Foresight News, the Beam Foundation announced that the Etna upgrade of the Avalanche network will transform the Beam Network into a Layer 1 network and enable it to flexibly choose its own consensus mechanism. The Beam Network will adopt the Horizon upgrade, transitioning to a permissionless Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. The Horizon upgrade is planned to be completed by the end of January 2025, but no later than the end of the first quarter of 2025.
After the upgrade, individuals who meet the network standards for validation can protect the Beam network by running or delegating to Beam nodes. In return, validators can receive network rewards, including transaction (gas) fees, protocol fees, and validator incentive subsidies, for the validator services they provide to the Beam network. The network standards for running a Beam node are: at least holding 1 node token and 20,000 BEAM. Each Beam node can stake up to 50 million BEAM and 1,000 node tokens at most.
