Why did the public chain Berachain secure $42 million in funding? The founder shares the development history

Author: Smokey the Bera, Co-founder of Berachain

Compiled by: Leo, BlockBeats

Yesterday, Layer 1 public chain Berachain announced the completion of a $42 million funding round, with co-founder Smokey the Bera writing an article about "The Development of Berachain So Far," compiled by BlockBeats as follows:

About a year and a half ago, Papa and I joked about making a smoking bear NFT. 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 combines liquidity and security.

It has been a rushed journey and just the beginning for Berachain. First, let’s hear a sentimental history lesson from Smokey the Bera.

Papa (his NFT team) and I started investing in crypto in 2015. We began trading coins in 2017 and 2018, playing around with all the shitcoins, and then came the summer of DeFi. We witnessed the rise and fall of various chains and ecosystems, spending a lot of time on alt-Layer rotations in 2021 and 2022. A common cycle emerged—chain launch > ecosystem fund > DEX & lending market > TVL pump > emission exhaustion > chain dead.

No matter how decentralized, scalable, or secure these chains are—regardless of finality time or interoperability—if there is no liquidity, that chain will quickly become a "ghost town." Meanwhile, we reached a 7-figure TVL across multiple ecosystems on-chain, with over 100 times the validators, and there’s no doubt the network is secure—but at what cost?

Liquidity is indeed the lifeblood of DeFi, but beyond that, protocol activity is also crucial. When we realized this, Beras was accelerating its development. We inadvertently launched a community of thousands of smart yet level-headed DeFi enthusiasts who dared to take the plunge and buy the smoking bear NFTs, God knows why.

As we validated our arguments and explored the value of retail and developers in the on-chain ecosystem, they became the best interview group. With community feedback and long-term interactions with Papa, Dev, and Homme, Proof of Liquity emerged.

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

As these core "application chain" primitives bring value to the protocol layer, we saw the beginning of a flywheel, incentivizing protocols and validators to participate in network governance and liquidity provision through real incentives.

Dapps can leverage this liquidity routing environment to guide their own ecosystems and contracts, making Berachain the first chain to provide liquidity for its builders, disrupting the current dominance of donations and fake ecosystem funds. Berachain's features include:

• Systematically building liquidity;
• Incentivizing protocols and validators to participate in chain infrastructure;
• Redefining the cost of bribery;
• Addressing the issue of staking centralization;

Berachain addresses some of the most important issues in DeFi and the entire blockchain space. We have the opportunity to extract assets from every EVM and Cosmos chain to build the deepest and most capital-efficient liquidity pools available, providing users with CEX-like capital depth and speed, as well as the transparency and customizability of a CEX on-chain ecosystem.

I really wish I could take credit for half of the ideas and visions mentioned in this article. But I’m just doing henlos and ooga boogas. The vision of Berachain comes from months of iteration by the team, sleepless nights, empty Red Bull cans, and doodles on whiteboards. Of course, all of this is also thanks to the hardworking brothers of Bera.

Most importantly, the entire team came together because of the community, thousands of crazy mfs creating pastas on Discord, even building Dapps without a testnet, the original VC team, and those who played Warzone with Dev, knowing that Papa existed!

The only ones crazy enough to string dozens of projects into one game, during the bank run, trading VC asking me about this while minting 16,420 NFTs. I cherish you quirky characters, the Bera alts legion, and the faith that has formed in Bera.

Finally, thank you to our investors for trusting a chain run by smoking bear jpegs. We have many great ideas, and with your help, these ideas are becoming increasingly likely to come to fruition.

Thinking about where we started and where we are now feels a bit 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 is going to be more exciting!