A different type of innovation

What if there were a chain purpose-built to help its applications succeed?

Across the entire Berachain ecosystem, amongst users, dApps, and validators, BGT is crucial and coveted. Users can earn BGT only by depositing PoL-eligible receipt tokens into Reward Vaults, smart-contract pools that gate every emission.

But what happens when we think further into the future?

The design of PoL creates a continued feedback loop, where productive on-chain actions mint a receipt token, the token gets staked in a whitelisted vault, validators route BGT toward that vault in exchange for incentives, and participants boost the validator with the BGT they earn, increasing its future emissions in the process. 

The result is a market-driven yet protocol-enforced alignment between chain security, dApp traction, and end-user rewards, moving Berachain beyond classical yield farming toward a flexible incentive fabric.

But PoL can enable so much more than “just DeFi” - let’s examine this.

Seeing Reward Vaults in a new light

With the mechanics of BGT emissions and reward-vault gating in place, the next step is understanding how developers can translate real-world or on-chain actions into those emissions and generate productive economic activity on Berachain. 

The process relies on a simple cycle, turning user activity into a receipt token, routing the token back through a vault, and letting validators compete to direct BGT toward it.

Mapping this “Action -> Receipt -> Vault -> BGT” pipeline clarifies how PoL becomes an all-purpose incentive fabric for everything - Captain Jack discussed this in a tweet, but we’ll flesh out the idea a bit more to assist in the rest of the article.

• Action: A user performs an economically valuable activity inside Berachain, like depositing into an LP position, settling an invoice for a tokenized RWA, or providing compute to a DeAI on-chain compute cluster.
• Receipt: The application mints a proof of that action - a fungible or non-fungible receipt token carrying metadata. If the action produces $0.30 of platform revenue, the dev can decide that subsidizing it with $0.20 worth of BGT is profitable.
• Vault: The dApp then stakes the receipt on behalf of the user inside a whitelisted reward vault. The vault accumulates BGT over time and users experience the benefits without needing to grasp the technicals.
• BGT: As validators observe the vault’s incentive-per-BGT rate, they redirect a share of their emissions to capture those incentives. Users harvest BGT, optionally boost validators, or burn BGT for BERA, completing the flywheel.

That last part is just basic PoL, but it’s the most important to remember. All of this relies on the relationship between BERA and BGT, validators, dApps, and users. The previously mentioned PoL changes were implemented because of outspoken community feedback around how the existing system wasn’t functioning as intended. With the improvements toward X, Y, and Z, PoL is functioning in a much healthier way and is better positioned to benefit various types of reward vaults, not just the large ones.

Going beyond DeFi

PoL’s reach extends well beyond liquidity pools and lending markets. The following examples illustrate how reward vaults could translate invoices, decentralized energy costs, GPU cycles, or in-game actions into BGT emissions, shifting the CAC from dApp treasuries to validator block rewards and aligning Berachain with genuine economic innovation.

RWAs 

It’s estimated the gross stock of tokenizable real-world assets sits at somewhere over $800 trillion, yet only a few billion of that is on-chain today. Reward vaults let builders close that gap by subsidizing the exact on-chain actions that create cash-flow receipts. 

An SME that factors a $10,000 invoice could mint an ERC-20 representing the claim and auto-stake it; validators route BGT toward the vault in exchange for a predictable incentive spread.

A more practical RWA vault template could take in every invoice, tokenized T-bill or revenue-sharing agreement and convert it into a fungible cash-flow receipt ERC-20. From here, the dApp’s controller contracts could autostake the receipt token into a whitelisted RWA vault, allowing it to earn BGT emissions while the user sits back. 

These vaults could also integrate other technologies like oracles to handle defaults. In the event of a missed payment on an invoice, the receipt token would become unstaked (no longer eligible for BGT emissions) and unclaimed rewards would be distributed back to the treasury. This process could effectively protect validators from subsidizing bad debt and capital-providers can still tap into rewards without needing to concern themselves with those missing payments. In a world like this, CAC/BGT ratios might become standard across every dApp’s dashboard next to revenues, volumes, and other important metrics.

DePIN

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks convert cap-ex-heavy utilities into open markets. PoL vaults allow every verifiable unit of service to mint a receipt token that funnels BGT to compliant nodes. A Wi-Fi hotspot could stake “proof-of-coverage” NFTs; a solar farm could stake hourly kWh receipts. Validators, lured by the hotspot’s or solar farm’s incentive tokens, supply BGT, effectively underwriting early network build-out with block rewards.

Projects can embed “BERA vacuums” - programmed purchases of BERA with a portion of fee income - to deepen native liquidity while still compensating operators in BGT.

For a bandwidth or energy-related network, reward vaults could work best if every single “unit of service” was tokenized on-chain. What’s this mean?

In the case of a project trying to bootstrap a network of decentralized solar panels, these could regularly emit data and show progress like 1) energy produced and 2) dollars saved, with the data getting sent back to an oracle, essentially locking this information in on-chain. Reward vaults could then absorb datapoints like this, distributing BGT based on quality-throughput or actual work done. 

DePIN projects struggle across nearly every time horizon to combat against mercenary actors and a lack of actual work being done. With PoL and reward vaults, the good actors pushing towards innovation would receive the bulk of BGT, isolating the DePIN project from overpaying for poor performance. 

Going back to these BERA vacuums, if a project were to reach a steady state and see that initial mania wear off, the emissions could be placed on a more linear schedule and the controller could portion off sections of revenue to divert towards the BERA vacuum, tying their success to the native-token of Berachain. 

DeAI

Each verified batch of inference or parameter update mints a “proof-of-compute” receipt, auto-staked into a dedicated vault. Validators route BGT toward the vault because the operator pledges a predictable amount of AI-native fees per BGT emitted. Developers avoid launching speculative “GPU tokens,” while node operators earn a liquid governance asset with chain-level utility.

A decentralized compute marketplace could make use of ERC-1155 proof-of-compute receipt tokens, effectively encoding GPU minutes into verifiable, on-chain goods. After a task is completed, the controller or some type of middleman could then auto-stake the receipt tokens into a vault and let the holder earn BGT emissions, based on the value generated or quality minutes provided from the GPUs.

Reward vaults could be used to potentially cover costs, as node operators would be farming BGT, but could also choose whether or not to loop their rewards or use it to pay for electricity, COGS, or other expenses - making Berachain a destination for smarter DePIN business practices.

GameFi

In a blockchain game, finishing a raid could mint a soul-bound “achievement NFT” staked into a reward vault. The vault’s incentive token might be in-game gold or an ad-revenue share, while BGT emissions function as a cross-game loyalty currency. For casual users, complexity disappears: the app stakes receipts behind the scenes, BGT trickles into their wallet, and optional “one-click boost” flows help them delegate that BGT to a favorite validator for extra perks.

Reward vaults might work best through abstracting away all of the internal crypto plumbing that so often confuses new users. Whether it's a mobile-first environment or traditional web dApp, the presence of reward vaults could lay underneath all game utility, letting users focus on the gameplay while vaults power incentive farming without the hassle.

In games with their own native in-game currencies, BGT emissions could be used to help guide the economy and tether it to a token with real-world utility rather than arbitrary game currencies.

Path forward

The long-term health of PoL depends on emission discipline and transparent guard-rails. Governance has already implemented the 30% per-vault allocation ceiling, ensuring no single strategy can monopolize validator block rewards and smoothing BGT yields across the ecosystem.

Post-deposit vaults: Products such as SolvBTC.BERA already “zap” idle Bitcoin deposits into BERA-denominated LPs automatically, demonstrating how front-ends can abstract away bridging, swapping, and staking in a single click.

Extending this pattern, a vault-factory SDK could let devs spin up audited RWA, DePIN, or compute vaults with preset oracle hooks or emission curves depending on the function.

• BERA vacuums: Some protocols may program a portion of fee income to market-buy BERA, concentrating liquidity and soft-pegging ecosystem value to the gas token.
• Cross-domain receipts: Light-client bridges can attest to receipts minted on rollups or other L1s, allowing, for example, a Solana-based DePIN network to claim BGT incentives on Berachain.
• Validator marketplaces: Public dashboards that surface commission rates, historical ROI, and supported vaults will let users route boosts intelligently and let niche validators specialize.

PoL has evolved from an inventive consensus tweak into a full-scale incentive fabric that can subsidize real-world assets, decentralized infrastructure, AI compute, and consumer engagement - all without shifting the emissions burden onto application treasuries. 

By routing validator-funded BGT through whitelisted reward vaults, Berachain converts any measurable action into a stakeable receipt token, letting builders pre-price customer-acquisition cost and users capture governance upside for productive behavior.

The recently enacted 30% per-vault allocation cap, faster rebalancing windows, and commission dials protect that engine from capture, ensuring emissions remain a network-wide growth driver rather than a zero-sum yield farm. 

Looking ahead, the roadmap pairs tighter fiscal discipline with greater composability: CAC-indexed dashboards, claw-back-enabled vault templates, post-deposit “zap” flows, BERA-buyback vacuums, and cross-domain receipt bridges. 

Together, these primitives let Berachain socialize the up-front costs of onboarding invoices, kilowatt-hours, GPU cycles, and gameplay minutes, while converging toward a low-inflation steady state that anchors value in the gas token. If executed, PoL will stand not just as a novel staking design, but as an operating system for aligning chain security, application economics, and real-world utility.