Berachain Begins $1.1 Billion BERA Airdrop as Mainnet Launches

Berachain launched its “proof-of-liquidity” layer-1 blockchain Thursday while commencing its BERA token airdrop to the community—with the value of the airdrop allotments hitting $1.17 billion at Thursday's peak price.

Trading for BERA is now live on major centralized exchanges including Binance, OKX, and Coinbase. The token briefly surged to a peak of $14.83 after launch, but has fallen approximately 49% to $8.00 at the time of writing.

The network, which spun out of a 2021 Ethereum NFT project, raised more than $100 million to bring its chain and novel consensus mechanism to fruition.

“Feels surreal,” pseudonymous co-founder Smokey the Bera posted on X (formerly Twitter). “Team and I will be in the trenches busting bugs and helping teams get set up to win on Berachain.”

The mainnet launch occurred around 8am ET with airdropped BERA, the network’s native gas token, already in eligible users’ wallets except in instances where use of a bridge or an exchange claim was required.

Because Berachain is “EVM-identical," most popular Ethereum Virtual Machine wallet providers (like MetaMask or Rabby) allow users to easily add Berachain support to start interacting with the network and gain access to their tokens.

Of the 15.75% of the total BERA supply (79 million tokens) set aside for the airdrop, at least 11.15%—or 55.75 million tokens—are directly available to users today, providing more than $800 million to recipients at the peak trading price so far Thursday.

The additional 4.6% of the total supply for the airdrop allocation is reserved for select social media users, teams, and applications that earned a share via the “Request for Broposal,”an incentive program for applications and communities held by the chain.

The final airdrop recipients will be those that deposited to Boyco, the network’s pre-launch liquidity platform. Boyco participants will receive their rewards within 30-90 days, based on the markets they participated in. 

At the peak price so far of $14.83, the BERA airdrop would grant more than $1.1 billion to the community when all parties have claimed.

“Airdrops are all about rewarding the community that helped your project win,” Smokey the Bera posted on Wednesday. 

Beyond the initial airdrop, an additional 65.5 million BERA tokens are set aside for users, developers, and applications as part of the network’s “future community incentives” allocation. A full tokenomics breakdown and eligibility checker were launched by the network on Wednesday. 

BERA is one of three tokens in the Berachain ecosystem, alongside its governance token BGT and HONEY, its native stablecoin.

Edited by Andrew Hayward