Berachain looks like another crypto project that's going to take a lot of people to zero. If you're holding this or researching it, I think you'll find this review helpful, because it's an honest look at something that, in my opinion, looks terrible. I don't want anyone to lose money on this. I'm so tired of seeing people get ripped off on these horrible projects, and it only takes me about 10 minutes to show you how bad they are. So let's look at how bad this one is.
Right now this has a $4 billion fully diluted market cap, even though it only launched a couple of weeks ago. In my opinion, in 99.9% of scenarios, people are going to lose their money on this. The fully diluted market cap on it is bigger than Internet Computer, which I believe has the absolute best technology in crypto and massive real-world potential. And there's the opportunity cost to consider: if you put your money in one thing, you can't have it in anything else. To me this looks extremely dangerous and extremely speculative.
Locked tokens and the unlock schedule
Most of the tokens are locked up. My belief is you're going to get dumped on with this project. There are tons of obvious problems with it. Around 78% of the tokens are still locked, and I think it's all but guaranteed that holders are going to get dumped all over. Look at the unlock schedule. It looks like they're still going to have airdrops, and this part is so bad: it looks to me like they're planning to dump all over you, try to time the top of the bull market, and then dump on you after that.
Marketing that says nothing
So you go in and it says, "What makes the blockchain unique? Fundamentally changes how Layer One economics are structured." What does that even mean? Did you understand it? I don't think you did, because there's nothing there to understand. They just wrote a bunch of stuff that sounds impressive while providing no real value. If you didn't know about Internet Computer Protocol, you might think that's all crypto is: people talking a bunch of nonsense with no real value behind it. But that's not all it is. There's technology out there that genuinely changes the way you can build on the internet, and this sucks by comparison.
If you actually look at it, it's a gas and staking token, and then you have to have a separate token for governance. In my view that's a horrible setup. And it's yet another EVM-identical Layer One blockchain. There are so many of these, because it's cheap to create them and, in my opinion, easy to rip people off by creating them. Technical infrastructure? It's "built." Community governance? Is there any?
Who are the founders?
Who are the founders of Berachain? You've got to read this. Seriously, how could anyone read this and still buy in? I don't think anybody who bought this actually read it. "Berachain is founded by a group of individuals." That's trustworthy, isn't it? "Known for their early"... oh my goodness... "early involvement in the decentralized finance sector. The founding team comprises Death Bear." And the rest are bears too. They're trolling you. This is a project supposedly worth billions of dollars that I'm sure has paid people to talk about it. It looks to me like they're cheating the social media metrics and trolling you at the same time. It's as if they're saying: these people are so ignorant they're not even going to look up who the founders are, and if they do, we'll just write something funny.
"Each founder brings a wealth of experience from their time investing in DeFi activities." What's sad is there are probably people who are going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars collectively on this who didn't take the time to look up who the founders are. "With their journey in this innovative financial landscape beginning as early as 2015. Their collective expertise and insights in DeFi instrumental and been shaping"... it's hard to believe this is trending right now on CoinMarketCap. It's trending, but it gets worse.
Just look at their website, berachain.com, and compare it to a real one. It scrolls up, "backed by the best." The same people who are ripping you off on all these other coins are, in my view, invested in this and ripping you off on it too. And the bear theme is funny. The EVM and the bears, it's funny. But is funny what you're looking for when you're investing? Because I'm not looking for funny when I invest my money.
The numbers don't hold up
If you look, this is doing 27 transactions a second, which sucks when you consider the fully diluted market cap is the same as Internet Computer. Compare it: at the same market cap, ICP is doing a thousand transactions a second. So would you rather invest in something doing 20 or 30 transactions a second, or a thousand? I know where I'd rather put my money.
Look at their apps. There's a bunch of junky apps on there, and these aren't apps that, from what I can see, are even built to run on the blockchain. They have tiny little connections to the blockchain and are built mostly on centralized tech. And they have some totally degenerate apps: gambling, betting, DeFi, DAO. To me these are garbage. There's Bear Arena, Bear Poker, Bear Search. I actually clicked on Bear Search. It's extremely sparse. There's hardly anything there. It looks like a cheap Notion site that's listed as one of their projects. I think they're figuring you won't actually look at it. But look how cheap it looks.
Their blog only goes back less than a year. Do you want to invest in a project that's only been around for a year? I don't. I want to invest in something that's proven. I don't even like Bitcoin, but at least it's been around for a while. "Berachain careers: high-performance EVM Layer One blockchain," just like all the other Ethereum copycats looking to challenge traditional proof of stake. Good luck with that.
No team willing to show their face
They're hiring a bunch of growth leads all over the place, and they say they're hiring engineers, but I wish I could find an actual engineer working on the project. Not one person is willing to put their face on it. And honestly, I wouldn't put my face on this if I were working on it either. Would you put your face on something you knew was just ripping people off? That's why there are no team members listed.
Now look at their X account. Every project that's trending follows the same playbook, probably because the same group is organizing all these coins and starting all these little coins for the purpose of ripping people off. As I explained recently in a discussion of Dominic Williams' message to crypto beginners, this is the crypto rip-off template: one million followers, Cayman Islands, joined during the last bear market and the last bull market. They've been sitting there, ready to rip people off. A million followers, blatant social media manipulation, tons of bots all over the place.
You can see they have absolutely terrible engagement on their posts by comparison. I've got less than 10,000 followers; I do a post and get nearly 500 reach in less than an hour. They have a million followers and only get a tiny fraction of that engagement. That's what happens when you use bots to push your account up: the engagement sucks. And you can see all these junk chains jerk each other around. Somebody is creating all these junk coins to drain you financially, and then they have all the projects work together so people stumble across one through another. The Graph sucks too, just as I said in a previous review, and all these dumpster-fire projects work together to rip you off.
The exchanges that are ripping you off keep prices suppressed. Companies like QuickNode that, in my opinion, sell fundamentally useless nodes to support these chains. Pyth Network, which I reviewed before and consider garbage. All these coins work together to rip you off, and not one of them, in my view, has anything fundamentally useful to offer humanity. That's the bottom line. And it looks like they use bots to push certain posts when they want to. They do airdrops to sucker people who feel broke to begin with, and this is where I've seen so many people get ripped off, on airdrop scams. This is so obviously bad. I could go further, but I think that's enough. To me this is an absolute trash chain.
If you want to understand what real value in crypto can look like, and how I think about protecting your money instead of losing it, you can go through my Money playlist. I'd rather you spend ten minutes there than hundreds of millions of dollars collectively on projects like this one.