Interview: Jack, BlockBeats

Translation: Lucy, Ladyfinger, BlockBeats

After the end of the Alt L1 era led by the "Solunavax Three Musketeers", the "new public chain" track has become boring. On the one hand, the improvement of modular infrastructure such as L2 and RaaS has made "chain building" a relatively simple thing. On the other hand, large and comprehensive new public chains are highly homogenized from ecological architecture to front-end experience. There are a lot of new words in the promotional materials, but in fact, even the names are the same, just, just, just.

In the past year, both the team and VC have paid too much attention to the so-called technological innovation of the chain, emphasizing TPS and settlement speed all day long, but ignoring the basic problem of product PMF. Under the community's calls for "anti-VC coins" and "anti-high FDV", the market is no longer willing to pay for these new ecological high-performance public chains, and many large projects have become ghost chains.

In contrast, Solana and TON, which use user activity as a breakthrough, are particularly popular. People are losing money in pump.fun and clicking on Telegram until their pinkies cramp. You can see from the price performance of SOL and TON that as long as there is a reason, people will pay for it no matter how expensive it is. Therefore, "VC coins" are not the fundamental reason for the birth and death of new public chains. "Technical thresholds" are all paper tigers. "Someone comes to play with you" is the key to survival, which is also the simplest way to judge the potential of public chains. According to this logic, if we examine the new public chains on the market today, Berachain may be the only one that can pass the passing line.

Recently, BlockBeats interviewed Smokey The Bera, co-founder of Berachain, and talked about their "sloppy" LOGO design and how they plan to "squander" the $140 million in financing.

Grassroots culture + super high valuation =?

Berachain is a chain that is different from any angle, with a slightly abstract brand name, a slacking LOGO design, and even the consensus mechanism has become a DeFi game. But it is such a grassroots chain that has completed two rounds of financing of $140 million in the past year at a super high valuation. Before you have a deep understanding of it, Berachain may really make you doubt that the world is a big grass-roots team.

However, in fact, Berachain has the purest Degen gene. It originated from a rebase NFT project called Bong Bears, which was then jointly launched by several DeFi OGs and quickly attracted a number of early DeFi investors to join. Although it focuses on grassroots culture, Berachain cannot be a grass-roots project in terms of strength or financial resources.

Interestingly, from Bong Bears NFT to today's Berachain, "liquidity" seems to have always been the keyword that the team revolves around when building products. Behind liquidity is the design of gameplay, gaming, and revenue. The product's measurement standard is no longer the technical level, but the user portrait and activity level.

BlockBeats: Before we start, please briefly introduce your background. Why did you decide to "transform" from an investor to a project founder? Smokey the Bera: I’ve spent most of my career either starting companies or allocating capital to them, and I was actually a founder before I became a VC. I was in healthcare and biotech, which is very different from crypto. But I think once you’ve been a founder in one space, it’s a lot easier to be a founder in another space, or you have a better understanding of what it’s like to be a founder. That’s why the transition was easier for me. I think VC was a great path in some ways. I learned a lot through trial and error when I first started, which worked out well, and then I thought I could work in VC and use that to gain a lot of experience that I wouldn’t necessarily have learned if I was focusing on a single product. And now, I can say that I’ve gained a lot of information from my previous experience as a founder and VC, and ended up being 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 that we needed to take this project seriously.

In short, I like to explore new things, and the role of a venture capitalist can help me do this to a certain extent, but I think as a founder you can have a greater impact on some things. So in many cases, if you want to see some rare opportunities, you have to do it yourself.

BlockBeats: Let's talk about Berachain. Even with your institutional background and the huge financing of the project itself, it still gives people a casual and Degen feeling, not like a regular "VC project". Do you deliberately maintain this atmosphere?

Smokey the Bera: Yes, when we look back at crypto projects over the past few years or projects that have actually been able to build real communities and ecosystems, we can see a ripple effect: you must initially attract some crypto-native users or "on-chain Degen", and then this influence will gradually spread to other users.

For us, being too formal will not work well in terms of team personality and the brand we have built around BeraNFT. We are not trying to present ourselves as Sui or Aptos, even though we have a very qualified team and can compete fiercely with any other organization. But the progress we have made so far even with a very limited marketing budget speaks well to this.

It is also a suitable choice from a community alignment perspective. As mentioned before, Berachain originated from a related Bong Bears NFT project, which is almost impossible to present in a formal way, but in turn has become one of the strongest parts of our community. Because it’s a very grassroots, very organic concept, people come together because of culture, not with bots or PUAs to complete various tasks, just a “gathering” of people who believe in this concept and enjoy bantering and socializing with each other, and try to create a co-worker-like environment.

BlockBeats: In the current market, people are increasingly missing those “organic small-cap experiments” that grow naturally, and this is exactly the atmosphere that Berachain conveys to users. But at the same time, you have also raised a lot of VC capital. On the one hand, you want to maintain a natural small group atmosphere, and on the other hand, there is a lot of capital and furry parties waiting for returns. How do you balance this conflict?

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

Many low FDV and early grassroots projects are at a greater disadvantage in the future community because they are forced to sell the project's tokens to the open market or OTC platforms. Our view is that we would rather raise VC funds to give us greater leverage in the market and attract the best talent than sell to the community in the future. Every time people see the Ethereum Foundation selling tokens, they say "The Ethereum Foundation is selling on its own", 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 is not the gas tokens for staking or governance, but often the projects that launch tokens on the chain. Looking back at all the recent L1 or L2 launches, most of them did a poor job of attracting potential projects that have the opportunity to go from zero to one to TGE on their own chains. They are basically relatively generic forks of existing products, so people play for a month or two and then lose interest. Looking at the Blast ecosystem, Orbit Protocol once had a TVL of $500 million, and now the FDV is less than $3 million. When the market is not favorable for L1 or L2 tokens, people simply don't want these tokens, so they often become very common "Pump & Dump" projects.

If we really want an ecosystem to thrive and maintain a sense of community, there needs to be early community-driven, highly connected projects that really provide opportunities for people. That’s why we’re focusing on building the 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 slew of exciting new projects that will TGE quickly, giving people the opportunity to experience new things and continue to create wealth effects.

I think this way we can achieve the best of both worlds, with capital that can support projects to maintain runway for more than five to ten years, while also being able to take advantage of various strategic opportunities in the ecosystem. We have an incubator that helps us work with the best teams in the ecosystem and quickly advance their development from a resource perspective. There are 10 projects so far, 5 of which have completed the first batch of incubation, and two of them have received investment from Binance Labs and Polychain. This brings top talent to the ecosystem and sets the bar high, which usually takes months or years. So we see this "treasury funds" as a means to truly serve the community, rather than extract value from it.

BlockBeats: Berachain has many VC institutions behind it, and there is also an official accelerator within the ecosystem. How do you ensure that there will be no "VC party" and "princeling" projects in the ecosystem, and secondly, be able to cultivate "organic" projects that grow naturally?

Smokey the Bera: I want to be honest and say that our foundation does have an incubation department, but the projects it involves are less than 5% to 10% of the total number of projects on Berachain. We prefer to work with teams that we think are very promising and want to work closely with, especially those first-time entrepreneurs who have good ideas but lack the resources to market. We will provide them with experience and guidance. I don't want to mislead people by saying that we don't do incubation, but our incubation method is different from other teams. We are not just incubating some general ecosystem-based projects, but focusing on things that are new and unprecedented.

From our interactions with the community, there are a few things that are very important to us. The 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 think there is an opportunity here.

We also have some community members who we have known for a long time, who have seen the project continue to grow and at some point had the urge to build products themselves. So when you can have such community leaders, it is very important to go from just posting and being a trader to being a builder.

The second thing I think is to have a culture of help, that is, the foundation or lab is to help these projects hands-on.

I see a lot of ecosystems either taking a very hands-off attitude, thinking that if you build the infrastructure, the applications will follow; or just throwing a lot of money at people. I think both approaches are wrong. Investing a lot of money will only attract developers who can't find capital on their own in the short term, and letting go completely will not make any team working in your ecosystem feel supported.

I think the best thing a foundation can do is to show that you have done a lot of work and invested a lot of useful time in the ecosystem projects, which includes working with these teams on market strategy, token economics strategy, or anything else to ensure that they have the best experience possible, and truly become an extension of their team in an unofficial way.

The key here is to be their advisor and help solve problems instead of doing everything for them. Our role is to guide them to the right path. This is like the old Chinese saying "Teach a man to fish": teaching a person to fish is more valuable than giving him a fish. It's a simple and straightforward metaphor, but it can aptly illustrate our philosophy.

BlockBeats: In other words, Berachain is well 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 is your mentor. In short, you are the right developer.

Smokey the Bera: I totally agree. The key is to show our presence and our willingness to invest time and energy. In this scenario, the team is the customer, and our task is to ensure that they feel truly supported and integrated into a carefully curated, non-toxic ecosystem. This is not an environment full of negativity and mutual devaluation, but an atmosphere full of fun, friendliness, and encouragement.

We have a developer chat group with about 400 members working on different products on the chain. Although there is a lot of copy-paste and jokes in the group chat, I actually like this atmosphere because it fits the image of our ecosystem very well. When new teams join, they announce their construction plans, ask about potential partners and projects that others are working on. Such interactions naturally lead to some very cool cooperation opportunities before the chain is launched.

BlockBeats: How to make a practical project? It seems that the part of the projects with tokens has no revenue ability, and the projects that can generate blood on their own do not consider issuing tokens.

Smokey the Bera: This is true. Many times, issuing tokens has become the "last act" of the project's life. I have always believed that the best projects can achieve widespread adoption without tokens, and then use tokens to further promote this adoption.

Of course, this is easier said than done. To get to that point, you need to have a superior product, or a service that is unique. You will only see high adoption if users don’t have the option you offer elsewhere, otherwise users will just try all sorts of ways to get more of your tokens.

As for how to build a good project, I think the key is innovation, not for its own sake, but also great 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 don’t really understand, and ultimately these technologies don’t have much practical use, even though they look cool in theory. If you look at the problem from a more product-centric perspective, you will go further.

For Berachain, the question I think about the most is: how do we make sure we effectively educate people to understand what Proof of Liquidity (POL) is, and how it is different from the applications we have seen before. Of course, it is very powerful on a technical level, but we want the system to feel like a familiar tool to users, while giving them some new features that they haven’t seen before. This is what a lot of great projects do, they give users the opportunity to do new things that there is a clear need for, but do it in a way that isn't strange and isn't scary.

For example, token launch pads often have, and Pump.fun adds the element of bonding curves to the mix, which is familiar and not intimidating. On the other hand, projects that have been gaining traction recently are like Expomets on BeraChain, which encourages users to do leveraged long and short trading on low-cap meme coins and altcoins. Leveraged trading of shitcoins is definitely one of the most obvious examples of product-market fit in crypto. So, building products that really fit your user base is critical, and there are a lot of people who are just theoretically building things without realizing that they might be building something that no one actually needs.

BlockBeats: Based on this methodology, is it the best choice for entrepreneurs to create an "on-chain casino" or "leveraged market"?

Smokey the Bera: I don't think it's the best choice. To be more precise, it is a project that has achieved a certain balance between product and market demand. But the key lies in the distribution strategy, which is a challenge in the crypto field, and few teams can achieve excellent distribution.

To do experiments, you have to do them big

Compared with most new public chains, Berachain has really played with the consensus mechanism. Berachain's POL liquidity proof uses three tokens, namely BERA, governance token BGT and stablecoin HONEY. BERA is used as a native token to pay for Gas and block rewards. BGT is a governance token that cannot be transferred. Holders can participate in the decision-making process of block reward distribution, while HONEY is a native stablecoin minted by users through mortgage.

After users deposit their assets into the ecosystem, they will receive BERA, and use HONEY to pledge with them to form an LP to provide initial liquidity for the protocol, thereby obtaining BGT emissions. In addition to obtaining BGT through LP pledge, projects that enter the ecosystem whitelist are also eligible to obtain BGT. Staking BGT can not only obtain network fee income distribution, but also have an impact on the amount and direction of BGT emissions, such as giving more points to project A and less points to project B.

Berachain ecological logic diagram, compiled by: @0xSleepinRain

In order to obtain more BGT, the project must "bribe" BGT pledgers in various ways, and when the participants change from a liquidity pool to a project, the bribery methods naturally increase. In other words, Berachain has turned itself into a large Curve.

BlockBeats: So for Berachain, its biggest advantage is that it has a large amount of funds from the beginning to provide startup liquidity for the entire ecosystem. The key is to have a gamification mechanism to encourage these funds to flow and circulate among various projects and user groups.

Smokey the Bera: Yeah, a lot of the best ecosystems are able to build a kind of walled garden. That is, you want to have an ecosystem that allows people to maximize their capital without having to leave to get specific services elsewhere.

For Berachain, this will be the first chain where you can have your cake and eat it too. You can participate in LPs and do social and governance activities in multiple different applications like DeFi, NFTs, GameFi, and then get whitelisted or vote for specific projects to be selected as part of POL (Proof of Liquidity), making them eligible to get native returns from the chain, which means that you can get the native staking returns on Berachain while getting the project governance tokens, and you also multiply your influence on the network incentive allocation.

So we want to minimize people's opportunity costs and have an ecosystem that can effectively attract external funds, but also be self-contained to a certain extent, so that there is no large-scale capital outflow, which leads to a lack of stability in the ecosystem and the ability to build more complex products.

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

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

On the other hand, if you look at the ecosystems that have stood the test of time, most of them have maintained extremely meaningful interaction mechanisms with the community and brought the community together through their own unique culture or methods. For example, Solana has done a great job in this regard. Another more unique case is the Tron ecosystem. No one talks about or thinks about Tron, but there is a lot of capital there, there is USDT issuance, and once people are in, they will not leave. I think this is also an interesting mental model.

BlockBeats: Back to Berachain's POL consensus mechanism. To some extent, it reproduces the concept of "protocol owns liquidity" proposed by OHM, that is, the protocol or ecosystem has the autonomy to allocate liquidity. At the same time, it also uses a "vote bribery" mechanism similar to Curve in its specific implementation, giving the outside world a sense of gamification. In this cycle, everyone is generally not optimistic about or no longer pays attention to the "DeFi experiment", especially after Curve's founder liquidation incident some time ago. But you chose to further amplify this experiment and raise it to the level of a public chain. Why?

Smokey the Bera: I think there are a couple different nuances here. On one hand, you can think of it as the DeFi ecosystem, and on the other hand, you can simply think of it as a liquidity mechanism. I think all projects in crypto are going to rely on liquidity to some degree, whether it's providing liquidity pools for their tokens in a DEX or launching usage of the protocol itself, all projects will ultimately operate on the back of some kind of DeFi-related technology.

A lot of GameFi projects will basically have fee and reward accumulation mechanisms. Projects like Fantasy Top and Pump.fun will have bonding curves behind them that are completely DeFi-driven. Really, the area that generates the most usage and revenue within DeFi or the entire crypto space is still DeFi projects, even if that's not very obvious now, it's just not discussed as publicly as it used to be, but if you look at Ethena, Jito, Pendle, and Pump.fund, they are all DeFi projects.

I think that while DeFi is an obvious, very clear first choice in proving liquidity, it can actually be expanded to any other area. It can be used to support gaming projects and social projects, it can be used to do anything that involves value exchange and liquidity. So it's actually a very flexible tool for the future. DeFi has a very clear initial use case, but we're seeing more and more more "exotic" things starting to be driven by it.

Actually Berachain's mechanism is not close to the model of the protocol having liquidity, it does help to start the liquidity of the protocol, but it's more like liquidity that is directly directed by the validator or LP. Because ultimately the way it works is that each validator has a series of threshold settings (Gauges) and users choose to delegate to validators based on their ideas about how to distribute block rewards.

So users are basically encouraged to work with some validators who will distribute those block rewards to their own pools that provide liquidity every time they win a block, thereby increasing their own rewards. There will also be certain "bribe incentives" in these pools, and users hope to win these incentives through validators.

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

BlockBeats: If Berachain is considered as a "public chain extension" of the Curve experiment, how is it different from Curve at the mechanism level?

Smokey the Bera: The biggest difference is the logic of the validator protocol. In Curve, you can earn CRV emissions through farming and LP mining, and then generally need to choose to lock it for a period of time to obtain veCRV, and the length and amount of lock-up will affect the mining yield of CRV.

But Berachain does not have such a mechanism. Each validator has its own threshold settings (Gauge) for the way your rewards or income are generated. Every time a validator wins a block, he can choose the emission of Berachain's native token BGT, such as sending 50% of the reward to pool A, 25% to application B, and 25% to application C. The way APY and incentive weights are generated throughout the system is by taking the weighted average of the validator's BGT token delegation weights, so if one validator is delegated 1,000 BGT and another is only delegated 100 BGT, even if both are set to 50% to Pool A and 50% to Pool B, the former will still receive more rewards from both pools because it has a higher weight.

Another interesting level is that we do have some overlap with projects like Convex. Protocols can work directly with validators to cold-start their own liquidity, which is a bit like Curve War in the past, but the rewards come from the emissions of an L1 public chain, and unlike veTokens that are only locked and held, BGT is a token that can earn fees from the operation of the public chain network and generate destruction pressure.

So on the one hand, you actually hold an asset that can accumulate value over time and are incentivized to hold it. Validators can choose to work directly with protocols, for example, validators can go to project teams and say, "Hey, you give me your X tokens, and in exchange, I will allocate my Y emissions directly to your pool or protocol." This is a great way to diversify income channels for validators, and the process is similar to trying to make a venture capital investment in an early protocol, and this process is almost cost-free for the validator.

On the other hand, this mechanism can also be used as an incentive distribution tool for ecological protocols, because users generally delegate to specific validators that support the protocol based on the protocol they like or want to get incentives for. You can say "Hey, I want to delegate my BGT to this validator because he has incentives on X protocol and just wants to get investment exposure to X protocol." I think this level of choice or game is a little higher than what I see in the Curve ecosystem, and it is also controlled by different trading pairs, and validators are able to set rule weights, which actually greatly increases the complexity of different levels of this equation.

BlockBeats：In past DeFi experiments, everyone had to deal with the problem of token selling pressure, and ve(3,3) and other veToken models were born. How will BeraChain solve the BGT emission problem?

Smokey the Bera：I think the most important point is that we don't actually try to rely on the lock-up mechanism to solve this problem. I understand the value of lock-ups and understand its rationality. It is logically reasonable, but I also think that in many cases, this will only lead to more unhealthy backlogs of demand for tokens and make these selling events more intense than otherwise.

So, we actually try to avoid various veToken models. In Berachain, you can unbind or cancel the delegation from a validator very easily. We don't have a 21-day exit period like Cosmos, but a queue like ETH. If you want to have a good token, you have to build a good project. This isn’t a particularly novel insight, but a lot of people try to get around building good projects by making their tokens more scarce, which isn’t really the answer.

I think you have to find a good use case or way to make your token useful and effectively build an ecosystem around it. In Berachain’s case, that’s what we did.

Users get BGT from the on-chain native emission, and BGT is soul-bound, non-transferable, and cannot be sold on the open market. At this point you have two choices, one is to delegate these BGT to a validator and use it to help you realize compound interest, including getting incentives from new protocols, getting network fees, and effectively playing a role in on-chain incentive allocation and governance. The other is that you can choose to burn it and get BERA tokens, and speculate on the liquidity and ecological value of BERA tokens.

Berachain embeds the user's token usage option into the underlying layer of the L1 chain. You can choose long-termism and accumulate a lot of BGT so that you can get a lot of incentives and become a group that influences the direction of incentive allocation in the ecosystem. Or you can choose to get a lot of liquidity immediately and use it to form LPs and put them somewhere else on the chain. This freedom of choice is actually very healthy for people to explore the ecosystem in their own way.

Currently, many people ignore the design of token requirements when designing projects, and our goal is to ensure that the existence of tokens has practical uses. In most cases, attempts to delay and evade token selling pressure through complex lock-up mechanisms or other means often lead people to find other ways to circumvent these restrictions, such as through strange over-the-counter OTC markets or derivatives markets, which often do not have good results.

Ask at the end

On June 13, the Berachain testnet V2 was launched, introducing BeaconKit and increasing the number of validators to more than 200. This upgrade also made Berachain the first L1 project to achieve "EVM consistency" (EVM Identical). In fact, the Berachain team is not without technical strength, but they found that in the currency circle, selling by promoting the superiority of technology to C-end users has almost never succeeded.

BlockBeats: Let's talk about technical issues. Berachain V2 introduced the new concept of "EVM consistency" (EVM Identical). What is the difference between it and "EVM compatibility"? At the terminal, who will clearly feel the difference between them?

Smokey the Bera: The main difference is the developer experience. Although many chains claim to be EVM compatible, they are often not completely consistent, which can cause developers to encounter obstacles when migrating applications from the mainnet to other ecosystems. Usually, they need to maintain a fork of Geth or similar libraries and adjust them for specific consensus mechanisms.

As far as we know, Berachain is the first L1 chain to build a fully EVM consistent environment. This means that you can run execution clients such as Reth, Nethermind, Aragon, Geth, etc. without any problems because they provide the exact same execution environment as Ethereum. This allows any new EIPs to be easily integrated and the extension compatibility is exactly the same. If developers want to build L2 on their chain, they can do it in the exact same way as on Ethereum, which is often difficult to achieve in other L1 ecosystems.

Objectively speaking, this also reduces a lot of workload for us, in terms of maintaining a large research team or research engineering team, and when it comes to the comparison between actual forks and this environment, we think that any contribution to the ETH mainnet benefits us in some way. From a developer tooling perspective, this is a huge boon for building broad infrastructure, L2, and scaling. Overall, I think this is a very solid tool that provides us with strong support.

BlockBeats: Many of the ZK Rollups that were extremely promising last year seem to be in some trouble now? Has Berachain learned any "pitfall avoidance experience" from these projects?

Smokey the Bera: No, we don't really see the value in it. They are seen as a cool experiment in the geek circle, but in actual communication, we find that developers, especially, encounter more problems than solutions in the process of developing products. As a developer, the resistance is huge because there are always many voices vying for your attention, asking you to choose chain A or chain B to develop. If you encounter many obstacles when 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 obstacles that developers may encounter and ensure that they can smoothly enter and use our ecosystem.

BlockBeats: If Berachain becomes a huge success in the future, other old or new players may imitate your mechanism. What will Berachain do at this time?

Smokey the Bera: I don't think technology itself is a project's competitive advantage. We are indeed very supportive of the idea of open source software, even though every codebase may hide some unknown details. But at the end of the day, technology is not the core factor that determines the success of a project. It is a basic threshold, and if the technical performance is not up to standard, users will naturally not adopt it. What really matters is the combination of technical performance and distribution strategy, which helps build a community and ecosystem.

I am sure that if someone claims that their project is "an enhanced version of Berachain" or imitates Berachain to fork and copy, there is nothing wrong with it. In fact, I think such competition and imitation are beneficial. Just like Uniswap and Velodrome were also forked on different blockchains, these forks often add value to their original projects. I expect Berachain to have a similar positive impact, and we are still optimistic even if there are multiple forks.

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

BlockBeats: Last question, if Berachain becomes bigger in enterprise applications in the future, will you consider changing the current "grassroots brand" name and logo image?

Smokey the Bera: We recognize that different people have different use case needs. As I said, we are building and scaling the company, and many members have rich professional backgrounds in traditional fields, so we are very comfortable in a professional business environment. The identities of many of our team members are public, such as Adam, who is responsible for corporate development. He has been responsible for popular startup projects for Amazon Web Services, handled thousands of top accounts, and later was responsible for business development at Third Web. This background allows us to showcase our past achievements and professional image while working on Berachain.

Our backers include traditional institutions and individuals such as GoldenTree and Stephen Tannenbaum, as well as co-lead investors such as 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 reveal too much at present.

Brands are changeable, but companies are more concerned about our performance - whether we are good enough to build things from scratch. As projects enter the late execution stage, people pay less attention to the brand and more attention to the actual results we can provide.

We also see the adjustment of BeraChain brand in different scenarios. For example, an L2 built on BeraChain recently completed a major round of financing. The team has rich experience in the gaming field and will help tens of millions of users enter the ecosystem. Through such branches, we can show people different faces of Berachain according to different use case needs, such as consumers, games, etc. We are committed to keeping the brand true to its roots, and as the project progresses we will work to make more content and information more accessible to the average user, whether or not they are familiar with cryptocurrency or blockchain technology.