dashboard, and release a quarterly Treasury report (or sign up to receive it by email here), where our treasury wallet addresses are listed. Click on them to gain a full, live picture. This transparency is something we hold very dear, and it helps build trust with the community, but an interesting side point is that it can also be problematic: a large transfer has been known to trigger real anxiety, for example. The curious case of lo-fi hi-tech The blockchain-focused nature of web3 treasuries like ours might seem very hi-tech, but there are some surprisingly low-tech aspects to managing them. There’s a lot of manual tracking, for instance, since certain chains and tokens aren’t supported by tracking tools. Indeed, web3 treasury management has a distinct DIY nature. It requires you to be part CFO, part DeFi analyst, and part governance operator. Much is unstandardized: there’s no consistent approach to valuation or accounting treatments. That means lots of good old-fashioned spreadsheets! There’s an irony that this blockchain-based system built for uniformity is (for now) highly fragmented in how it's actually used. The way we see it, this isn’t a bad thing; it just reflects how early we are in our journey. With crypto, a new financial system is being built from scratch, after all. There are few better examples of this in the crypto world than Noon, the ‘fair and intelligent’ stablecoin we covered back in February of this year. Not only are those guys in crypto because they believe in democratized finance, they’re also reaping the rewards – Noon founder Arpan Gautam told us recently that they’ve experienced approximately 500% annualized growth, with a Token Generation Event (TGE) coming very soon. Linking back to our finance team’s reference to all the fiddly spreadsheet work they have to do, Arpan and the Noon team are only too aware of crypto’s current UI/UX issues and are actively working on improving things in that area. The goal is for Noon to be accessible to your average grandma, not just gung-ho early adopters (with spreadsheets). Another example of DeFi doing truly groundbreaking things are Beam partners Fyde and Bluefin. Fyde specialize in modelling on-chain risk parameters – checks and balances for decentralized systems, basically. Bluefin, meanwhile, are shooting for the stars, quietly building the world’s most powerful decentralized financial ecosystem. They’re good folks to know. A new chapter: Beam Ventures Looking to the future, Beam’s treasury guardians will keep on doing what they’ve been doing so well. Stability, diversification, stablecoins, long-term investments: lots of this. High-risk DeFi yields? None of those. When markets are exuberant, and ascribe higher valuations, multiples and liquidity, we’ll try to grow cash-like assets. In bear markets, we’ll turn low liquidity and valuations to our advantage by getting better deals. One major development is just appearing on the horizon like the midsummer sunrise. In December 2024, we announced the launch of Beam Ventures, a qualified investor fund focused on frontier technologies based out of Abu Dhabi. We’ve been dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on that project ever since – understandably, there’s a lot of paperwork to get through with something like this – but we’re excited to say Beam Ventures is nearly ready to get to work. Want to learn more about Beam? Twitter: https://twitter.com/BuildOnBeam Twitter: https://twitter.com/BeamFDN Website: http://www.onbeam.com/ Documentation: https://docs.onbeam.com/ Governance forum: https://gov.onbeam.com/ Snapshot: https://vote.onbeam.com/ Telegram announcements: https://t.me/buildonbeam_ann Medium: https://medium.com/@onbeam Disclaimer: This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, financial or tax advice. Nothing contained herein constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any assets referenced herein. We make no warranties of any kind in relation to our content, including but not limited to the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. There can be no assurance that the investments mentioned herein will be profitable. Any use or reliance on the content provided herein is solely at your own risk and discretion