Author: Nancy, PANews
Berachain is one of the most popular and highly valued public chains in the market, but its co-founder Smokey was recently criticized by the community for distancing himself from Cosmos.
Due to the huge amount of financing and strong investment lineup, Berachain has won high market enthusiasm. In April 2023, Berachain announced that it had received $42 million in financing from Polychain Capital, OKX Ventures, Hack VC, Dao5, Tribe Capital, Dragonfly Capital's former partner and Celestia founder Mustafa Al-Bassam, etc., and then in March this year, it received a $69 million Series B financing investment from Brevan Howard Digital and Framework Ventures with a valuation of $1.5 billion, becoming a unicorn, and it was later revealed that its financing amount increased to $100 million.
Although Berachain is expected to launch its mainnet in the second quarter of this year, it has already launched its public testnet Artio. According to @0x_Umeshu, there are more than 90 Berachain ecosystem projects, covering Restaking, Gaming, NFT and DeFi.
Although many users have reported that the interaction of the Berachain test network is very slow and the faucet often does not get "water", its participation is still high. According to the test network Artio browser data, as of May 10, Berachain's transactions exceeded 1.678 million, the total number of addresses has reached 17.7 million, 13.38w, and the current number of daily active addresses is 902,000. At the same time, the popularity of Berachain has also driven the popularity of related NFTs, including Baby Bears, Bong Bears, Boo Bears and Bond Bears. According to Dune data statistics, as of May 10, the market value of these NFTs has exceeded US$100 million.
While the market is highly sought after, Berachain, which is built on Cosmos SDK, has caused controversy by "drawing a clear line" with Cosmos. The story started with a tweet.
On May 8, @QwQiao, former head of Messari products, tweeted, "After an in-depth study of the meta-concepts of chain abstraction and application chain, I officially became a loyal fan of Cosmos. Chain abstraction: IBC may be one of the best bridges currently, providing cheap, fast and secure settlement methods without having to understand its underlying technology; for application chains: seeing projects like dYdX and Hyperliquid choose Cosmos instead of Ethereum has greatly changed my view. Somehow, although the visions of Cosmos and Ethereum are converging, Cosmos is still lagging behind Ethereum to some extent. Maybe Cosmos lacks a spiritual leader like Vitalik (co-founder of Ethereum) and a more outspoken technical evangelist like Mert (CEO of Helius). In another parallel universe, if Vitalik had not been influenced by Bitcoin maximalists and had not created Ethereum in 2014, then Cosmos might have won. "
Smokey commented on the tweet, saying, “Cosmos doesn’t understand GTM (Go-To-Market) at all, and said that although the analysis is logically tenable, it is not realistic at the moment.”
In response to the comment that "Berachain is a blockchain running on Cosmos SDK", Bera v2 is more like Ethereum than Cosmos (including its staking mechanism), and Cosmos needs a new community or rebranding. Berachain will not position itself as a Cosmos chain.
As soon as this statement came out, the Cosmos community was immediately in an uproar. Some people said, "There is nothing wrong with not airdropping to the Cosmos community or not liking Cosmos, but this behavior of trying to take advantage of Cosmos' popularity and mocking it is hypocritical, not to mention that the early technology was forked from Cosmos." Others believe that "the bottom line is that Cosmos has failed to develop, and Berachain's emphasis on being EVM rather than Cosmos chain may also be to raise its valuation."
In response, Smokey clarified that they never denied that Berachain was using the Cosmos SDK, but that did not mean it had to be called the Cosmos chain. Berachain is closer to Ethereum than Cosmos, which will be reflected in the upcoming new version of Polaris (modular EVM framework). In fact, from the perspective of developer adoption, brand awareness, and overall image, being called the Cosmos chain has harmed Berachain in many aspects, including recruiting talent, venture capital, and development experience. The Cosmos SDK is an important part of the Berachain technology stack, and although it has some shortcomings, it has great potential. And he believes that Cosmos as a whole will gain greater benefits by helping to implement good technology behind the scenes rather than being the protagonist.
In addition, Smokey also emphasized that Cosmos is not the main reason why Berachain has gained attention, but its ecosystem, community building and our Proof of Liquidity mechanism.
“Berachain was developed using Cosmos’ CometBFT + Cosmos open source EVM compatible framework Polaris EVM. The founders are so disgusted with and fiercely debate the label of Cosmos chain. On the one hand, it is because the crypto mafia culture objectively exists, and as former OHM team members, they are unwilling to offend the Ethereum community; on the other hand, Berachain’s POL consensus mechanism needs to suck blood from the Ethereum ecosystem. If it arouses the vigilance and disgust of the Ethereum community like Celestia, it will be N times the result with only half the effort.” This is how the research institute @@0xNing0x explained this controversy.
