As you’re reading this, Berachain’s Boyco pre-launch deposit vaults have attracted over 1.5 billion dollars in TVL.

But what do they do, and why did the floodgates open before mainnet?

These pre-launch vaults are different from Boyco — they’re additive and offer an alternative approach to liquidity provision that makes the Boyco process even more accessible to new users, and more seamless as a whole to dApps and the Berachain ecosystem.

The pre-launch program began as a community-driven initiative from protocols and dApps in the Berachain ecosystem, bringing us to where we are today.

Its goal was to offer users early exposure to Berachain, allowing them to participate prior to Boyco and mainnet in a more passive, hands-off approach. The community has responded with overwhelming enthusiasm and over 130,000 active wallets have already deposited. 

This post will dig into how it works, why this was done, and how everything fits together.

Unlocking liquidity

What makes these pre-launch vaults unique? 

Aside from being just a good means of getting the community involved early, these vaults are a simpler way of stacking rewards prior to Boyco’s launch, with a one-click UX across a few different verticals. 

StakeStone, Pendle, Lombard, Concrete, PumpBTC, Kelp, Usual, CIAN, Veda, Ethena, Bedrock, and ether.fi let users deposit a variety of assets, whether that’s majors or yield-bearing assets, to help bootstrap liquidity for participating dApps, such as Kodiak and Dolomite, well ahead of their mainnet deployment.

This early liquidity aggregation has two major benefits:

• Momentum: It creates a sense of excitement and commitment by engaging early liquidity providers and giving them a chance to get involved.
• Streamlined Deployment: Liquidity from the pre-launch vaults will seamlessly transition into Boyco’s incentivized liquidity markets.

The latter benefit is the most important, as Boyco will be extremely pivotal in the first days of Berachain mainnet, essentially acting as the central liquidity hub for both dApps and users. This pre-launch program in conjunction with Boyco seeks to solve a common (but easily overlooked) problem inherent to all L1s: the cold start challenge. 

When new blockchains launch, they often struggle to attract liquidity, leaving users unable to access the depth and functionality necessary for meaningful interactions. Without meaningful interactions, these users quickly lose interest and dApps miss out on a prime opportunity for user acquisition. Or these L1s attract liquidity, but it’s mercenary—users and LPs care less about the underlying chain or dApps than they do the potential returns from providing assets. 

This typically leads to reliance on external actors, such as high-net-worth individuals or market makers, to provide liquidity under exclusive terms - a practice that is often inequitable and unsustainable, but most importantly, quite opaque.

Boyco is Berachain’s response to this, a rewriting of go-to-market strategies from first principles, built with Berachain’s unique architecture and focus on incentive alignment in mind. Berachain’s approach flips this dynamic by enabling less opaque and more democratized liquidity provisioning. 

It’s a community-first model that rewards participation with early access to incentives, a smooth UX, and the chance to support the growth of Berachain’s native ecosystem from the beginning.

This approach ensures that LPs are not merely passive participants but integral actors in the network’s success - even prior to day one. We’ve discussed this before, but the importance of Boyco isn’t limited to less opaque liquidity management or bootstrapping, but the freedom it gives to dApps. 

From the earliest days, Boyco was built to take the form of a more modern chain bootstrapping program - a response to fleeting rewards, mercenary LPs, and ecosystems that quickly became unable to innovate or come together. With Boyco, both users and builders are given the optionality to do more of what matters. 

For the users, providing liquidity is less taxing and won’t be nearly as tedious as it would be without explicit terms. Builders gain the freedom to just work on an innovative on-chain experience, without needing to run around chasing LPs. 

If something like Boyco is an engine, pre-launch vaults are the oil that powers it.

Looking at the numbers

As shown in this Dune Analytics dashboard created by the honey jar, the initiative has already attracted significant interest, with over $1.5 billion in funds deposited across numerous projects and verticals. This data was pulled as of January 15th 2025.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the key players bringing all of this to life:

1. StakeStone: With over $400 million in deposits, StakeStone is a major contributor to the program. Its deposits include volatile LP tokens such as cbBTC and WETH, which will play a critical role in incentivizing early liquidity on Berachain-native DEXs like Kodiak.
2. Pendle: Having grown to be one of the largest names in the yield space, Pendle will look to create unique markets and strategies on Berachain that optimize for PoL and Berachain native assets.
3. ConcreteXYZ: This platform focuses on managing deposits into Berachain’s money markets and other applications, ensuring that liquidity is strategically deployed to maximize ecosystem utility.
4. Ethena: With over $80 million in deposits, Ethena focuses on stablecoin liquidity, particularly through assets like USDe and sUSDe, which are vital for stable swap pools and lending markets.
5. CIAN: The CIAN team wants to redistribute yield sources across the DeFi ecosystem, making a leap towards Berachain with pre-launch vaults. These vaults created by the CIAN team have already accumulated over $270 million, amassing over 2,300 pumpBTC in the process.
6. Lombard: As a pioneer in the program, Lombard has allocated $218 million, largely in BTC liquidity, which will be instrumental for early lending and trading markets.
7. ether.fi: Contributing over $440 million in assets, ether.fi’s deposits support both volatile and stable asset pools, balancing risk and rewards for participants.

Each protocol’s role extends beyond just liquidity provision or managing user funds. 

By participating in this effort, these projects are laying the groundwork for future collaborations within the broader Berachain and Boyco ecosystems. These teams are tasked with gaining user trust early, and making sure their needs are met prior to mainnet, letting them earn additional rewards for their decision to cooperate in the earliest innings.

Through involving these users early, dApps secure the liquidity needed to operate effectively from the start, avoiding the pitfalls of low liquidity that can plague new chains - and they get users excited, giving them something to do sooner than later. Through offering these pre-launch vault participants early access, the Berachain ecosystem aligns stakeholders around a shared vision of growth and success.

But how does this play into Boyco, and how do these two systems feed into each other? Could you have one without the other?

Boyco’s design addresses a few key issues in traditional liquidity markets:

• Transparency: Participants know exactly where their funds are going, the duration of locks, and the incentives they will receive.
• Efficiency: By eliminating middlemen and double incentivization, Boyco ensures that every dollar of liquidity is put to productive use.
• Fairness: LPs of all sizes can participate on equal terms, breaking down barriers that traditionally favor large capital providers.

As it stands, the assets deposited through the pre-launch vaults will get routed to native Berachain dApps participating in Boyco - like Kodiak or Dolomite - then sent throughout the ecosystem. Just as a refresher, teams like Kodiak want to make liquidity more dynamic and give users far more control over their funds. 

Kodiak is working to build out a DEX, an automated liquidity manager, token deployment factory, and an incentive layer to tap into PoL. With assets routed from Boyco to Kodiak, users could stack yields offered by dApps integrated in Boyco and take their rewards, loop them again through Kodiak and farm other assets, like BGT.

In the case of something like Dolomite, their money market could allow Boyco deposited assets to serve as collateral for other positions, or earn users even more yield. 

If we take a look at assets deposited (thanks to THJ for the dashboard), over 50% are represented by Bitcoin (in the form of LBTC and eBTC) and wETH - the rest are a healthy mix of yield-bearing tokens and everything in between.

This is a very good starting point for Berachain, and users will be able to tap into a deep set of liquidity from non-native assets and majors, across a set of apps that offer something for everyone. 

We’ve seen Ethena and USDe take DeFi by storm over the past year, becoming the largest decentralized stablecoin in circulation. With the help of Lombard and pumpBTC, holders of BTC can make use of their assets on Berachain and participate in PoL. And the list goes on. 

It’s difficult to describe just how helpful these vaults and Boyco have been - and will continue to be - for a chain approaching mainnet. Instead of various parties needing to coordinate with users and LPs, it’s already being worked through and coordinated from the beginning.

Here is a full overview of dApps and asset issuers that were accepted into Boyco and will be available day one. 

The liquidity must flow

If the goal of Boyco is to efficiently match interests between LPs and dApps, then pre-launch vaults are a way of casting a large net and efficiently aggregating the interests of over 125,000 users. Instead of letting dApps or other protocols make the vaults themselves, Berachain decided to support and help roll out a larger program to make it stand out. 

It isn’t Boyco, so why deposit? 

This is a great question, and its answer will vary depending on what you’re looking for. 

Like expressed earlier, if you want to start stacking rewards prior to Boyco and mainnet, then pre-launch vaults could be for you. Teams like Concrete that manage the transfer and allocation of these funds can send them to Boyco without you needing to lift a finger. Of course this gives you less optionality come Boyco, but for some, more rewards might make up for that.

At the end of the day it comes down to user preference, but the difference is that users are given optionality on Berachain, not just in what they can do on-chain, but what their assets do. Here's what it might look like in practice:

Ethena and CIAN are building new DeFi experiences and changing how we define stablecoins. Lombard and PumpBTC are giving users more to do than ever before with Bitcoin.

And this isn’t even considering what will happen once Berachain native dApps go live and get in on the fun. The Proof-of-Liquidity flywheel has been discussed quite extensively on this blog, but it’s less discussed how each dApp existing within Berachain can bootstrap sub-flywheels of its own. Boyco and pre-launch vaults give these teams a boost and let them lay the groundwork for what’s to come. 

Once Boyco launches, the liquidity aggregated through the pre-launch program will seamlessly transition into Boyco’s liquidity markets with the help of LayerZero, Enso, Concrete, and other partners. 

Boyco represents Berachain’s next-level approach to liquidity provisioning, enabling dApps to negotiate directly with LPs for incentives and ensuring that all participants have equal access to competitive yield opportunities.

But it’s more than just a liquidity bootstrapping initiative—it’s a testament to the power of aligned incentives and community-driven innovation. By integrating all of these dApps and letting them build out their own respective vaults prior to launch, the community can get involved earlier and gain a taste for what’s to come.

With over $1.5 billion already deposited and a growing community of passionate participants, Berachain’s journey is just getting started. For LPs, protocols, and users alike, the pre-launch program offers a glimpse into the future of decentralized finance - a future where liquidity is abundant, incentives are aligned, and the opportunities are endless.