Berachain

All right, we're live. Thank you so much, everyone, for your patience. We had just a slight delay, and thank you for bearing with us. Wink, wink. Sorry for the pun. Anyways, welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. So, if you're new here, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast for builders to showcase something they're passionate about or have been working on in Web3. This could be an awesome project you've been working on, demonstrating new testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, open-source projects, etc. Basically, if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share it with the community. And today, I am ecstatic to have Devon Bear, also known as Dev Bear on Twitter, who is part of the Berachain team and will be giving us an overview of Berachain, which is on the heels of just launching its testnet yesterday. And it was quite the launch. Congratulations, Devon, and welcome to the show.

Oh, thank you for having me on, Narb. I appreciate it, as always. I know we were looking at doing this back in July or June or something crazy.

Yeah, yes. I believe last time you were on, you were with Josh Stein, who was doing some Celestia stuff, but at the same time, you were also doing some Berachain stuff there as well. So, yeah, it's great to have you on and to actually see what all the goodies are behind Berachain. But before we get into that, perhaps you'd like to give a brief introduction about yourself if some folks didn't tune into the last DevNTell when you were on.

Yeah, absolutely. So, a little about myself. Dev Bear, Devon Bear, whichever developer the bear I have in the office, I have literally eight names, so I have to remember them all and people will just say things and I'll be like, 'Is that me, maybe, question mark?' But a little background on myself technically. I was a distributed systems engineer at Apple, that's where the bulk of my professional experience came from. I worked on like low-level P2P stuff, so when I got into crypto, it was kind of like, 'Oh, this is all like super familiar.' Kind of, yeah, started Berachain with my co-founder Smokey and Papa about almost two years ago now, which is kind of crazy. And we've just been kind of doing a lot of cool stuff since, and it's been super exciting to finally see all of that hard work pay off and be able to share it with you guys.

Yeah, and it looked like an astounding amount of work that went into it, just looking at the revamped website, 'Up Only,' very clever, we have to scroll up on the website too.

I'll share my screen. Yeah, for sure. So, this is the revamped page. I'm sure you guys have seen that really blank one for a very long time, so it's good that we were finally able to update that one, which is nice. We also have some links on the front page to all the different dApps and stuff, so if you want to try out any of the native dApps, if you want to check out the block explorer, the faucet, anything, it's all here, which is awesome. We've got links to the docs. For DevNTell, we've got the Polaris repo on there as well. And then we also have a list of quests. Right now we have Galxe enabled, and basically, it's like a set of to-dos and just kind of a quest that you go on in order to kind of explore the Berachain ecosystem and it takes you through a bunch of that stuff. So, it's been super exciting, and yeah, we have a ton of different dApps, and they all have full frontends and integrations and stuff there, as well as the block explorer, which we've been working with the guys over at RouteScan to get onboarded, and it's been good and doing well there, so yeah.

Excellent. I guess before we get into some of the nitty-gritty of what you launched yesterday, perhaps for our audience who isn't familiar, could you give a brief rundown of what Berachain is, why you guys built it, and just some high-level stuff for the audience?

Yeah, absolutely. So, Berachain is an EVM-compatible L1 built on the Cosmos SDK. So, what we did is we took the base Cosmos SDK and then we built our own EVM framework that integrates full EVM compatibility with it. That is, as many people in the dev community know, Polaris, which we can—I think that takes us to the docs, but the GitHub is a little better. So, this is Polaris, our EVM framework, so you can plug EVM compatibility into any Cosmos blockchain, which is super exciting. But the meat of Berachain isn't Polaris, but is the Proof-of-Liquidity system. The idea behind Proof-of-Liquidity is we align security and liquidity. So, validators are responsible for basically maintaining liquidity, and the chain itself is secured by liquidity incentives through the form of BGT. BGT is this non-purchasable token, non-transferable, non-purchasable, and it basically represents like a unit of governance or consensus power. The only way to get BGT is through providing liquidity. So, that allowed us to basically make the value that is securing the network a unit of liquidity, and by so you get the actual chain secured by liquidity. And the motivation for this was that we noticed through kind of the L1 cycle of 2021 and 2022 that a lot of these L1s didn't really have like a sustainable tokenomics model. You would just stake a bunch of their token, and with slashing these days really just being—if you're staking with an honest node, it's really just if they didn't configure something right or there's an outage. It was pretty much just, ironically, 'Up Only.' You just, if you denominate your thing in L1 token here, you just get more L1 token at an 8% rate or whatever. And the way you can think about it is you can think about it as the inflation that you're getting for staking is really just an anti-dilutionary method for your network ownership. Like if 100% of the tokens are staked and the inflation is 10%, you just keep whatever percentage you had. If you had 5% staked, you just have 5% network ownership. What Proof-of-Liquidity does, and the main novelty of Proof-of-Liquidity, is it decouples that. So now we have it so that network ownership is a function of how much liquidity you've provided over time. So if I have 5% of network ownership today but I'm providing zero liquidity, over time my 5% will get diluted to zero. Conversely, if I come to Berachain with no BGT and I start providing 5% of the liquidity, as time goes to infinity, I end up with 5% of network ownership. So we've been able to correlate network ownership over time with the actual liquidity that's provided, and that's the big novelty there.

Gotcha. And I suppose is there any special use cases you see Berachain kind of providing for, or is it like another general-purpose blockchain that can do all the things?

It's kind of both. We have like a variety of dApps that are built into the chain and revolve around our native stablecoin Honey. So we have a way to borrow Honey, a way to kind of trade Honey, we have a DEX, we have a PSM model that's built-in, but really the idea is that we've built these core dApps as a way to facilitate kind of the beginning of the ecosystem and be able to have dApps build into the chain. The other thing is if you pass a governance vote, we have full on-chain governance that's supplied via the governance modules in Cosmos, you could actually have it to where your protocol is earning BGT as a part of like being in this system. Or if your protocol is delegating liquidity, there's lots of options there, and we really see Berachain in this kind of core economic system that's built around Proof-of-Liquidity to be a way to like kickstart protocols building on the chain so that they don't necessarily have to bootstrap liquidity as hard. They can use it to attract users, they can use it to run a validator, they can use that validator to direct emissions to liquidity pools that they care about, and the validators really play a big role in this whole system, and the thing that the system does is it allows protocols building to really eventually end up being validators and work with validators in order to route these BGT emissions around. And that's really the cool thing is when you deploy an app on Berachain, you're not just deploying an app on Berachain, you can deploy an app that really is integrated with Berachain at the base layer and in a non-trivial sense. And that is kind of the big selling point to a lot of these protocols is they really feel like they're, you know, not just building on the chain but are really involved in the chain and its validator set and its governance and those type of things. Which is really great from a community aspect as well.

It certainly is. You get all that core functionality out of the box when you deploy on Berachain from what it looks like.

I guess if I were somebody brand new to Berachain, I know there's quite a bit here to unravel, but what would you kind of walk through as like the stepping stones to get going with Berachain?

Yeah, so the first thing I would do is I would probably just go say a user went to berachain.com and walk through like what the new user experience is like here. So what we can actually end up doing is here my MetaMask will load, which it's struggling. I'll have to switch over to the right network because I believe I'm on a testnet at the time. Wow, my computer is struggling. Let's just get a new wallet here, we'll say, 'DevNTell.' Okay, I'm going to have to switch to the right network too but it might do it automatically. Yeah, so we'll get a new wallet here going and give me a second here. So basically what you'd want to do is you'd want to go over to the faucet, that would be kind of the first thing. And the faucet right now, it may work, it may not. We are dealing with a ton of bot traffic right now, so if this doesn't go through, I apologize. We're working with a variety of RPC services and stuff, but it's being hit with a lot of bots right now. So what you'd want to do is you'd want to open your MetaMask, copy your guy in here, and then click and prove that you're not a bot. Then from there, you want to drip some tokens. It may work. Oh, there we go, it worked, and then we got the anti-spam. So it might not go through, we'll see. The office IP address is also getting really jammed. So it might not go through, but if not, we can grab another wallet or just kind of do the walkthrough and kind of go from there. We're getting really hammered right now, but yeah. We'll just walk through the regular pages then.

So then from there, there's lots of different dApps you can play with. So we got like BEX, so BEX is the ability to swap tokens, you can add liquidity here. So you get kind of your faucet tokens, you could do some swaps here. We have a variety of different pools and stuff that you can play around with. You could create a pool, you can do a swap, there's lots of kind of cool stuff you can do here. The other applications we have is we have BEND. So BEND is the way that you can actually borrow Honey, which is super cool. So you can think of it as kind of a way to if I have a bunch of assets and I want to get Honey out, I don't just need to like swap for them, I can like borrow them there. The other thing we've got a couple of other things as well, we got the actual Honey minting dApp as well, which is super awesome. So you're able to take a variety of tokens right now, it's just kind of testnet USDC, but you're able to kind of mint Honey that way. And we also have like a fun arcade mode as well, which people tend to like it.

And Honey, just for clarification, is the stablecoin in the ecosystem if I'm not mistaken? Cool.

Yes, Honey is a stablecoin. So that's why we have like that PSM model, you can also borrow for it, which is super cool there. And then we also have our Berachain Perps platform, which is all backed by basically synthetics and it uses Honey under the hood. So you're basically what's really cool about it is it has really great liquidity because you're basically just trading against yourself, which is really nice. It kind of you can imagine that the synthetic positions are basically like over-collateralized CDPs, and you're basically just trading with yourself, which is really cool because you don't end up with order book issues, you don't end up with situations where like you can't close a position because there's insufficient liquidity or some kind of order book issue. You're really just playing with yourself, which is really nice, and all of the margin and stuff comes from basically users supplying that liquidity in a common DEX pool type thing. So that's really cool there. And yeah, right now we don't have too many pairs right now, but right now we have BTC, ETH, ATOM, and TIA. And what's super cool about this is in the spirit of Berachain being a Cosmos chain, we were able to integrate a lot of cool things. Notably, the one oracle solution that we're using right now in the testnet, we worked in collaboration with the guys over at Skip. So what's really cool is the validators themselves are actually providing these oracle prices and are able to access—in the EVM is able to access them. So it's really nice because the security of the oracle is tied to the security of the chain as well, so we kind of have an oracle that's also secured by liquidity, which is really, really cool.

Interesting. And what is the extent of the capabilities for the oracles? Do they only provide price data, or can you connect external API to them as well to bring off-chain data inside?

Yeah, so they're fully generalizable. Right now we're just using it for pricing data, but the benefit to being an oracle is as long as it is something that we can come to consensus on in some regard, it works, right? So you could add anything. Let's say we wanted to create an oracle for 'is it sunny today in Orlando?' As long as the validators are able to submit a value where like maybe for something like that where it's just binary is it sunny or not, the validators have to submit yes it's sunny or no it's not sunny. As long as we can do some sort of vote aggregation like yes/no is really easy, right? You just say do we have 67% that say yes? Okay, it's yes. That's like a kind of a trivial example, but you could do lots and lots of things. People think of oracles, especially in blockchain generally, as pricing data, but really oracles in blockchain are, as you said Narb, bringing off-chain data to on-chain, and as long as it's something we can run a vote on, it's doable.

Nice, nice. We do have a couple of questions from the crowd. Just want to get these in just in case we miss them.

So, 'wantstocomment' commented: 'How will bridges work? Does the governance token get burned on outflows? Will bridge protocols end up governing the chain?'

That's a really interesting question. Right now bridging is we're working with a few solutions, we're kind of in the last phases there. But basically, like if you wanted to like bridge your—you're saying like bridge your governance token, like or any token. Like if I wanted to move like BGT, is that kind of what the question is?

That's how I understand. 'wantstocomment,' please, you can comment further to verify, but let's assume the governance token only.

Yeah, so the governance token you wouldn't be able to bridge, unless someone were to make you like a synthetic or something, but the governance token in its natural form is non-transferable and you can't purchase it. So you wouldn't be able to bridge it.

Gotcha, gotcha. Great question there. Next question is: 'Does Berachain connect to Celestia nodes?'

As of now, you know, I think we do a lot of work with Celestia, we know the guys over there very well, we're very close to them. Right now in its sense, Berachain is truly an L1. So Berachain is an L1 that's secured by liquidity and that's the type of security that is the goal of it. That being said, I think there's a lot of interesting things that can happen when it comes to data availability in general and I think we're definitely exploring things with Celestia to figure out things that work. Love the guys over there. But yeah, we are secured by liquidity for now, that's where our security comes from.

Gotcha. And 'wantstocomment' clarified: 'he meant any token, not just governance.'

So, yeah, bridging is something that we have bridging partners for that we're going to be working with, as well as we're also exploring how we can integrate IBC. We get this question a lot, so I think I can just bring it up now. We want to make sure that when we enable IBC that it's something that is—the DevUX is there. IBC with EVM chains has its difficulties, and we want to make sure that when we get there, the DevUX is solid and the security is there.

Beauty. And Ahmet asks: 'What is Honeylist?'

I unfortunately have to skip that question, but yeah.

I see. But I guess a stay tuned kind of thing. Honeylist is a solid meme from the Discord.

Gotcha. I suppose going through all of this, the really cool stuff that you guys released yesterday, I'm sure it was quite an experience just going through that. You mentioning you being a distributed systems engineer at Apple and starting Berachain, I guess maybe do you want to speak to what your experiences were like doing that transition and just if there are any like hopeful people in the crowd that are looking to do the same thing, maybe start their own company or startup?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing that allowed me to succeed in that regard was I genuinely enjoyed what I am doing, right? Like when I started getting into playing around with Geth and Cosmos and these things, it was something that it was like it was fun, right? Like I would come home after work and like be excited to play around with these codebases and do things, and I think that's a big part of how even Berachain to some extent is where it is today is the people that not only myself, but the people that are helping build this all really genuinely enjoy blockchain and it's something they were passionate about. Speaking on myself, it's working on these systems, blockchain and getting into the space really helped me like respark my love for software engineering. I found working in a big corporate company—did it help me get my skills to a base ground level? Yes, absolutely. Did I learn a lot about how working in a corporate environment works and you know how these big professional companies run? Absolutely. But I really think that it really resparked my love for software engineering in general and computer science and all those things, and I think finding that passion was kind of it, I would say. So I think even if it's not in crypto, even if your passion is not in crypto and you work at a FAANG company now or a mid-size company or whatever, I think kind of the general thing is that in order for you to have—be successful, not only the company be successful, but your own personal goals and stuff to be—to feel accomplished is finding something that you're passionate about, finding a way to take that passion into something that has product-market fit or can be marketed to users or whatever it is, and just double down on learning how to build that and then building it.

Yeah, that's an awesome way to kind of tell the story there. And I would just add that if you're on the fence, just start. Just like build something and get it out there and just like see what the reaction is from people. Even if there is no reaction, just the fact that you started already puts you ahead of so many other people who are afraid to start. But yeah, that's great to hear there.

There are a couple more questions that the crowd is asking, so we can continue to entertain those. 'Is there a method to acquire test tokens for running the validator node on the Artio testnet? We will be excited to provide our own RPC as well' from 'deNodes'.

Yes, so in terms of running a validator, our devrel team will be communicating more things in the next little while with respect to that. In terms of acquiring testnet tokens to actually like interact with the chain, so Bera, you can use that faucet link. It's artio.faucet.berachain.com. There's a lot of rate limits on it right now, it's getting hit really heavy by bots, the engineering team is literally above my head right now working on solving that. And if there's any issues there, please just be patient with us. But if you try—if you try a few times, you will eventually get through. In terms of validators and getting the tokens required to run a validator, BGT, we will communicate that in the next kind of 24 to 48 hours.

Excellent. Awesome. And the next question—I kind of forgot to touch on myself, being a Canadian myself—'Is the majority of the team working in-person in Toronto or are you remote/hybrid?'

Yeah, so a lot of our team is globally distributed, so kind of all over the place. Engineering, a lot of it is in Toronto at the moment. But yeah, that's kind of where we're at. Having a business team globally distributed has been a really powerful advantage for us, being able to have them in the ground, on places and at conferences, those type of things, has been a non-starter for us. On the other side, though, having a lot of the engineering team in one place has been really strong and allows us, especially yesterday, being able to make sure that the communication is there, making sure that when problems arrive, you can get the person who needs to fix it immediately, has been really strong there.

Excellent, excellent. And I said Canadian, not comedian, if my Canadian was jumbled there. Anyways, I guess on this point on the engineering team and the distributed business team, are you guys hiring? And then are there any particular roles that you're looking for? We are Developer DAO after all, and there are a lot of really great up-and-coming devs and product folks and more in the space. Is there a way that people—or is there a particular skill set that you're looking for or looking to hire?

Yeah, always looking for more engineers. We have a careers.berachain.com. Absolutely submit a resume, we'd love to take a look at anyone's resume who's interested. In terms of roles on the engineering side, I can speak of, we're still looking for more core protocol devs, still looking for anyone with like strong infrastructure experience. Those are kind of the two biggest things we're hiring for now, just really trying to build out a more robust team, a deeper team as we get closer and closer to our mainnet. That's the big thing.

Excellent. Yeah, folks, if you're interested, Berachain is—it's got a lot going on, so you definitely want to check them out. I guess coming up on time here, just so folks are able to kind of get support if they start playing around with the testnet and deploying smart contracts, what's the best way for them to kind of get in touch with the Berachain community? Is there a Discord? Should they interact on Twitter? What would you recommend?

Yeah, hop into the Discord for sure, Twitter's good, I'd say those are the two biggest things.

Excellent. And we have the Twitter link in the YouTube description, we'll also work on getting the Discord link added there as well for everybody's convenience. And with that, I want to thank you so much, Devon, for coming on. Really appreciate you taking the time in this, what is a hectic time I'm sure at the Berachain side of things. But yeah, really looking forward to continuing to see the Berachain ecosystem grow and yeah, thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Narb. Appreciate you having me on. Cheers, everyone.

My pleasure. And before everybody leaves, I want to share the QR code for you to scan to claim your NFT for being an attendee here on DevNTell today. So what you'll want to do is grab your regular QR code scanner, scan this code, and you'll have an hour and a half from now to be able to claim your NFT, which will be airdropped to you within the next couple of days. And with that, I just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend, and we'll catch you all back here next week for another DevNTell. All right. Cheers, gang.