Despite not having launched its mainnet, Berachain has raked in more than $1.7 billion in deposit vaults as investors seek rewards for helping bootstrap protocol liquidity.
The pre-launch deposit vaults, which opened in collaboration with Berachain, allow users to deposit Wrapped Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other supported assets via protocols like StakeStone or Lombard Finance in order to gain early access to Berachain—a hotly anticipated layer-1 blockchain network.
Deposits are currently split across 12 different protocols, all of which are offering users access to Berachain before its next big step, Boyco—described as “a pre-launch liquidity platform designed to help Berachain’s application layer turn momentum into early growth.”
B is for Billion. pic.twitter.com/8bQISuq58M
— Berachain 🐻⛓ (@berachain) January 8, 2025
In other words, users will be able to deposit funds to help protocols on the nascent blockchain with early liquidity, aiming to make them more successful from day one.
Users participating with the available pre-launch vaults are getting a head start on Boyco, and ultimately a headstart on rewards in the Berachain ecosystem.
“Aside from being just a good means of getting the community involved early, these vaults are a simpler way of stacking rewards prior to Boyco’s launch, with a one-click UX across a few different verticals,” wrote Berachain’s pseudonymous Berachain team member, Knower Bera
All apparently in demand, the rewards vary based on the vaults that users are depositing into or protocols they are interacting with. For example, those depositing with Lombard Finance are receiving stacked rewards from Berachain, Lombard, Babylon, Concrete, Kodiak, and Dolomite—projects that aim to play a significant role in the Berachain ecosystem upon launch.
Similarly stacked rewards are available to depositors in the StakeStone vaults, which hold more than $450 million according to a Dune dashboard built by Berachain community The Honey Jar.
Only EtherFi has attracted more money than StakeStone to date, holding nearly $480 million in pre-launch deposit vaults at the time of writing.
With a cumulative total value locked of more than $1.7 billion at present time, Berachain’s pre-launch vaults alone would make it the 10th largest blockchain by TVL according to data from DefiLlama, surpassing blockchains like Avalanche and Aptos in the process.
Exact details on rewards and tokenomics are still unknown, but Berachain has set aside more than 1% of its token supply for Boyco, its pre-launch liquidity platform.
Though the timeline for Berachain’s mainnet launch has not been formally disclosed, pseudonymous project lead Smokey the Bera indicated that it would come just weeks after the Boyco launch.
Berachain is built around a novel consensus mechanism called proof-of-liquidity. The project recently announced $100 million in funding to further build out its Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible blockchain.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
