On June 29th, major privacy cryptocurrency Beam underwent a hard fork to enable "Confidential DeFi" on Beam. In the time of the DeFi boom, how will Beam's confidential DeFi be different from other DeFi such as COMP and MakerDao? Alexander Zaidelson, the CEO of Beam, spoke to Cointelegraph about its prospects.
The Beam hard fork activated the support of confidential assets, or Beam CA, which enabled independent tokens to be issued on the Beam blockchain. It is a key component of the confidential DeFi, benefitting from the confidentiality and scalability features of Beam.
Zaidelson explained that confidential DeFi is "an ecosystem for financial services that have full confidentiality, great usability and also opt-in auditability."
Zaidelson acknowledged the merit of other DeFi services like Compound and Maker as "solid financial instruments". Indeed he dismissed a comparison between the recent DeFi boom and the ICO boom in 2017, and described ICOs as "a flawed concept where people believed in invaded promises and lost their money.”
But he also pointed out the difference from Beam's DeFi as follows:
"They are built on Ethereum, which is an antithesis of privacy. Beam Confidential DeFi will offer evolved functionality plus financial privacy and all that with great usability and ability to audit transactions"
When asked if Beam’s DeFi targets audiences different from those of COMP and Maker, he answered that “everyone needs privacy, so eventually, everything will move to confidential DeFi.”
Compound's governance token COMP has been wildly successful in the initial period since launching. It only took a single day of trading for COMP to dethrone Maker (MKR) from the leader of the decentralized finance rankings.