In recent months, we have observed that several teams—after initially showing strong enthusiasm—have paused or exited their Berachain deployments for a variety of reasons. We respect these decisions. This article is not intended to open a debate; it is meant to explain why we, the authors, remain committed to Berachain, and why this chain is still the best venue for our protocols to build together.

None of our projects has received direct financial support or grants (beyond RFA) from the Berachain Foundation, and this piece is unsponsored. We are writing solely to give our communities and partners high‑level information and to reassure them about our strategic choices.

Authors (in alphabetical order):

• BlockRost: Founder of Dirac Finance

• Caspar: Founder of D8X

• HoneyCub: Founder of MadHoney

• Prince: Founder of Beraborrow

All four founding teams have at least ten years of experience in both crypto and traditional finance. We are business‑oriented builders focused on long‑term outcomes, not short‑term opportunistic farming or token speculation.

We entered DeFi more than seven years ago—all of us—and more than twelve for some. Dirac and D8X started collaborating two years ago, first with Dirac’s options delta hedging through D8X perps. Then our partnership evolved to reach a broader dimension, by which Dirac deploys vaults using D8X perps for both yield generation and delta hedging.

Both D8X and Dirac decided to join Berachain after exploring many other blockchain opportunities and understanding that Berachain’s Proof‑of‑Liquidity (PoL) perfectly fits our business needs in DeFi. In simple terms, on Berachain, value flows from the chain to the dApps, rather than from the dApps to the chain.

Beraborrow has deployed its lending protocol as a Berachain-native dApp and issues an overcollateralized stablecoin called NECT. Both Dirac and D8X actively collaborate with Beraborrow, using NECT as a staking asset and as collateral within their systems.

Insights from articles—such as this excellent piece from our friends at The Honey Jar, published in January 2023—and discussions with the Berachain core team gave us more arguments beyond PoL, focused on the ecosystem aspects that are also fundamental to the economic success of a DeFi protocol.

In early 2024, Dirac decided to become a Berachain-native dApp, and D8X decided to deploy their perps engine on Berachain and make it accessible to anyone through MadHoney.

The reasons that brought us to Berachain remain valid today. Despite the current FUD and discouragement from some projects, our conviction remains unchanged—and we are more motivated than ever. Here are some reasons why:

• Our past experience in TradFi gives us the necessary hindsight to understand that the operational and efficient implementation of a mechanism such as PoL will require several years of calibration.

• Berachain mainnet launched only six months ago; the Berachain Foundation’s DeFi and Technical teams are constantly iterating and improving PoL, as demonstrated two days ago by the latest Berachain Foundation proposal for Proof of Liquidity V2.

• Discussions with many founders of projects deployed on Berachain show that there are many of us who believe in the chain and want to continue building here.

• Alignment between our founders—especially the DeFi-TradFi Synergy with Berachain Foundation’s long-term vision, and Smokey’s short-term advice that protocols should focus on product–market fit, token launch and protocol’s development.

• We are all in the early stages of development, and our projects will require several years to reach maturity. Dirac’s innovative Vault-as-a-Service program, launched in collaboration with D8X and MadHoney as its first partners, is still in its infancy—just like Berachain’s Proof-of-Liquidity—and both will take time to fully mature. For all these reasons—and many more—we continue building. The Berachain core team is also actively building, as are many other serious protocols. We are happy to continue alongside them.

  We believe the real cause of the current FUD is simply that the price of BERAUSD has fallen. Many of those spreading FUD prefer not to admit this, instead citing unrelated technical concerns. If BERAUSD rallies tomorrow, the FUD will disappear, and the same critics will return to praise the ecosystem. At D8X, MadHoney, and Dirac, we continue building regardless of BERAUSD’s price. Our focus is on PoL and business fundamentals.

Our DeFi protocols benefit from one another in order to grow. This is a universal reality in DeFi, but unusually well supported here.

• NECT, Beraborrow’s overcollateralised stablecoin, has been live for some time and is already the preferred choice for builders across the ecosystem. D8X’s perp engine powering MadPerps and some of Dirac’s vaults have listed NECT as collateral. Traders on MadHoney can use NECT to trade perpetuals, and Dirac will accept NECT in its staking vaults.

• NECT LPs providing liquidity into D8X’s perp pool require trading volume to get yield. MadHoney provides volume through their frontend. Dirac supplies this via vaults that route capital into perp-based strategies, with support from the Beraborrow team.

Dirac is rolling out Vault‑as‑a‑Service (VaaS) and depends on counterparties - perp venues such as D8X / MadHoney and yield‑bearing assets such as NECT - to populate new strategies.

Why our collaboration on Berachain outperforms anything we have seen before

• Proof-of-Liquidity alignment via BGT emissions: Berachain’s PoL model enables our protocols to distribute additional yield through BGT, creating strong incentives for users to participate. This unique mechanism is the primary reason we’ve chosen to build on Berachain.

• Combined expertise across teams: The integration of our teams’ TradFi and DeFi experience with the technical and economic expertise of the Berachain core team allows us to design and deploy innovative strategies that are fully aligned with PoL mechanics.

• A genuinely collaborative ecosystem: The Berachain core team cultivates a culture of proactive support, extending beyond technical topics to areas including protocol security, governance design, and community-building.

As stated earlier in this article, our decision to build on Berachain is not driven by market conditions, but by the business fundamentals of its Proof-of-Liquidity model.

So what does it take for protocols to truly attract liquidity?From a DeFi standpoint, liquidity must be sustainable and self-reinforcing. While DeFi today still suffers from opportunistic users—chasing rewards and airdrops rather than real yield—we believe it will evolve into a space where services and returns begin to compete with those in traditional finance and business. As protocols, it is our responsibility to generate attractive, organic yield that gives investors a clear reason to allocate capital to our vaults and liquidity pools.

Attracting fresh capital from TradFi and CeFi—not merely circulating funds within the same ecosystem—is a core objective. As PoL improves, we believe the value proposition for users depositing into our protocols on Berachain will exceed what is possible on most other chains.

In short, we as protocols are responsible for our own liquidity—and Berachain provides the best infrastructure, incentives, and alignment to make that liquidity sticky, scalable, and capital-efficient.

Among all EVM chains, Berachain stands out as the partner most aligned with our long-term goals—economically, architecturally, and culturally.

We demonstrate our collaborative advantage by launching RWA‑backed perpetual‑strategy vaults on Dirac Finance, powered by the D8X perps engine.

• Vault architecture – Users deposit stablecoins into Dirac; the vault opens perpetual positions on selected real‑world‑asset (RWA) markets at D8X  and captures BGT emissions as additional yield.

• Initial RWA markets –

  • "F*ck Schiff": Long BTC / Short GOLD

  • "I love Schiff vault": Long GOLD / Short BTC

The Schiff vaults were deployed on mainnet on June 10, 2025 for a one-month testing cycle and performed as expected (APY: +70% for the long BTC vault, –44% for the short). They are now in the audit phase. Official launch target: July 25, 2025.

These vaults are permissionless, fully transparent on‑chain and providing an early, concrete proof of how D8X,  MadHoney and Dirac can co‑create value while reinforcing Berachain’s PoL economy.

We are executing a long-term collaboration plan. In the near future, D8X, MadHoney, and Dirac will be joined by other Berachain-native protocols to expand the vault ecosystem and deploy new strategies involving perpetuals, options, and staking yields.

The upcoming strategies include:

• “MicroStrategy Premiums”: A long MSTR / short BTC relative value strategy proposed by Carnation, Berachain’s in-house expert on DeFi, options, and perps.

• Strategy mix: Both high-conviction directional plays and delta-neutral market-making strategies will be deployed, offering depositors a full spectrum of risk–return profiles.

These strategies will be rolled out sequentially, following the one-month cycle of the current Schiff vaults.

Our goal in the upcoming months is simple: to deploy a wide variety of on-chain strategies that demonstrate—through results—the thesis and principles outlined in this article.

By combining D8X and MadHoney’s perps markets with Dirac’s vault infrastructure—and aligning it within the Proof-of-Liquidity mechanism—we are constructing capital‑efficient flywheels that accrue value to users, protocols, and the chain itself.

Market cycles will come and go. Our commitment to building sustainable, business‑oriented DeFi remains unchanged. We are here for the long run, guided by a clear strategic vision.

Among all blockchains, Berachain remains the adequate place to build and achieve our objectives.

This is just the beginning of our journey. Let’s keep pushing.

Ooga Booga.

In recent months, we have observed that several teams—after initially showing strong enthusiasm—have paused or exited their Berachain deployments for a variety of reasons. We respect these decisions. This article is not intended to open a debate; it is meant to explain why we, the authors, remain committed to Berachain, and why this chain is still the best venue for our protocols to build together.

None of our projects has received direct financial support or grants (beyond RFA) from the Berachain Foundation, and this piece is unsponsored. We are writing solely to give our communities and partners high‑level information and to reassure them about our strategic choices.

Authors (in alphabetical order):

• BlockRost: Founder of Dirac Finance

• Caspar: Founder of D8X

• HoneyCub: Founder of MadHoney

• Prince: Founder of Beraborrow

All four founding teams have at least ten years of experience in both crypto and traditional finance. We are business‑oriented builders focused on long‑term outcomes, not short‑term opportunistic farming or token speculation.

We entered DeFi more than seven years ago—all of us—and more than twelve for some. Dirac and D8X started collaborating two years ago, first with Dirac’s options delta hedging through D8X perps. Then our partnership evolved to reach a broader dimension, by which Dirac deploys vaults using D8X perps for both yield generation and delta hedging.

Both D8X and Dirac decided to join Berachain after exploring many other blockchain opportunities and understanding that Berachain’s Proof‑of‑Liquidity (PoL) perfectly fits our business needs in DeFi. In simple terms, on Berachain, value flows from the chain to the dApps, rather than from the dApps to the chain.

Beraborrow has deployed its lending protocol as a Berachain-native dApp and issues an overcollateralized stablecoin called NECT. Both Dirac and D8X actively collaborate with Beraborrow, using NECT as a staking asset and as collateral within their systems.

Insights from articles—such as this excellent piece from our friends at The Honey Jar, published in January 2023—and discussions with the Berachain core team gave us more arguments beyond PoL, focused on the ecosystem aspects that are also fundamental to the economic success of a DeFi protocol.

In early 2024, Dirac decided to become a Berachain-native dApp, and D8X decided to deploy their perps engine on Berachain and make it accessible to anyone through MadHoney.

The reasons that brought us to Berachain remain valid today. Despite the current FUD and discouragement from some projects, our conviction remains unchanged—and we are more motivated than ever. Here are some reasons why:

• Our past experience in TradFi gives us the necessary hindsight to understand that the operational and efficient implementation of a mechanism such as PoL will require several years of calibration.

• Berachain mainnet launched only six months ago; the Berachain Foundation’s DeFi and Technical teams are constantly iterating and improving PoL, as demonstrated two days ago by the latest Berachain Foundation proposal for Proof of Liquidity V2.

• Discussions with many founders of projects deployed on Berachain show that there are many of us who believe in the chain and want to continue building here.

• Alignment between our founders—especially the DeFi-TradFi Synergy with Berachain Foundation’s long-term vision, and Smokey’s short-term advice that protocols should focus on product–market fit, token launch and protocol’s development.

• We are all in the early stages of development, and our projects will require several years to reach maturity. Dirac’s innovative Vault-as-a-Service program, launched in collaboration with D8X and MadHoney as its first partners, is still in its infancy—just like Berachain’s Proof-of-Liquidity—and both will take time to fully mature. For all these reasons—and many more—we continue building. The Berachain core team is also actively building, as are many other serious protocols. We are happy to continue alongside them.

  We believe the real cause of the current FUD is simply that the price of BERAUSD has fallen. Many of those spreading FUD prefer not to admit this, instead citing unrelated technical concerns. If BERAUSD rallies tomorrow, the FUD will disappear, and the same critics will return to praise the ecosystem. At D8X, MadHoney, and Dirac, we continue building regardless of BERAUSD’s price. Our focus is on PoL and business fundamentals.

Our DeFi protocols benefit from one another in order to grow. This is a universal reality in DeFi, but unusually well supported here.

• NECT, Beraborrow’s overcollateralised stablecoin, has been live for some time and is already the preferred choice for builders across the ecosystem. D8X’s perp engine powering MadPerps and some of Dirac’s vaults have listed NECT as collateral. Traders on MadHoney can use NECT to trade perpetuals, and Dirac will accept NECT in its staking vaults.

• NECT LPs providing liquidity into D8X’s perp pool require trading volume to get yield. MadHoney provides volume through their frontend. Dirac supplies this via vaults that route capital into perp-based strategies, with support from the Beraborrow team.

Dirac is rolling out Vault‑as‑a‑Service (VaaS) and depends on counterparties - perp venues such as D8X / MadHoney and yield‑bearing assets such as NECT - to populate new strategies.

Why our collaboration on Berachain outperforms anything we have seen before

• Proof-of-Liquidity alignment via BGT emissions: Berachain’s PoL model enables our protocols to distribute additional yield through BGT, creating strong incentives for users to participate. This unique mechanism is the primary reason we’ve chosen to build on Berachain.

• Combined expertise across teams: The integration of our teams’ TradFi and DeFi experience with the technical and economic expertise of the Berachain core team allows us to design and deploy innovative strategies that are fully aligned with PoL mechanics.

• A genuinely collaborative ecosystem: The Berachain core team cultivates a culture of proactive support, extending beyond technical topics to areas including protocol security, governance design, and community-building.

As stated earlier in this article, our decision to build on Berachain is not driven by market conditions, but by the business fundamentals of its Proof-of-Liquidity model.

So what does it take for protocols to truly attract liquidity?From a DeFi standpoint, liquidity must be sustainable and self-reinforcing. While DeFi today still suffers from opportunistic users—chasing rewards and airdrops rather than real yield—we believe it will evolve into a space where services and returns begin to compete with those in traditional finance and business. As protocols, it is our responsibility to generate attractive, organic yield that gives investors a clear reason to allocate capital to our vaults and liquidity pools.

Attracting fresh capital from TradFi and CeFi—not merely circulating funds within the same ecosystem—is a core objective. As PoL improves, we believe the value proposition for users depositing into our protocols on Berachain will exceed what is possible on most other chains.

In short, we as protocols are responsible for our own liquidity—and Berachain provides the best infrastructure, incentives, and alignment to make that liquidity sticky, scalable, and capital-efficient.

Among all EVM chains, Berachain stands out as the partner most aligned with our long-term goals—economically, architecturally, and culturally.

We demonstrate our collaborative advantage by launching RWA‑backed perpetual‑strategy vaults on Dirac Finance, powered by the D8X perps engine.

• Vault architecture – Users deposit stablecoins into Dirac; the vault opens perpetual positions on selected real‑world‑asset (RWA) markets at D8X  and captures BGT emissions as additional yield.

• Initial RWA markets –

  • "F*ck Schiff": Long BTC / Short GOLD

  • "I love Schiff vault": Long GOLD / Short BTC

The Schiff vaults were deployed on mainnet on June 10, 2025 for a one-month testing cycle and performed as expected (APY: +70% for the long BTC vault, –44% for the short). They are now in the audit phase. Official launch target: July 25, 2025.

These vaults are permissionless, fully transparent on‑chain and providing an early, concrete proof of how D8X,  MadHoney and Dirac can co‑create value while reinforcing Berachain’s PoL economy.

We are executing a long-term collaboration plan. In the near future, D8X, MadHoney, and Dirac will be joined by other Berachain-native protocols to expand the vault ecosystem and deploy new strategies involving perpetuals, options, and staking yields.

The upcoming strategies include:

• “MicroStrategy Premiums”: A long MSTR / short BTC relative value strategy proposed by Carnation, Berachain’s in-house expert on DeFi, options, and perps.

• Strategy mix: Both high-conviction directional plays and delta-neutral market-making strategies will be deployed, offering depositors a full spectrum of risk–return profiles.

These strategies will be rolled out sequentially, following the one-month cycle of the current Schiff vaults.

Our goal in the upcoming months is simple: to deploy a wide variety of on-chain strategies that demonstrate—through results—the thesis and principles outlined in this article.

By combining D8X and MadHoney’s perps markets with Dirac’s vault infrastructure—and aligning it within the Proof-of-Liquidity mechanism—we are constructing capital‑efficient flywheels that accrue value to users, protocols, and the chain itself.

Market cycles will come and go. Our commitment to building sustainable, business‑oriented DeFi remains unchanged. We are here for the long run, guided by a clear strategic vision.

Among all blockchains, Berachain remains the adequate place to build and achieve our objectives.

This is just the beginning of our journey. Let’s keep pushing.

Ooga Booga.