By Mahe, Foresight News
Original title: Cryptocurrency price crash, layoffs, developer exodus: Is Berachain a dead public chain every day?
On January 14th, BERA experienced a brief surge, jumping from $0.5 to $0.9, a rare occurrence given its previous 12-week losing streak. That same day, the Berachain Foundation released its 2025 year-end summary, emphasizing ecosystem expansion, technological optimization, and community engagement following the mainnet launch, while also acknowledging the pressures brought about by market volatility.
Since the launch of the Berachain mainnet, both its TVL (total value) and token price have experienced significant fluctuations. This may not be solely due to market cycles, but rather a result of a combination of internal strategies and external pressures.
TVL dropped from 3 billion to 180 million, while the chain's 24-hour revenue was $84.
In February 2025, Berachain officially launched mainnet, introducing an innovative Proof-of-Live (PoL) consensus mechanism. This mechanism aims to incentivize application and user participation through Proof of Liquidity, rather than the traditional Proof of Stake. This makes Berachain a Layer 1 chain specifically designed for DeFi applications, aiming to improve capital efficiency and user adoption. In its early stages, the ecosystem expanded rapidly, attracting hundreds of dApps, including DEXs such as BEX, lending protocols, and NFT marketplaces.
TVL surged to $3.3 billion, with over 140,000 active addresses and 9.59 million transactions. The foundation also supported multiple ecosystem projects through RFA (Request for Application) and RFC (Request for Comment) procedures, and partnered with institutions like BitGo to provide custody services, enhancing the professionalism of the projects. Furthermore, Berachain's community building and marketing strategies performed exceptionally well in its early stages. Bear-themed NFT series (such as Bong Bears) attracted a large user base, and airdrops and incentive programs further stimulated engagement. These initiatives helped Berachain become a hot topic in the DeFi space in the first half of 2025, ranking as the sixth largest DeFi chain.
However, as the price of the coin continued to decline, according to DefiLlama data, its TVL has fallen to $180 million, its 24-hour on-chain revenue is $84, and its total on-chain stablecoin supply is $153.5 million.
Retail investors prioritized? Most tokens belong to venture capitalists, with a large unlock expected in February.
In its year-end update, the Berachain Foundation acknowledged that the "retail-first" strategy in the crypto market had been largely ineffective, leading to a reallocation of resources. This directly triggered a series of problems. First, layoffs and team changes. As part of a strategic shift, the Berachain Foundation cut most of its retail marketing team, focusing instead on foundational development. Berachain's lead developer, Alberto, will also be leaving to co-found a Web2 company with former banking colleagues.
The foundation emphasized that the departures were amicable, but they undoubtedly weakened the project's core technical capabilities. Within the community, some developers have moved to other chains such as Monad, further exacerbating the talent drain.
Perhaps the "retail-first" strategy promoted by the Berachain Foundation was never actually implemented.
The project initially emphasized community-driven development, but in practice, the incentive mechanism failed to attract users in a sustained manner, and token distribution left retail investors out in the cold.
While the PoL mechanism is innovative, its complexity (such as multi-token models, including BERA and BGT) deterred users, leading to a sharp decline in network activity. In November 2025, the project suspended its network due to a vulnerability in the Balancer protocol, fortunately without affecting the safety of user funds.
The price of BERA has fallen from a high of $9 to $0.7 today. In just one year, the token of the once-reigning king of public blockchains has fallen by more than 10 times.
This collapse stemmed from a model characterized by low circulation and high FDV (Funds-to-Vend) inflation, leading to a rapid price crash after artificial inflation. The root of these problems lies in Berachain's token distribution mechanism. Early contributors received 16.82% of the total supply, while private investors received a staggering 34.31%, making it a typical VC (Venture Capital) token. Furthermore, NFT holders received tens of millions of dollars worth of tokens, while testnet users only received a $60 airdrop, sparking controversy over "wealth inequality" and marginalizing some loyal users.
This contradicts the "retail-first" slogan; the project is essentially a VC-driven, low-circulation, high-FDV model: early investors entered at $0.82 and reaped 10-15 times returns, while retail investors suffered the collapse. Foundation founder Smokey admitted that if he could do it again, he wouldn't sell so many tokens to VCs and has already bought back some to reduce dilution. In October 2025, the Berachain Foundation partnered with Greenlane Holdings to launch BeraStrategy, using BERA as a reserve asset, but this failed to reverse the token price decline.
Furthermore, VCs such as Brevan Howard's Nova Fund hold refund rights and can demand a full refund of $25 million by February 2026, further highlighting Berachain's preference for VCs.
Community discontent is high, with many users calling it "the ultimate fraud, L1".
On February 6th of this year, Berachain will unlock 63.75 million BERA, representing approximately 12.16% of the total supply. Of this unlocked amount, 28.58 million BERA will go to private investors. Starting in March, the monthly unlocked amount of BERA will be 2.53% of the total supply. Given the current liquidity crunch, this year's continued large-scale unlocking may trigger significant selling pressure.
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