Berachain started as a meme, has a strong community cultural consensus, focuses on "liquidity" and "NFT" narratives, and is closely related to the early DeFi project OlympusDAO. Specifically, Berachain is an idea from the NFT project Bong Bears community, supported by OlympusDAO and its investors, and inspired by OlympusDAO's rebasing to produce new collections of Bond Bears, Boo Bears, Baby Bears, Band Bears and Bit Bears.
In terms of team composition, Berachain is composed of 30 anonymous members including Homme Bera, Dev Bear, Papa Bear and Smokey the Bera, as well as Baloo the Bera, the former engineering director of Mysten Labs, who joined Berachain in January this year.
Berachain began financing after the FTX thunderstorm in November 2022, and completed US$42 million in financing at a valuation of US$420 million in April 2023. Polychain Capital led the investment, OKX Ventures, Hack VC, Dao 5, Tribe Capital, Shima Capital, Robot Ventures , Goldentree Asset Management, former partner of Dragonfly Capital, Mustafa Al-Bassam, founder of Celestia, Zaki Manian, co-founder of Tendermint, and 20 other DeFi project founders participated in the investment. At the time of the funding announcement, the Berachain ecosystem had over $250 million in total committed value locked.
In January of this year, Berachain said that there were more than 30 native teams building on Berachain, and more than 100 teams from other networks planned to deploy on testnet and mainnet, including Pendle, Redacted, Sudoswap, Abracadabra, etc. According to BD Umeshu from The Honey Jar community, Berachain had more than 70 ecological projects in January 2024. Recently, Berachain has also partnered with cross-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero and NFT project Pudgy Penguin.
Benefiting from the strong community cultural consensus, Berachain, which is in the Artio test network stage, is also extremely popular. The faucet once dropped from 1 BERA to 0.1 BERA. Problems such as network congestion, queuing, slow payment, and low allocation have all troubled users. Berachain will be launched on the mainnet in the second quarter. Before that, participating in the testnet and ecological interaction is the only way.
