Beam: The Gaming Chain That Became a Six-Division Crypto Group

Most gaming chains start with a studio. Beam started with a DAO, a crypto collective run by token-holder votes. In April 2023, the Merit Circle DAO announced it was building a blockchain made for games, powered by Avalanche technology and promising developers ready-made tools: smart contracts, marketplaces and cheap, fast transactions.

Three years later Beam is still a gaming network. It is also a trading app, a venture fund and a treasury holding well over $170 million. That journey is a neat summary of where web3 gaming money has gone.

What Beam is

When it was announced, Beam was an Avalanche subnet: a separate blockchain built with Avalanche's tools, free to set its own rules and token, with low fees and quick settlement. Merit Circle said it had a network of more than 60 partnered games lined up. The early slate included the motocross game Trial Xtreme, Walker World, Hash Rush and Edenhorde Eclipse, plus Sphere, an NFT marketplace.

Since then, Beam has become a fully independent layer 1, separate from Avalanche's main "Primary Network" but still built on its technology. Anyone can run a validator, and hundreds do. To validate, you need a Beam NFT called a Node Token plus at least one BEAM token; more than 58,000 Node Tokens have been minted. Validators that stay online at least 80% of each 30-day "season" share the gas fees the network collects.

From MC to BEAM

In October 2023, the DAO began swapping its old MC token for BEAM at a ratio of 1 MC to 100 BEAM, with the migration window open for 12 months. The goal, it said, was to align the token's name with what the ecosystem actually did. BEAM became the network's native token, used for gas, validation and governance.

The games

Beam's best-known game is an old favourite with a new layer. Trial Xtreme first appeared in 2009, and its first four instalments together passed 250 million downloads on mobile. The fifth entry, released in 2024, added blockchain features, including a marketplace for trading bikes and blueprints.

Other partners have come and gone. At gamescom 2025 in Cologne, Beam hosted an event on 20 August with projects including Pixelmon, Off The Grid, Forgotten Playland and Trial Xtreme. In December 2025, Power Protocol, working with studio Pixion Games, launched a token tied to the strategy game Fableborne's fourth season.

Beyond games

By September 2025, Beam described itself as having six divisions: AI, ventures, finance, real-world assets, gaming and trading. Its trading division launched Dreamcash, a mobile-first crypto trading app. Beam Ventures has been working toward a licence in Abu Dhabi.

Its treasury is unusually transparent. The report for the end of 2025 valued it at $174.7 million, down 11.65% from about $197.7 million three months earlier, a smaller fall than Bitcoin (down 23%) or Ether (down 28%) over the same quarter. It held about 9.93 billion BEAM, valued at $26.9 million, and burned 40.3 million BEAM during the quarter. (Token values are volatile; these are dated snapshots from the treasury's own report, not a forecast.) The report also listed investments in GPU computing, AI tools and another blockchain, Monad, and grouped written-off positions into an "Other Investments" line.

Why it matters

Beam is a clear example of a trend we've seen across gaming chains, from Oasys's turn to tokenized property to Ronin's move onto Ethereum. Building and running a blockchain only for games is expensive, and the player base shrank after 2022. So chains diversify, merge or plug into bigger networks.

For players, the questions are practical. Is the game you care about still being updated? Does the chain under it have a plan for keeping the lights on? Beam's open treasury reports at least make the second question easier to answer than on most networks.

For the wider chain race, read our features on Polygon and its rivals and Ronin's move to Ethereum.