Exclusive Interview with Berachain Co-founder: The Last Fun Public Chain in the Crypto World, Committed to Carrying Out the "Grassroots Movement" to the End

Interview: Jack, BlockBeats

Translation: Luccy, Ladyfinger, BlockBeats

After the era of "Solunavax Trio" led the Alt L1 wave, the "new public chain" track has become rather dull. On one hand, the improvement of modular infrastructure such as L2 and RaaS has made "chain creation" a relatively simple task. On the other hand, the large and comprehensive new public chains exhibit a high degree of homogeneity from ecological architecture to front-end experience. They churn out a bunch of new terms in their promotional materials, but in reality, even the names are the same: random, random, random.

In the past year, teams and VCs have overly focused on the so-called technological innovations of chains, constantly emphasizing TPS and settlement speed, while neglecting the fundamental issue of product PMF. Under community calls for "anti-VC coins" and "anti-high FDV," the market is no longer willing to pay for these new high-performance public chains, and many large projects have already become ghost chains.

In contrast, Solana and TON, which focus on user activity as a breakthrough, are particularly appealing. People are losing money on pump.fun and cramping their fingers on Telegram. You can see from the price performance of SOL and TON that as long as there is a reason, people will buy even at high prices. Therefore, "VC coins" are not the fundamental reason for the birth and death of new public chains; "technical barriers" are just paper tigers. The key to survival is "having people come to play here," which is also the simplest way to judge the potential of a public chain. Following this logic, when examining the new public chains on the market today, perhaps only Berachain can surpass the passing mark.

Recently, BlockBeats interviewed Berachain co-founder Smokey The Bera to discuss their "hasty" logo design and how they plan to "squander" the $140 million in funding they have secured.

Grassroots Culture + High Valuation = ?

Berachain is a chain that appears to be an outlier from any angle, with an abstract brand name, a casual logo design, and even its consensus mechanism resembling a DeFi game. Yet, this grassroots chain has completed two rounds of funding totaling $140 million at a high valuation over the past year. Before delving deeper into it, Berachain might indeed make you question whether the world is just a big makeshift stage.

However, in reality, Berachain possesses the purest Degen genes. It originated from an NFT project called Bong Bears, which was later co-launched by several DeFi OGs and quickly attracted a number of early DeFi investors. Despite its grassroots culture, Berachain cannot be considered a makeshift project in terms of strength or financial backing.

Interestingly, from Bong Bears NFT to today's Berachain, "liquidity" seems to have been a keyword the team has focused on while building the product. Behind liquidity lies the design of gameplay, games, and yields, and the measurement standard for products is no longer technical level but user profiles and activity levels.

BlockBeats: Before we start, could you briefly introduce your background and why you decided to "transition" from an investor to a project founder?

Smokey the Bera: Most of my career has been spent founding companies or allocating capital for them. Before becoming a venture capitalist, I was already a founder. At that time, I was in healthcare and biotech, which is quite different from the crypto space. But I believe that once you become a founder in one field, it becomes much easier to be a founder in another field, or you become more aware of what it feels like to be a founder. That's why the transition was relatively easy for me to adapt to.

I think being a venture capitalist is a good path in some ways. I learned a lot through trial and error during my first startup, and the results were quite good. Then I thought I could work in the venture capital industry and use it to accumulate a lot of experiences that I might not necessarily learn while focusing on a single product.

Now, I can say that I have gained a lot of insights from my previous experiences as a founder and my venture capital experience, and I have become a founder again, but it wasn't particularly planned. As you mentioned, we initially saw Bong Bears as just a fun NFT experiment, but then things developed beyond our expectations, and at some point, we realized we needed to take this project seriously.

In short, I enjoy exploring new things. The role of a venture capitalist can help me do that to some extent, but I believe that as a founder, you can have a greater impact on certain things. So in many cases, if you want to see some rare opportunities, you have to do it yourself.

BlockBeats: Back to Berachain, even with your institutional background and the project's massive funding, it still gives off a casual and Degen vibe, which is not like a conventional "VC project." Is this atmosphere something you intentionally maintain?

Smokey the Bera: Yes, when we look back at crypto projects over the past few years or those that have actually built real communities and ecosystems, we can see a ripple effect: the initial attraction is certainly some crypto-native users or "on-chain Degens," and then that influence gradually spreads to other users.

For us, given the team's personality and the brand we built around BeraNFT, being overly formal would yield little effect. We haven't tried to present ourselves like Sui or Aptos, even though we have a very qualified team that can compete fiercely with any other organization. But so far, even with a very limited marketing budget, the progress we've made can well prove this point.

From the perspective of community alignment, this is also a suitable choice. As mentioned earlier, Berachain originated from a related Bong Bears NFT project, which is almost impossible to present in a formal way, but conversely, it has become one of the strongest parts of our community. Because this is a very grassroots, very organic concept, people come together because of culture, not because of bots or PUA users completing various tasks, but just a "gathering" of people who believe in this concept and enjoy mutual teasing and socializing, trying to create a colleague-like environment.

BlockBeats: In the current market, people increasingly miss those naturally grown "organic small-cap experiments," which is exactly the atmosphere Berachain conveys to users. But at the same time, you have also raised a lot of VC capital. On one hand, you want to maintain a natural small group atmosphere, while on the other hand, there is a lot of capital and yield farmers waiting for returns. How do you balance this conflict?

Smokey the Bera: I think this is a multifaceted answer. There is a saying now that capital and community cannot coexist, but I think that is actually wrong. Capital can help you grow the community, create asymmetrical opportunities and trades that most groups cannot access, especially now that we see more and more people with considerable capital reserves.

Many low FDV and early grassroots projects are actually at a disadvantage in future communities because they are forced to sell the project's tokens to the public market or OTC platforms. Our view is that we would rather raise VC funding to give us greater leverage in the market to attract the best talent, rather than selling to the community in the future. Every time we see the Ethereum Foundation sell tokens, people say, "The Ethereum Foundation is dumping," and we don't want to do that.

I think another important aspect is that when I explore new ecosystems, whether it's Arbitrum, Optimism, or other new L1s, in most cases, the real wealth creation does not come from staking or governance gas tokens, but often from projects that launch tokens on-chain. Looking back at all the recent L1 or L2 releases, most have done poorly in attracting potential projects that have the opportunity to go from zero to one in their own chain's TGE; they are basically just relatively generic forks of existing products, so people lose interest after playing for a month or two. Look at the Blast ecosystem; Orbit Protocol once had $500 million in TVL, and now its FDV is less than $3 million. When the market is unfavorable for L1 or L2 tokens, people simply do not want these tokens, so they often become very common "Pump & Dump" projects.

If we truly want an ecosystem to thrive and maintain a sense of community, we need early community-driven, highly interconnected projects that genuinely provide opportunities for people. That’s why we focus on building a local ecosystem before launch to avoid the situation where most L1s have nothing interesting to play with in the first 6 to 12 months. On Berachain, we expect to see a series of exciting new projects that will quickly TGE, giving people the chance to experience new things and continue creating wealth effects.

I believe this way we can achieve a win-win situation, having capital that can support the project for a runway of five to ten years while also leveraging various strategic opportunities within the ecosystem. We have an incubator that helps us work with the best teams in the ecosystem to rapidly advance their development from a resource perspective. So far, there are 10 projects, of which 5 have completed the first batch of incubation, and two have received investments from Binance Labs and Polychain. This brings top talent to the ecosystem and sets high standards, which usually takes months or years. So we see this "treasury fund" as a means to truly serve the community rather than extracting value from it.

BlockBeats: Behind Berachain, there are many VC institutions, and there is also an official accelerator within the ecosystem. How do you ensure that there won't be "VC factions" and "princelings" projects within the ecosystem, and how can you cultivate naturally grown "organic" projects?

Smokey the Bera: I want to be honest; our foundation does have an incubation department, but the projects it involves account for less than 5% to 10% of the total projects on Berachain. We prefer to work with teams that we believe are very promising and want to collaborate closely with, especially those with good ideas but lacking marketing resources. We provide them with experience and guidance. I don’t want to mislead everyone into thinking we don’t do incubation, but our incubation approach is different from other teams. We are not just incubating some generic ecosystem foundational projects; we focus on those novel and unprecedented things.

From our communication with the community, a few things are very important to us. First is to show the world that you are excited about the product you are building. For the Berachain ecosystem, having a passionate community or a very active early group makes it easier for developers to notice you and see opportunities here.

We also have some community members whom we have known for a long time. They have witnessed the project's continuous development and at some point felt the urge to build products themselves. So, when you can have such community leaders, it is very important to transition from merely posting to becoming builders.

Secondly, I believe it is important to have a supportive culture, where the foundation or lab actively helps these projects.

I see many ecosystems either take a very hands-off approach, believing that as long as the infrastructure is built, applications will follow; or they just throw a lot of money at people. I think both approaches are wrong. A large influx of funds will only attract developers who cannot find capital themselves in the short term, while a completely hands-off approach will not make any teams working in your ecosystem feel supported.

I believe the best thing the foundation can do is to show that you have done a lot of work for the ecosystem projects and invested a lot of beneficial time, including collaborating with these teams on market strategies, token economics strategies, or anything else to ensure they have the best experience possible, truly becoming an extension of their teams in an unofficial way.

The key here is to be their advisor, assisting in problem-solving rather than doing everything for them. Our role is to guide them down the right path. It’s like the Chinese proverb "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." This is a simple and straightforward metaphor, yet it aptly illustrates our philosophy.

BlockBeats: In other words, Berachain has prepared for developers in terms of liquidity, community, and project growth. Liquidity helps you cold start, the community helps you find users, and the incubator acts as your mentor. In short, developers, you are welcome here.

Smokey the Bera: I completely agree. The key is to demonstrate our presence and our willingness to invest time and effort. In this scenario, the team is the client, and our task is to ensure they feel genuinely supported and integrated into a carefully curated, non-toxic ecosystem. This is not an environment filled with negativity and mutual belittling, but one that is fun, friendly, and encouraging.

We have a developer chat group with about 400 members developing different products on-chain. Although there is a lot of copy-pasting and joking in the group chat, I actually enjoy this atmosphere because it aligns very well with the image of our ecosystem. When new teams join, they announce their building plans and inquire about potential partners and what others are developing. Such interactions naturally foster some very cool collaboration opportunities even before going live on-chain.

BlockBeats: How do you create a practical project? It seems that many projects with tokens lack revenue-generating capabilities, while those that can self-generate revenue do not consider issuing tokens.

Smokey the Bera: That's true; often, issuing tokens has become the "final act" of a project's life. I have always believed that the best projects can achieve widespread adoption without tokens and then use tokens to further drive that adoption.

Of course, this is easier said than done. To reach such a state, you need to provide an excellent product or offer a unique service. You will only see a high level of adoption when users have no other options for what you provide; otherwise, users will just try various ways to acquire more of your tokens.

Regarding how to build a good project, I think the key lies in innovation, not for the sake of innovation itself, but also requires excellent communication, deep consideration of user experience, and product thinking. A particularly bad tendency in the crypto industry is to build castles in the air around high-tech or jargon that people cannot truly understand, ultimately leading to technologies that have little practical use, even though they may seem cool from a theoretical perspective. If you approach the problem from a more product-centered perspective, you will go further.

Taking Berachain as an example, the question I ponder the most is: how do we ensure that we effectively educate people on what Proof of Liquidity (POL) is and how it differs from the applications we have seen before? Of course, it is technically powerful, but we want the system to feel like a familiar tool to users while providing them with some unprecedented new features. This is what many excellent projects do; they offer users the opportunity to do new things that have clear demand but are implemented in a way that is not unfamiliar or intimidating.

For example, token launchpads are common, while Pump.fun adds elements of joint curves, which are familiar to people and not intimidating. On the other hand, recently popular projects like Expomets on BeraChain encourage users to leverage long and short trades on low-market-cap meme coins and altcoins. In the most obvious case of product-market fit in cryptocurrency, leveraged trading of junk coins is definitely one of them. Therefore, it is crucial to build products that genuinely fit the user base; many people just stay at the theoretical construction stage without realizing that what they might be building is something no one really needs.

BlockBeats: Based on this methodology, is creating an "on-chain casino" or "leverage market" the best choice for entrepreneurs?

Smokey the Bera: I don't think that's the best choice. More accurately, it is a project that strikes a certain balance between product and market demand. But the key still lies in the distribution strategy, which is a challenge in the crypto space, as few teams can excel in distribution.

Experimenting Big

Compared to most new public chains, Berachain is genuinely playing with its consensus mechanism. Berachain's POL (Proof of Liquidity) uses three tokens: BERA, the governance token BGT, and the stablecoin HONEY. BERA serves as the native token for paying gas fees and block rewards, BGT is a non-transferable governance token that allows holders to participate in the decision-making process for block reward distribution, while HONEY is the native stablecoin minted by users through staking.

Users deposit assets into the ecosystem to receive BERA and use HONEY to form LPs, providing initial liquidity for the protocol to earn BGT emissions. In addition to earning BGT through LP staking, projects that enter the ecosystem whitelist also qualify for BGT. Staking BGT not only allows users to earn a share of network fee revenues but also influences the quantity and direction of BGT emissions, such as allocating more to project A and less to project B.

To obtain more BGT, projects must engage in various "bribery" tactics for BGT stakers, and as participants transition from a liquidity pool to a project, the bribery tactics naturally increase. In other words, Berachain has turned itself into a large Curve.

BlockBeats: So for Berachain, its biggest advantage is having substantial funds from the start to provide initial liquidity for the entire ecosystem. The key is to have a gamified mechanism that encourages these funds to flow and circulate among various projects and user groups.

Smokey the Bera: Yes, many of the best ecosystems can establish a walled garden. That is, you want an ecosystem where people can maximize their capital without needing to leave to obtain specific services.

For Berachain, this will be the first chain that allows you to "have your cake and eat it too." You can participate in LPs and engage in social and governance activities across various applications like DeFi, NFT, and GameFi, and then earn whitelist spots or votes to have specific projects selected as part of POL (Proof of Liquidity), qualifying them for native earnings from the chain. This means you can earn governance tokens from projects while also gaining additional native staking rewards on Berachain, and your influence over network incentive distribution also multiplies.

So we hope to minimize people's opportunity costs and have an ecosystem that can effectively attract external capital while also being somewhat self-contained, preventing large-scale capital outflows that would undermine the ecosystem's stability and its ability to build more complex products.

BlockBeats: Blast may have encountered such a situation, where most users immediately chose to withdraw their funds after the airdrop distribution.

Smokey the Bera: Exactly. I believe the role of incentive mechanisms is very important in the entire ecosystem, as well as the stability of the community. If a community is too utilitarian or designed too intricately, it is challenging to achieve lasting effects, which to some extent reflects the current situation.

On the other hand, you can look at those ecosystems that have withstood the test of time; most maintain very meaningful interactive mechanisms with the community, bringing them together through their unique culture or methods. For example, Solana has done an excellent job in this regard. Another more peculiar case is the Tron ecosystem. No one talks about or considers Tron, but there is a lot of capital there, with the issuance of USDT, and once people enter, they do not leave. I think this is also an interesting thought model.

BlockBeats: Back to Berachain's POL consensus mechanism. It somewhat reproduces the concept of "protocol-owned liquidity" proposed by OHM, meaning that the protocol or ecosystem has the autonomy to allocate liquidity. At the same time, it also adopts a "bribery" mechanism similar to Curve in its implementation, giving an impression of gamification. In this cycle, everyone generally looks down upon or no longer pays attention to "DeFi experiments," especially after the recent liquidation incident involving Curve's founder. But you chose to further amplify this experiment and elevate it to the level of a public chain. Why?

Smokey the Bera: I think there are a few different nuances here. On one hand, it can be seen as a DeFi ecosystem; on the other hand, you can simply view it as a liquidity mechanism. I believe that all projects in the crypto space will rely on liquidity to some extent, whether it is providing liquidity pools for their tokens in DEXs or launching the use of the protocol itself; all projects will ultimately operate with the support of some DeFi-related technology.

Many GameFi projects essentially have fee and reward accumulation mechanisms. Projects like Fantasy Top and Pump.fun have fully DeFi-driven bonding curves behind them. In fact, the areas generating the most usage and revenue in DeFi or the entire cryptocurrency space are still DeFi projects, even if this is not very obvious right now; people just do not discuss it as openly as before. But if you look at Ethena, Jito, Pendle, and Pump.fund, they are all DeFi projects.

I believe that while DeFi is an obvious and clear first choice for proving liquidity, it can actually be extended to any other field. It can support gaming projects and social projects and can be used for anything involving value exchange and liquidity. Therefore, it is actually a very flexible tool for the future. DeFi has a very clear initial use case, but we are seeing more and more "exotic" things being driven by it.

In reality, Berachain's mechanism is not close to the model of protocol-owned liquidity; it does help to kickstart the protocol's liquidity, but it is more like liquidity that is directly guided by validators or LPs. Because ultimately, it works in such a way that each validator has a series of threshold settings (Gauge), and users choose to delegate to validators based on their ideas for distributing block rewards.

Thus, users are essentially encouraged to collaborate with some validators, who will allocate these block rewards to the liquidity pools they provide whenever they win a block, thereby increasing their own rewards. These pools will also have certain "bribery incentives," and users hope to win these incentives through validators.

But I think Curve has been very successful in many ways, so if you really want to understand the fundamentals, you can think of Berachain as "Curve-ified at the chain level," because you can actually quickly and directly allocate incentives not just to a specific DEX pool but to any protocol on the chain.

BlockBeats: If we consider Berachain as the "public chain version" of the Curve experiment, what are the differences in mechanisms compared to Curve?

Smokey the Bera: The biggest difference lies in the logic of the validator protocol. In Curve, you can earn CRV emissions through farming and LP mining, and you generally need to choose to lock them for a period to obtain veCRV, with the duration and amount locked affecting the mining yield of CRV.

However, Berachain does not have such a mechanism. Each validator has its own threshold settings (Gauge) for generating rewards or yields, and whenever a validator wins a block, they can choose to allocate emissions of the native token BGT, for example, sending 50% of the rewards to Pool A, 25% to Application B, and 25% to Application C. The generation of APY and incentive weights in the entire system is derived from the weighted average of the delegated weights of the validators' BGT tokens. If one validator is delegated 1000 BGT while another is only delegated 100 BGT, even if both have the same reward distribution settings of 50% to Pool A and 50% to Pool B, the former will still receive more rewards from both pools because its weight is higher.

Another interesting aspect is that we do overlap with projects like Convex. Protocols can directly collaborate with validators to cold start their own liquidity, which is somewhat similar to the past Curve War, but the rewards come from the emissions of an L1 public chain, and unlike relying solely on locking and holding veTokens, BGT is a token that can earn fees from the public chain network and create burning pressure.

So on one hand, you actually hold an asset that can accumulate value over time and are incentivized to hold this asset. Validators can choose to collaborate directly with protocols; for example, a validator might approach a project team and say, "Hey, give me your X token, and in exchange, I will directly allocate my Y emissions to your pool or protocol." This is a good way to provide validators with diversified income streams, and the process is similar to attempting to venture capital into an early protocol, which incurs almost no cost for the validators.

On the other hand, this mechanism can also serve as an incentive distribution tool for ecosystem protocols, as users generally delegate to specific validators supporting the protocols they like or wish to receive incentives from. You could say, "Hey, I want to delegate my BGT to this validator because they have incentives on the X protocol, and I happen to want exposure to the X protocol." I believe this level of choice or game theory is higher than what I see in the Curve ecosystem, and it is also controlled by different trading pairs, allowing validators to set rule weights, which significantly increases the complexity of this equation across different dimensions.

BlockBeats: In past DeFi experiments, everyone had to deal with the issue of token sell pressure, leading to the emergence of ve(3,3) and other veToken models. How does BeraChain plan to address the issue of BGT emissions?

Smokey the Bera: I think the most important point is that we are not trying to rely on a locking mechanism to solve this problem. I understand the value of locking and its rationale; logically, it makes sense, but I also believe that in many cases, it only leads to more unhealthy accumulation of demand for tokens and makes these sell events more intense than in other situations.

Therefore, we have actually avoided various veToken models. In Berachain, you can easily unbind or undelegate from a validator; we do not have a 21-day exit period like Cosmos, but rather a queue like ETH. If you want to have a good token, you must build a good project. This is not a particularly novel insight, but many people try to bypass the process of building a good project by making their tokens scarcer, which is not the real answer.

I believe you must find a good scenario or method to make your token useful and effectively build an ecosystem around it. In the case of Berachain, that is exactly what we are doing.

Users obtain BGT from on-chain native emissions, and BGT is soulbound and non-transferable, meaning it cannot be sold on the public market. At this point, you face two choices: one is to delegate these BGT to a validator, using it to achieve compound returns, including obtaining incentives from new protocols, earning network fees, and effectively participating in on-chain incentive distribution and governance. The second option is to choose to burn it and receive BERA tokens, using the liquidity and ecological value of BERA tokens for speculation.

Berachain embeds the choice of how users use their tokens into the underlying L1 chain. You can choose long-termism and accumulate a large amount of BGT to gain substantial incentives, becoming a group that influences the direction of ecosystem incentive distribution. Alternatively, you can choose to gain a large amount of liquidity immediately and then use it to form LPs elsewhere on the chain. This freedom of choice is actually very healthy for allowing people to explore the ecosystem in their own way.

Currently, many people overlook the design of token demand when designing projects, while our goal is to ensure that the existence of the token has practical uses. In most cases, trying to delay and evade token sell pressure through complex locking mechanisms or other means often leads people to seek other ways to circumvent these restrictions, such as through strange OTC markets or derivatives markets, and these practices often do not yield good results.

Questions at the End

On June 13, Berachain's testnet V2 was launched, introducing BeaconKit and increasing the number of validators to over 200. This upgrade also made Berachain the first L1 project to achieve "EVM Identical." In fact, the Berachain team is not lacking in technical strength; they have found that in the crypto space, promoting technical superiority to C-end users has almost never succeeded.

BlockBeats: Let's briefly discuss technical issues. Berachain V2 introduces the new concept of "EVM Identical." How does it differ from "EVM Compatible"? At the terminal level, who will clearly feel this difference?

Smokey the Bera: The main difference lies in the developer experience. Although many chains claim to be EVM-compatible, they often are not entirely consistent, which can lead to developers encountering obstacles when migrating applications from the mainnet to other ecosystems. Typically, they need to maintain a branch of Geth or a similar library and make adjustments for specific consensus mechanisms.

As far as we know, Berachain is the first L1 chain to build a fully EVM identical environment. This means you can run execution clients like Reth, Nethermind, Aragon, and Geth without any issues, as they provide the same execution environment as Ethereum. This way, any new EIP can be easily integrated, and the compatibility for expansion remains entirely the same. If developers want to build L2 on their chain, they can do so in exactly the same way as they would on Ethereum, which is often difficult to achieve in other L1 ecosystems.

Objectively, this also alleviates a lot of our workload. When it comes to maintaining a large research team or engineering team, we believe that any contributions to the ETH mainnet benefit us to some extent when comparing actual forks with this environment. From the perspective of developer tools, this is a significant advantage for building extensive infrastructure, L2, and scaling. Overall, I think this is a very reliable tool that provides us with strong support.

BlockBeats: Many ZK Rollups that were highly regarded last year now seem to be facing some difficulties. Has Berachain learned any "pitfall avoidance" lessons from these projects?

Smokey the Bera: No, we haven't really seen the value in them. While they are viewed as a cool attempt in the geek circle, we find that especially during product development, developers encounter more problems than solutions. As a developer, the resistance is enormous because there are always many voices competing for your attention, making you choose between chain A or chain B for development. If you encounter many obstacles while exploring a new chain ecosystem, it is often easier to give up and say, "I don't want to develop here" than to solve these problems. Therefore, our goal is to minimize the barriers developers might encounter, ensuring they can smoothly enter and use our ecosystem.

BlockBeats: If Berachain achieves great success in the future, both established and new players may try to imitate your mechanisms. What will Berachain do then?

Smokey the Bera: I believe that technology itself is not the competitive advantage of a project. We do strongly support the idea of open-source software, even though every codebase may hide some unknown details. But ultimately, technology is not the core factor determining a project's success or failure. It is a basic threshold; if the technical performance does not meet standards, users will naturally not adopt it. What truly matters is the combination of technical performance and distribution strategy, which helps build the community and ecosystem.

I am confident that if someone claims their project is an "enhanced version of Berachain" or forks and replicates Berachain, there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, I believe such competition and imitation are beneficial. Just like Uniswap and Velodrome have been forked on different blockchains, these forks often add value to their original projects. I look forward to Berachain generating similar positive impacts, and even if multiple forks emerge, we remain optimistic about it.

I believe that simple technological replication cannot replicate the soul of an ecosystem, including its community culture and values. While this may sound idealistic, I think it has a real basis.

BlockBeats: One last question: if Berachain grows significantly in enterprise-level applications in the future, will you consider changing the current "grassroots brand" name and logo?

Smokey the Bera: We recognize that different people have different use case needs. As I mentioned, we are building and expanding the company, and many members have rich professional backgrounds in traditional fields, so we are very comfortable in professional business environments. Many of our team members' identities are public; for example, Adam, who is responsible for corporate development, previously handled popular startup projects at Amazon Web Services, managing thousands of top accounts, and later worked at Third Web in business development. Such backgrounds allow us to showcase our past achievements and professional image while working at Berachain.

Our supporters include traditional institutions and individuals like GoldenTree and Stephen Tannenbaum, as well as co-lead investors like Rrevan Howard Digital, who come from more traditional fields. Although the project may remain anonymous, there is strong corporate support behind it. In the future, we plan to further develop this direction, although we cannot disclose too much at the moment.

Brands are mutable, but enterprises care more about our performance—whether we are good enough to build things from scratch. As the project enters the later execution stages, people pay less attention to the brand and more to the actual results we can deliver.

We also see the BeraChain brand adjusting in different contexts. For example, an L2 built on BeraChain recently completed a significant funding round, and the team has extensive experience in the gaming field, which will help bring tens of millions of users into the ecosystem. We can showcase different aspects of Berachain to people through such branches based on different use case needs, such as consumer, gaming, etc. We are committed to keeping the brand true to its roots while striving to make more content and information accessible to ordinary users as the project progresses, regardless of whether they are familiar with cryptocurrency or blockchain technology.