Financing

The process of providing funds for business activities, making purchases or investing. In traditional financing, there are two main types of funding: debt and equity. Debt is a loan that must be paid back, often with interest. Equity gives ownership stakes in the company to the shareholder. Financing takes advantage of the fact that some have a surplus of money that they wish to put to work, while others demand money to undertake investment.

Cryptocurrency has provided a new venue for financing, as blockchain-based ventures raise capital by selling cryptographically secure digital assets (tokens). This can be in the form of a general-purpose medium of exchange and store-of-value cryptocurrency, a token which represents conventional security (security token), or a token which represent a right to a service provided in the network (utility token).

Utility tokens leverage the value of the network and the market demand of the token itself. This decouples the ownership of tokens from equity in the venture, and (theoretically) puts the incentive in the long-term development of the platform. However, utility tokens have found very short-term success, and their regulatory uncertainty was a breeding ground for frauds. The market has thus shifted to slower, regulated security tokens offerings.

Financing in Beam can be achieved with Confidential Assets, which allow the issuance of custom assets, such as tokens. This not only preserves the privacy of the issuer, but also the privacy of the issued token which is known only to the involved parties.