Author: Nancy, PANews

Berachain is one of the highly valued public chains in the current market, but recently its co-founder Smokey has faced community criticism for distancing himself from Cosmos.

With massive funding and a strong investment lineup, Berachain has garnered significant market enthusiasm. In April 2023, after securing a $42 million investment with participation from Polychain Capital, OKX Ventures, Hack VC, Dao5, Tribe CapitalDragonfly Capital former partners, and Celestia founder Mustafa Al-Bassam, Berachain further raised $69 million in Series B funding at a valuation of $1.5 billion in March this year from Brevan Howard Digital and Framework Ventures, increasing its funding amount to $100 million.

Although Berachain is expected to launch its mainnet in the second quarter of this year, it has already introduced the public testnet Artio. According to @0x_Umeshu's statistics, Berachain's ecosystem projects have exceeded 90, covering Restaking, Gaming, NFTs, DeFi, and more.

Despite some users' feedback about the laggy interaction on Berachain's testnet and the faucet often running out of "water," its engagement remains high. As per Artio testnet browser data, as of May 10th, Berachain has processed over 1.678 million transactions, with a total of 17.7 million addresses, 13.38 million, and a current daily active address count of 902,000. Simultaneously, Berachain's popularity has driven the rise of related NFTs, including Baby Bears, Bong Bears, Boo Bears, and Bond Bears. According to Dune Analytics, as of May 10th, the market value of these NFTs has exceeded $100 million.

Amid the market hype, Berachain, built on the Cosmos SDK, has sparked controversy by "drawing a clear line" from Cosmos. It all started with a tweet.

On May 8th, former Messari product lead @QwQiao tweeted, "After in-depth research on chain abstraction and the meta-concepts of application chains, I have officially become a loyal fan of Cosmos. Chain abstraction: IBC may be one of the best bridges currently available, offering cheap, fast, and secure settlement methods without needing to understand its underlying technology; for application chains: seeing projects like dYdX and Hyperliquid choose Cosmos over Ethereum has greatly changed my perspective. Somehow, even though Cosmos and Ethereum's visions are converging, Cosmos is still lagging behind Ethereum to some extent. Perhaps 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 extremists and had not created Ethereum in 2014, then Cosmos might have prevailed."

In response to this tweet, Smokey commented, "Cosmos fundamentally does not understand GTM (Go-To-Market), and although this analysis is logically sound, it is currently unrealistic."

Regarding the comment that "Berachain is a blockchain running on the Cosmos SDK," the reply stated that Bera v2 is more like Ethereum than Cosmos (including its staking mechanism), and Cosmos needs a new community or brand reshaping. Berachain will not position itself as a Cosmos chain.

With this statement, the Cosmos community immediately reacted. Some said, "It's not a problem if you don't airdrop to the Cosmos community or don't like Cosmos, but trying to ride on the Cosmos hype while mocking it is unacceptable, especially since the early technology forked from Cosmos." Others believed, "Ultimately, it is because Cosmos has not developed, and Berachain emphasizes itself as EVM rather than a Cosmos chain, which may also be to inflate its valuation."

In response, Smokey clarified that they have never denied that Berachain is using the Cosmos SDK, but it does not mean it must be called a Cosmos chain. Berachain is closer to Ethereum than Cosmos, which will be reflected in the upcoming Polaris (modular EVM framework) new version. In fact, being labeled as a Cosmos chain has damaged Berachain in terms of talent recruitment, venture capital, and development experience from the perspective of developer adoption, brand awareness, and overall image. The Cosmos SDK is an important part of Berachain's tech stack, with great potential despite some drawbacks. He believes that Cosmos, as a whole, will benefit more by helping achieve good technology behind the scenes rather than being in the spotlight.

Furthermore, Smokey emphasized that Cosmos is not the main reason for Berachain's attention; its ecosystem, community building, and our Proof of Liquidity mechanism are.

"Berachain is developed using Cosmos' CometBFT + Cosmos open-source EVM-compatible framework Polaris EVM. The founders are so averse to the Cosmos chain label and engage in intense debates because the crypto mafia culture objectively exists. As former members of the OHM team, they do not want to offend the Ethereum community; on the other hand, Berachain's POL consensus mechanism needs to feed on the Ethereum ecosystem. If they attract the attention and resentment of the Ethereum community like Celestia did, it will be a hundred times more effort for half the gain." Researcher @0xNing0x explained the controversy.