Berachain’s co-founder, Smokey the Bera, says the developer team sold too many BERA tokens to venture capitalists and is currently working towards buying back its supply.
Almost a month after the launch of the Berachain (BERA) mainnet, co-founder Smokey the Bera appeared on the Unchain podcast to talk about the regrets he had regarding the token’s launch and supply allocation.
Smokey The Bera said that the Berachain team sold too many tokens to venture capitalists ahead of its launch.
“I think that if I could go back and redo this again. If the team could start at ground zero. We probably would not have sold as much of our [token] supplies to VCs,” said Smokey in an interview clip shared on X.
The co-founder and chief exec said that a “vast majority” of the BERA tokens went into their seed rounds way back in early 2022, as well as their Series A funding round. He admitted that at the time, the team could not have foreseen just how big the project would become.
On Feb. 11, Berachain experienced backlash following its layer 1 launch as traders complained about the project’s airdrop allocations, tokenomics, and insider trading activity. Analysts uncovered issues regarding the token’s distribution structure, specifically how early investors and insiders were able to reap benefits from the network’s staking mechanism.
As a result, Smokey said his team is currently working on “non-trivially buying back portions” of the BERA token supply from VCs as a way to minimize the dilution of tokens experienced by the Berachain community.
“We totally sold too much to VCs and our goal is now to make sure that we do right by people overtime in light of that,” said Smokey.
At press time, BERA has gone up nearly 15% to a price of $7.18 in the past 24 hours of trading. In the past week, the token has gone down by nearly 1%. BERA’s circulating token supply currently stands at 107 million tokens, meanwhile its total supply is more than 500 million tokens.
Berachain’s native token has reached a market cap of more than $750 million and a fully diluted valuation of nearly $3.5 billion. In the past 24 hours, the token has seen a 29.7% increase in its daily trading volume to $325 million.
Berachain launched its mainnet and native token BERA simultaneously on Feb. 6. The token experienced an explosive debut on the market, reaching an all-time high of nearly $15 on launch day. It has since fallen down from the high, with its price plummeting more than half its initial peak price.
