Berachain’s number one priority has always been, and always will be, its applications. The chain lives or dies by their success, and as such, it's in the best interest of all stakeholders within the Berachain ecosystem for these applications to have the greatest degree of exposure to potential users, depositors and partners. 

While examining the trajectory of applications (and their liquidity acquisition efforts) in other ecosystems over the past cycle, we noted a number of issues which typically plagued their growth and widespread adoption. 

Cold start problem. A lot of DeFi applications suffer from practical usability without initially attracting some critical mass of capital to enable a depth of liquidity which can easily service your average on-chain user. 

Privileged liquidity provision. Cold Start issues evolved into applications striking deals with HNWIs, Family Offices, MMs or other parties, receiving predatory terms in exchange for liquidity provision (either some form of boosted or guaranteed yield from the treasury)

Points. Alternatively, teams turned to points programs as a means of attracting initial deposits; often rehypothecating deposits across multiple protocols with a variety of multipliers, with depositors ultimately hoping that their lasagna of points would convert into liquid tokens which provided them with meaningful upside. Unfortunately, a lack of transparency in the conversion of points to liquid tokens often resulted in misaligned expectations between users and protocols. 

The simple truth is that we don’t expect these behaviors to change - protocols will likely have to find ways to uniquely incentivize meaningful depositors, and to attract large userbases through multiple layers of yield, as farmers have become accustomed to these market conditions. 

Protocols want long-term oriented liquidity at a reasonable cost.

Farmers want destinations for their capital with a clear understanding of their potential upside. 

We believe that there’s a better solution that checks all of the aforementioned boxes. 

Boyco fixes this.

Royco powers Boyco to enable applications to create pre-launch, liquidity acquisition marketplaces. This process will begin shortly before launch, allowing users to pre-deposit into a number of dApps coming to Berachain Mainnet.

Boyco is designed to solve historical issues that have plagued liquidity raises: centralization; lack of transparency for users and dApps, inefficient spending, and inability to negotiate.

With meaningful clarity on Day One liquidity, dApps will have freedom to focus on finding product-market fit, collaboration with other applications, and solving go-to-market strategy. Users will have improved transparency on the counterparty they’re trusting, the duration and nominal terms for providing liquidity, and the ability to filter for projects across a number of criteria. Boyco changes how chains bootstrap, focusing on getting productive liquidity directly into applications prior to launch, and maximizing clarity for users.

Boyco

Royco is a protocol that enables dApps to create liquidity markets. These markets enable applications to negotiate with LPs to provide liquidity for an incentive (ie. pre-deposit for points or tokens). This has a few big upgrades for dApps looking to onboard pre-deposits:

Negotiate with LPs for guaranteed Day 1 Liquidity - Via the market, applications can negotiate with LPs to provide liquidity for tokens, points, future tokens, etc. Any LP can place intents “ie. I will provide $10M Day 1 Liquidity, for 1000 $XYZ tokens”, which an application can see on the market and accept/negotiate. Liquidity Depositors have funds locked for a predetermined period of time, and can be rewarded in vanilla tokens, points, vested assets, or any combination. One pool/vault/market may receive incentives from multiple applications, creating opportunities for yield stacking.

No need to double incentivize- Previously, chains incentivized locked pre-deposits onto a bridge contract or multisig, and subsequently incentivized those assets to get deposited into applications. With Boyco, LPs only need to be incentivized once, sending liquidity directly into its end destination: application smart contracts.

No PvP for the same liquidity- Rather than compete for some share of the liquidity to the chain, LPs are incentivized directly from other chains. This means applications are working together with applications and assets in the ecosystem, rather than against them. 

Boyco will allow applications to onboard liquidity directly into their smart contracts on their mainnet deployment, ensuring they can focus on building and creating within the Berachain ecosystem in the early days of deployment. It also ensures that LPs will have an easy way to shop around their liquidity to a variety of different protocols, with the ability to filter by different types of assets, durations of locks, types of applications, and return profiles. 

On both sides of the table, Boyco helps Berachain enable more transparent use-cases that meaningfully change the way applications and users deploy productive capital to a new chain. 

Chain Bootstrapping 2.0

When working to build this out, the goal was to create a modern version of a chain bootstrapping program, while simultaneously addressing the major issues that have plagued launches in the past.

Better Transparency - Before, users lacked clarity on how long their assets would be locked, and the nominal return profile. Applications lacked clarity on how they would be able to acquire bridged assets, and what it would cost them. With Boyco, users and applications get all the information they need, with certain Rage Quit options available to ensure that risk for depositors is minimized wherever possible.

Lowering Trust Assumptions - Historically, users were often forced to trust a single counterparty. This resulted in sending money into MultiSigs for long periods of time, rather than using smart contracts wherever possible to enforce custody, vesting, and rewards. When setting up a Boyco market, applications import their deposit/transaction interface, so you know exactly what level of trust assumptions are made. As a result, users get visibility into where their assets are going, even before the chain launches. 

Improving Accessibility - Rather than limit users to deposits across a limited subset of chains (or even one), depositors into Boyco will be able to provide liquidity across 20+ connected chains via Stargate for USDC, UDST, DAI, wETH, and wBTC. Additionally, other omnichain token standard options may be utilized under the hood for maximum flexibility. 

Spend Efficiency - Historically, chains offered incentives to onboard liquidity onto the chain, which then forced more spend via both applications and ecosystems to get those assets onto projects. By bringing the consumer directly to the application, Boyco eliminates the need for a middleman.

Application Symbiosis  - As a result of the two step process above, applications end up competing against each other to fight for share of assets already bridged to a chain. Now, they’re instead able to work together (even stacking yield for multi-platform integrations) to offer competitive cross-chain rates and raise the ecosystem floor in tandem.

How It Works

Getting liquidity into an application doesn’t require making counterparty tradeoffs, or ability to price risk effectively. The process for applications is quite simple. 1. Create a market via Royco.org by simply defining the functions you want the user to pre-approve (in this case: ie. bridge to Berachain and deposit into an application smart contract that was clearly defined prior for user visibility)

2. Offer incentives to potential LPs on the market. Or choose to accept LP intents. Anyone, not just you, can add incentives to the market for easy cross incentivization (ie. StakeStone can add incentives to a Kodiak Market, and Infrared could incentivize that LP to deposit into their application). 

3. When an LP fills an Intent, their assets are locked until they’re deposited into your protocol. LPs can enter applications through embeds in the application site, Royco and Berachain sites, and affiliated frontends. Liquidity filled will not be withdrawable until the date of the locked liquidity expiration, which is clearly shown prior to deposit. 

4. Get Guaranteed Day One Liquidity. Following Berachain’s Mainnet launch, and upon the application’s contract being deployed on Berachain Mainnet and verified for consistency with what was posted on Royco, pre-deposits will be bridged and deposited directly into the app.To begin, participation in the Boyco campaign will be gated to applications that submit Request for Broposal submissions through the newly launched program. If you’re an application that deployed on either Artio or bArtio, and are interested in participating, fill out an RFA Broposal on the Request for Broposal site.