Boyco Update: Announcing Selected dApps and Asset Issuers

What is Boyco?

At launch, a new chain captures significant attention and excitement. Boyco is a pre-launch liquidity platform designed to help Berachain’s application layer turn this momentum into early growth. By enabling dApps to secure liquidity before mainnet goes live, Boyco allows them to skip years of capital-building and position themselves for long-term success from day one.

Boyco enables applications to create pre-launch, liquidity markets— dedicated pools where users can deposit assets early to support a dApp’s launch while earning potential rewards. This process, the first of its kind on any chain, will begin in the near future, giving users the chance to participate in Berachain’s ecosystem ahead of mainnet.

Boyco is a joint effort between Berachain, Royco, Enso, LayerZero, and Stargate that was custom built for the Berachain ecosystem.

How Were Teams Selected?

Given the novelty and complexity of Boyco, as well as the sheer amount of operational overhead and testing, the number of teams selected was necessarily limited.

The primary categories that were used to determine participation were:

Assets needed for deposit
Berachain-Nativeness, Strategy, and Value Creation
External LP interest and desire to commit TVL to an application
Buy-in from potential asset issuers (not relevant in all cases)
Novelty of protocol
Berachain Community Alignment
Protocol security, robustness, and track record of PMF (if applicable)

Over the past few months, Berachain has developed opinions on broader market trends and identified where Proof of Liquidity is best suited to out-compete existing dPoS solutions. Boyco leans into these notes, addressing the cold start problem by ensuring that Day One liquidity is present to allow the massive universe of applications launching on Berachain to succeed.

Teams chosen were selected to service important verticals for distribution & growth of a new chain, including (but not limited to) DEX Liquidity, Lending, Derivatives, Yield Vaults, and Staking/Restaking.

There was also an active focus on selection for bootstrapping liquidity in major assets, as these can then be utilized for integrations across a wide variety of different applications. Due to the construction of Boyco, assets bridged over also needed to be LayerZero OFT-based, which excluded certain cross-chain asset issuers.

Projects that sought to onboard Berachain-native assets, such as BERA, BGT, or any native Governance Token, were ineligible. This is due to the fact that with thin liquidity and indeterminate demand on launch, depositors could potentially face extreme slippage, creating a negative user-experience.

Finally, we elected to include a couple projects that we felt offered interesting use-cases specifically for Boyco, such as utilizing the massive wave of Bitcoin LSTs for staking or borrowing against principle deposited into markets.

Why was my Project not Selected?

As elaborated above, projects were generally not chosen due to:

Needing Berachain Native assets for Pre-Deposit (most common)
Lack of interest or conviction from asset issuers / LPs (second most common)
Better suited for active, rather than locked liquidity deposits
Limited set of available integrations
Competitive verticals, as the goal was to give a wide variety of options within a very limited set of applications
Lack of audits

If you have specific questions on why your project wasn’t selected, feel free to ask in your dedicated Berachain <> Project chat.

Does this Impact my Request for Application Proposal?

No, selection for Boyco participation was completely separate from RFB. An announcement detailing successful Request for Application and Request for Community proposals will be published in the near future.

Is there anything planned for non-Boyco teams?

Absolutely. A potential future retroactive solution could look to resource builders that committed to Berachain and created novel products across a variety of different verticals, with extra weighting toward teams that weren’t selected for Boyco.

Additionally, many teams that didn’t qualify for Boyco will receive RFA allocations. This will give dApps liquid incentives that can be put to work immediately, allowing these projects to begin acquiring users from Day One of mainnet.

There are many excellent ways to replicate Royco’s design elements on Mainnet, including via Stargate composable calls, or Jumper, which can integrate bridge + deposit functionality directly into an application, with Proof of Liquidity, Royco, or other incentive distribution mechanisms under the hood loaded with liquid BERA from RFA.