Standing with Ethereum EVM instead of Cosmos, Berachain's "turnaround" remarks spark controversy
Berachain is one of the highly valued public chains currently in high demand in the market, but recently its co-founder Smokey faced criticism from the community for distancing himself from Cosmos.Author: Nancy, PANews
Berachain is one of the highly valued public chains currently trending in the market, but recently its co-founder Smokey faced community backlash for distancing itself from Cosmos.
Due to massive funding and a strong investment lineup, Berachain has garnered significant market interaction enthusiasm. In April 2023, Berachain announced it secured $42 million in funding from Polychain Capital, OKX Ventures, Hack VC, Dao5, Tribe Capital, former Dragonfly Capital partners, and Celestia founder Mustafa Al-Bassam. In March of this year, it became a unicorn with a valuation of $1.5 billion after receiving $69 million in Series B funding from Brevan Howard Digital and Framework Ventures, with reports later revealing its funding amount increased to $100 million.
Although Berachain is expected to launch its mainnet in the second quarter of this year, it has already launched the public testnet Artio. According to statistics from @0x_Umeshu reported, there are over 90 projects in the Berachain ecosystem, covering Restaking, Gaming, NFT, and DeFi.
Despite many users reporting that the Berachain testnet is very laggy and the faucet often fails to dispense "water," participation remains high. According to data from the Artio testnet browser, as of May 10, Berachain has recorded over 1.678 million transactions, with a total address count reaching 17.7 million, and the current number of daily active addresses is 902,000. Meanwhile, Berachain's popularity has also boosted related NFTs, including Baby Bears, Bong Bears, Boo Bears, and Bond Bears. According to Dune data, as of May 10, these NFTs have a market value exceeding $100 million.
Amidst the market's enthusiasm, Berachain, built on the Cosmos SDK, has sparked controversy by "drawing a line" with Cosmos. The issue began with a tweet.
On May 8, former Messari product lead @QwQiao tweeted, "After in-depth research on the meta-concepts of chain abstraction and application chains, I officially became a loyal fan of Cosmos. Chain abstraction: IBC may be one of the best bridges currently, providing a cheap, fast, and secure settlement method without needing to understand its underlying technology; regarding application chains: seeing projects like dYdX and Hyperliquid choose Cosmos over Ethereum has greatly changed my perspective. Somehow, despite the visions of Cosmos and Ethereum converging, Cosmos is still lagging behind Ethereum to some extent. Perhaps Cosmos lacks a spiritual leader like Vitalik (co-founder of Ethereum) and a more outspoken technical evangelist like Mert (CEO of Helius). In another parallel universe, if Vitalik had not been influenced by Bitcoin extremists and had not created Ethereum in 2014, Cosmos might have prevailed."
Smokey commented on the tweet, stating, "Cosmos fundamentally does not understand GTM (Go-To-Market), and while this analysis is logically sound, it is unrealistic at present."
In response to comments stating "Berachain is a blockchain running on Cosmos SDK," he replied that Bera v2 is more like Ethereum than Cosmos (including its staking mechanism), and that Cosmos needs a new community or brand rebranding. Berachain will not position itself as a Cosmos chain.
This statement immediately caused an uproar in the Cosmos community. Some expressed, "It's fine not to airdrop to the Cosmos community or not to like Cosmos, but this behavior of wanting to ride on Cosmos's popularity while mocking it is hypocritical, especially since the early technology was forked from Cosmos." Others believed, "Ultimately, it's because Cosmos has failed to develop, and Berachain emphasizing itself as EVM rather than a Cosmos chain may also be to inflate its valuation."
In response, Smokey clarified that they have never denied that Berachain is using the Cosmos SDK, but that does not mean it must be called a Cosmos chain. Berachain is closer to Ethereum than Cosmos, which will be reflected in the upcoming release of Polaris (a modular EVM framework) new version. In fact, from the perspective of developer adoption, brand recognition, and overall image, being labeled as a Cosmos chain has harmed Berachain in various aspects such as talent recruitment, venture capital, and development experience. The Cosmos SDK is an important part of Berachain's tech stack, which, despite some drawbacks, has great potential. He believes that Cosmos as a whole will gain greater benefits by helping to achieve good technology behind the scenes rather than being the main character.
Additionally, Smokey emphasized that Cosmos is not the main reason Berachain is gaining attention; its ecosystem, community building, and our Proof of Liquidity mechanism are what truly matter.
"Berachain is developed using Cosmos's CometBFT + Cosmos open-source EVM compatible framework Polaris EVM. The founders' aversion to the Cosmos chain label and the heated debate around it is partly due to the objective existence of crypto gang culture; as former OHM team members, they do not want to offend the Ethereum community. On the other hand, Berachain's POL consensus mechanism needs to draw from the Ethereum ecosystem, and if it raises the Ethereum community's vigilance and aversion like Celestia, it will only halve the effort." This controversy was explained by researcher @@0xNing0x.
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