It’s finally here. 

After over two years of waiting, Berachain’s mainnet launch came last Thursday and the beras have been cooking. There’s a lot to run through, and it’s difficult to get a full picture of what’s happening on any chain - but this post will provide a comprehensive look at almost everything you can do right now on Berachain. 

Berachain needs no introduction, but it would be a mistake not to mention Proof-of-Liquidity, the consensus mechanism driving Berachain’s economic innovation. When the idea for a new consensus mechanism was dreamed up, Berachain was still more of a community than it was an L1, but this is no longer the case. 

After attracting over $3 billion of deposits through the Boyco program Berachain is live, producing blocks, and attracting both dApps and users. 

This blog typically focuses on the fundamentals of Berachain, exploring what it might turn into down the line, so this post might feel like a breath of fresh air as we explore the actual reality of the chain. 

Let’s get to it.

Exploring Berachain’s DeFi ecosystem 

It’s probably best to start off with an overview of Berachain’s DeFi ecosystem, as much of this relies on assets deposited through Boyco, and dApps have been hard at work pushing out strategies and new things to do on-chain. 

If you look at DefiLlama, Berachain’s TVL is said to be just above $1.9 billion, but this doesn’t account for all of the Boyco assets. Captain Jack Bearow wrote an excellent summary of how Boyco markets work and where these assets are actually going, which you can read here. 

Very briefly, we can take a closer look at how Boyco functioned before getting into actual mainnet dynamics. 

12 apps were selected for Boyco, and over 20 asset issuers. Boyco assets were split into three categories, classifying them as majors, third party, or hybrid tokens. Multipliers were applied and durations set depending on these asset categories, with teams submitting application scripts specifying what the assets would be put towards upon mainnet launch. 

Looking at Berachain’s TVL we see a very healthy distribution, not only amongst dApps, but between pools, assets, and strategies employed by these teams. As we work through a list of what’s been happening on-chain, some specific strategies and pools will be highlighted to show what’s possible. 

Starting with BeraHub, we can examine where the PoL magic happens.

After opening the site you’ll find a few different tabs but we’ll start with the pools. The five largest pools by TVL let you deposit either HONEY or WBERA, with paired assets including BYUSD, USDC.e, WETH, and WBTC depending on your risk appetite.

These LP receipt tokens are eligible for staking within reward vaults, the primary avenue for earning BGT rewards on Berachain. There are currently five reward vaults - corresponding to those five pools - whitelisted and live for deposit, with varying BGT capture rates and APRs.

As of writing this post, Kodiak has a TVL of over $690 million - but where does it all come from, and how are LPs making use of Kodiak’s infrastructure?

If we take a look at the top ten pools by TVL, we can see that Kodiak has fairly deep liquidity across a number of pairs, across those three categories of assets previously mentioned. Of these, WETH pairs make up three of the top five, with STONE, WBTC, HONEY, and beraETH accompanying it. 

Over $375 million of WETH was deposited from Boyco, with a majority of this now living on Berachain mainnet.

Kodiak doesn’t just offer rewards for depositing more standard assets, as they also provide sweetened islands, specialized products for BERA/HONEY, BERA/WETH, and YEET/BERA pairs with three figure APRs at the time of writing. There’s something for everyone and Kodiak has grown to over $1.1 billion of assets and continues to work out new launches and farms, like the WBTC/BERA sweetened island, integration with Zapper, and consistent launches of new Berachain eco tokens.

D2 Finance currently offers a few unique strategies on Berachain, like HyperBera.USDC, HyperBera.weETH, Kodiak++, dgnBeraland, and HyperBera. The protocol has over $10 million in TVL as of writing this, and has been working hard to offer differentiated products that take advantage of the wider Berachain ecosystem. 

D2 recently wrote about their thoughts surrounding Berachain and PoL here, but the team wanted to put tokenized derivative strategies onto Berachain that not only offer attractive yields, but benefit from PoL’s reflexivity and incentive structure. If you’re looking to passively farm BGT rewards through a set of actively managed strategies, D2 might be the perfect destination for you. 

Ooga Booga, a native liquidity aggregator, has been pushing along seeing almost $200 million in swap volume since launch. This volume has come from a healthy mix of tokens, but mostly BERA, HONEY, and USDC.e. 

Beyond seeing a large amount of volume, Ooga Booga has been busy listing tokens and letting users trade assets across a variety of different DEXs in a clean UX and continues to ship new partnerships and integrations.

Dolomite has seen almost a billion dollars of assets enter the protocol, with over $32 million borrowed already. They’re building a money market and margin trading protocol, working to serve Berachain and users that want to do more with their assets.

For users that want to stake BGT or BERA, Infrared is key. 

The platform functions as a user-friendly liquid staking solution with a focus on PoL. Infrared has attracted over 180 million BERA so far, which users can stake for iBERA, Infrared’s liquid ERC-20 backed 1:1 with BERA. Deposited BERA tokens get staked through Infrared’s validator network, earning staking rewards without the hassle. 

One of the major benefits of liquid staking tokens isn’t just the easily accessible staking yield, but the added capital efficiency. Across the Berachain ecosystem you’ll be able to utilize your iBERA and provide liquidity, lend, or use as collateral, without foregoing staking rewards. Infrared will also offer iBGT, their liquid variant of BGT for users that want to maximize PoL rewards, which you can read more about here.

If you’re looking to maximize your exposure to the Berachain ecosystem and really get weird, you can deposit into Yeet’s liquidity trifecta vault (more on that here). 

The TLDR is that Yeet partnered with Beradrome and Kodiak to release a very user-friendly, automated yield product that lets depositors farm rewards and compound them back into a YEET/BERA LP position.

Instead of having to provide liquidity, stake the receipt token into Beradrome, and route this through Kodiak’s YEET/BERA island, users can just do all of this through Yeet without having to jump through a million hoops. If you want, you could even take the LP receipt token from the liquidity trifecta vault and take it elsewhere, the choice is yours. 

Beradrome also went live February 9th, and has a goal of becoming the go-to liquidity marketplace for essentially any yield bearing asset on Berachain. Its structure is quite complicated - as you can see in their docs - but that hasn’t stopped the beras from depositing and kicking off some flywheels.

The reasoning behind Beradrome’s architecture came from observing the Solidly model and a desire to make it better. With PoL operating under the hood, Beradrome is able to build even deeper liquidity with the help of reward vaults and yield-bearing tokens. Should the dApp continue to grow, there becomes a greater incentive for users to engage with BERO, hiBERO, and oBERO to take advantage of both Beradrome and the benefits of PoL. 

Last but not least, Smilee Finance has rolled out gBERA, its unique liquid staking token designed to rebase and accrue rewards from Berachain validators automatically. What makes gBERA different from other liquid staking tokens like iBERA is its ability to automate the reward claiming process, rolling these back into BERA for users without them needing to press any extra buttons. The team is looking to push out more integrations over the coming weeks, letting users wrap gBERA and use it across a variety of apps in the ecosystem. 

GameFi, SocialFi, and MemeFi on Berachain

If DeFi isn’t for you, that’s alright.

Berachain isn’t just another DeFi chain, and has a large amount of variety in its ecosystem, even just a week into mainnet. 

Maybe you want to bridge to Berachain and chill out, avoiding the dApps while you plot your next move. If that’s the case, look no further than bera.tv, which has been described by the team as the “first interdimensional AI generated television show” only on Berachain, if it wasn’t obvious enough. If hanging out and watching two AI bera news anchors talk about anything sounds up your alley, then you’re in the right place.

Do you want to bet, but sports aren’t your thing? Over/Under is live on mainnet and lets you bet on the outcomes of livestreamed video games, in real time, with the option to set up parlays too. Streaming has become one of the most popular ways to gain an audience, and numbers don’t lie - over seven million unique streamers used Twitch last year, and average concurrent viewership settled around two million. 

If crypto wants to break out of its bubble and start onboarding more users, appealing to their interests is a major avenue for potential success. Over/Under wants to become the de facto hub for streamers and speculators alike, exclusively on Berachain.

Memeswap wants to build the premier destination for memecoin traders, offering an experience similar to pump dot fun but built with the beras in mind. If you want to take advantage of increasing activity on-chain without buying any of the coins, you can use Memeswap to stake your BERA and offer rental liquidity for new token launches, earning yield in return. 

For users that want to actually trade the coins, they can use Memeswap and track new deployments, recent bondings, and other details to stay in the loop. They’ve done over 370,000 volume of BERA and are integrated with Infrared, Ooga Booga, and other teams to provide a seamless experience for all types of traders. 

Shogun is building a platform that makes it easier for users to get on-chain with gun.fun. Users can swap assets from any chain onto Berachain with only a single click, and the team just launched on February 11th. Berachain might be EVM-equivalent, but Shogun made it so anyone can send assets to Berachain, even from non-EVM chains. 

Honey Chat is a Berachain native social network application that wants to reinvent social dynamics through on-chain mechanisms. Users sign up and connect their existing X account and are able to access a network where social reputation actually matters, governed through tokens.

Pushing towards PoL 

With that out of the way we can talk about PoL, even though it isn’t officially live just yet.

Instead of sitting around and twiddling your thumbs, you should be actively thinking about how PoL will integrate with the existing on-chain liquidity and what you can do to take advantage of it. Whether you’re looking to rotate between dApps depending on reward schedules or remain loyal to one or two dApps, there’s a lot of value in thinking about it ahead of time.

It was mentioned earlier but there are currently just five whitelisted reward vaults - what happens once more protocols start applying for the whitelist process? The BGT capture rate is still fairly evenly distributed, but this most likely won’t remain the case for long. For more info on how reward vaults actually function, you can check out the docs here.

Berachain’s tokenomics were designed to facilitate a healthy balance between on-chain behaviors, splitting up the gas token and governance token for good reason. Instead of emitting 10% of BERA supply per year, users and dApps are able to gain access to BGT, with entirely different unit dynamics and game theory involved.

Just to briefly interject, there are already opportunities on-chain for those with their ear to the ground, like Infrared’s iBGT currently offering over a nice APR (in stablecoins, too). 

When PoL gets activated and officially goes live, those that did the work early will be rewarded for their patience and diligence, while others play catch-up and learn why Berachain is so different from PoS chains. 

For now, this post should have given you more than enough to think about and do right now on mainnet, but there’s a lot more that didn’t fit in the post. If you’re trying to stay up-to-date on Berachain happenings, a good place to start is the foundation’s X account and the ecosystem page, which is consistently updated as more teams launch on mainnet.

Thanks for reading, beras.