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From NFT to Public Chain, Berachain founder oral history

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"Berachain will get better and better in the future"

Original author:Smokey the BeraBerachain Associates

Leo, BlockBeats

Yesterday, Layer 1 public chain Berachain announced a $42 million funding round. Smokey the Bera co-authored the article "Berachain has Grown so far." BlockBeats has translated the following:

About a year and a half ago, Papa and I joked about making NFT the Smoking Bear. Today, Berachain announced that it has raised $42 million from some of the best crypto investors and angel investors in the crypto world to build the first protocol that truly marries liquidity and security.

It's a very hurried journey, and it's just the starting point for Berachain. First, listen to a sentimental history lesson from Smokey the Bera.

Papa (whose NFT team) and I have been investing in crypto since 2015. We started speculating in 2017, 2018, playing around with all the shitcoins, and then came the DeFi Summer. We went through some chain and ecological ebbs and flows, and spent a lot of time in 2021 and 2022 on alt-Layer rotation. A common loop occurs -- the chain starts. Ecological Fund > DEX & Lending market TVL pump > Emission depletion > chain ded.

No matter how decentralized, scalable, or secure these chains are - no matter how long it takes to finalize, no matter how interoperability, without liquidity, the chain will quickly become a "ghost town." At the same time, we've reached 7-digit TVLS in multiple ecosystems on the chain, 100x more validators, and no doubt the network is secure - but at what cost?

Liquidity is indeed the lifeblood of DeFi, but beyond that, protocol activity is important, and Beras is accelerating when we realise this. We inadvertently launched a community of thousands of intelligent but level-headed DeFi enthusiasts who took the risk of buying smoking bear NFT for God knows why.

As we test our thesis and explore the value of retail investors and developers in the on-chain ecosystem, they are the best group to interview. With feedback from the community, and a long engagement with Papa, Dev, and Homme, Proof of Liquity emerged.

An outstanding system that allows multiple sources of licensed capital to contribute to cybersecurity, while also acting as a source of liquidity, injecting a set of DeFi Legos: a spot AMM, a perpetual futures trading platform, and a stablecoin lending platform.

With the cost of these core "application chain" -type primitives bringing value to the protocol layer, we see the beginning of a flywheel of incentive protocols and validators engaging in network governance and liquidity provision through real incentives.

Dapps can use this liquidity routing environment to direct their own ecosystems and contracts, with Berachain becoming the first chain to provide liquidity to its builders and upending the current status quo of donations and fake eco-funds that dominate. Berachain has the following characteristics:

- Systematically building liquidity;

- Incentive protocols and validators to participate in the chain infrastructure;

- Redefine the cost of bribery;

- Solve the problem of concentration of pledges;

Berachain solves some of the most important problems for DeFi and the blockchain field in general. We have the opportunity to extract assets from each EVM and Cosmos chain to build the deepest and most capital efficient pool available, providing users with the depth and speed of CEX-like capital, as well as the transparency and customizability of CEX on-chain ecology.

I wish I could take credit for half of the ideas and visions mentioned in this article. But I just do henlos and ooga boogas. Berachain's vision grew out of months of iterations, sleepless nights, empty Red Bull cans and whiteboard doodles. Of course, all this is due to Bera's down-to-earth brothers.

Most importantly, the whole team came together because of the community, thousands of crazy mfs creating pastas on Discord, building Dapps even without a test net, the original VC team, the people who played Warzone with Dev, Someone who knows Papa exists!

The only brother crazy enough to string dozens of items into a game, trading VC asked me about it during a bank run, while minting 16,420 NFT. I cherish your quirky characters, the Legion of Bera alts, and the Bera faith that formed.

Finally, thanks to our investors for trusting a chain run by Smoking Bear jpegs, we have a lot of great ideas that are more and more likely to become reality with your help.

Thinking about where we started and where we are now, it all feels a little unreal. I just want to say thank you to the team, our investors, our community, and everyone who has inspired us along the way. The future will get more and more interesting!

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