Henlo retards. It seems everyone thinks BGT is the best thing to get if you want exposure to Beachain, and if you believe this…. Well tbh you’re right. It is.
So this is gonna break down how you can get your hands on some sweet sweet BGT, explained in a Yeetard-friendly way that even you mouthbreathers could understand.
In this article i will exblain:
What is BGT and why its lit
How you can earn it
Alternate ways to get the same benefits
My idiot friendly recommendation on what to do on mainnet
Berachain Governance Token, aka BGT, is a non-transferrable token which:
Can be staked or delegated
Earns revenue from fees spent on Berachain’s native apps (Bend, Bex, Berps)
Has power to direct the issuance of new BGT
This means BGT holders can choose what actions to incentivize (e.g. LPing a certain pool)
This also means that others can bribe BGT holders to choose certain actions over others, so BGT holders have another source of revenue they can opt into
Usually, if you want exposure to an L1, the go-to option is to buy the gas token, which in this case would be BERA. In Berachain, things work a bit differently though. BGT is a token which will have revenues and yields, whereas BERA will not.
As some of you idiots might have noted tho, BGT is non-transferable. “HoW dO i DuMp iT tHeN iF bErAcHaIn MoOns?” some of you may ask. Fear not my cubling, BGT can be burned at any time for BERA, at a 1:1 ratio.
You have 100 BGT and the price of BERA moons and you wanna capitalize on that? You can burn your 100 BGT for 100 BERA, then sell it.
Essentially, if you want direct exposure to BERA and Berachain, the best way to do that is by holding BGT. You still have all the same benefits of capturing price appreciation, AND you have the cashflows produced by the ecosystem as well.
Aight sounds lit bro, so….
You gotta earn it dawg. “How Lord Pemberton, how?” Lemme show you homie.
Step 1: go to BGT station
This is where you can see all the “Reward Vaults”, stake in them, and earn BGT. Reward Vaults are smart contracts that allow you to stake some various tokens, and earn BGT for doing so. Let’s take a look.
What’s important to look for here is:
The BGT capture of each vault. This refers to what share of the current BGT being emitted is going to one vault. HOWEVER this does NOT mean that vault will have the highest APR. If the vault TVL is super duper high, it might mean your APR if you deposit there could be super low even if it has the highest BGT capture
The type of asset in the reward vault. Some assets may be stuff you don’t wanna hold cos you think they're risky, and some might be stuff you’re holding anyway, and some might be stuff with impermanent loss risk which you’re not super comfortable with (pussy)
Number (2) is something we can figure it out easily. For example, we can see in row 1 that the token you must stake is the YEET/BERA kodiak island token. Are you cool holding that? You would know. If you just wanna hold stablecoins and dont want anything fancy, there will be options for you too.
Number (1) however is a bit more tricky, and this arguably the most important thing here, cos we wanna farm hella BGT yknowwhatimean. So how do we figure it out? Well, we could look at the vault TVL, relative BGT capture, and perceived market value of BGT in order to derive an APR.
Step 2: check out Infrared Finance to get APRs
This is a guide for smoovbrains tho, so fuck doing math and shit. Lemme teach you a cool trick instead. Head over to Infrared Finance’s vaults page, and sort by APR.
Infrared is liquid staking + metagovernance protocol (dw about it kitten, its complicated), which helps make BGT liquid. People farming in their vaults earn iBGT instead of BGT, and cos its liquid and has a market price, we can see an APR.
Why are we looking at this? 2 reasons:
Cos we can farm here and earn iBGT instead of normal BGT (I’ll discuss this later in the article)
Cos it lets us see which reward vaults have the highest APR
Once we see which vaults have the juiciest APR, this helps inform which Reward Vault(s) we wanna farm.
Step 3: Get in loser, we’re earning BGT
We’ve got the info now on which vaults have the best return, so lets get farming. It seems the vault with the highest APR rn is the YEET/BERA island on Kodiak. I wanna chase the highest APR, and im also Yeetarded so dont mind having exposure to that LP position.
Ok so how do I get the right token to stake? Lets head to kodiak.finance, and find the appropriate island
Click on it, so we can supply liquidity
Make sure to hit “Deposit Only”! Do NOT click “With Staking” cos we wanna go stake the LP token in the BGT reward vault.
After you sign all the required transactions and supply liquidity, you will receive a token in your wallet that looks something like this: KODI-WBERA-YEET.
Alright, now lets head back to BGT Station, and find the YEET-WBERA rewards vault. Wanna guess what you do next? That’s right, hit the deposit button.
Here it is circled in red, in case you are visually impaired as well as retarded.
Ok once you’ve done that, thats it! Come back to the same page in a few days to a week to start claiming your BGT rewards.
Ok cool now you know how to earn BGT. And we want BGT cos we get cashflow and can capture the upside of Berachain. Are there other ways to get the same benefits tho without having to do all that work?
Yup. there are. Lets look at them. Theres a few different solutions all with their own designs and trade-offs.
Infrared Finance
We mentioned them above, so lets start here. Infrared Finance is a protocol you’re probably not gonna understand in five minutes if you’re not already pretty defi and berachain native.
The important thing here is tho, is that they have a liquid version of BGT - iBGT - which has all the benefits of BGT, and doesnt require you to use any braincells. We know yall are in short supply anyway.
Alright cool, so what do you do? Earn iBGT by depositing in infrared vaults instead of BGT station, or just buy iBGT. Yup, just buy it.
After you’ve bought it or earned it, stake it, and you will earn all the sweet rewards of holding BGT, but without any of the active management required. What’s nice as well, is that the yield you will get by staking iBGT will prob be higher than other LSTs, due to its design where unstaked iBGT can be farmed in defi, whilst staked iBGT (siBGT) accrues the rewards of all outstanding iBGT, staked or not.
Note: this mechanism is similar to the designs of pxETH and frxETH
gBERA by Smilee Finance
Although this one is not technically BGT, it gives the holder the same kinda exposure and benefits, just in a different way.
Deposit your BERA with Smilee, they stake it, they earn staking rewards and BGT, and all these rewards are converted into BERA and compound your staked position.
It is also rebasing, so that means if you hold 1 gBERA in your wallet, it will magically increase to 1.1 gBERA on its own. There will definitely be a wrapped version if you want to rehypothecate it in DeFi - probably wgBERA or something.
To be a bit more degen, you could also LP wgBERA-BERA, and earn some farming rewards from that with low impermanent loss.
BGT market
Your third option here is just to buy BGT straight up. “But but BGT is non transferrable bro!!11!!11 you cant just buy it bro!!!111”
Yup. thats true. What BGT market enables tho, is for a smart contract to have ownership of BGT, and then for mfers to buy and sell ownership of that smart contract. Thereby buying and selling ownership of the BGT as well.
The pro here is that you can get straight up BGT, so if you're a Sophisticated Market Actor with your own plans for how you want to use BGT, this could be ideal. The con of this approach is that if you are a crayon eater who just wants to get yield with minimal work, this may not be the approach for you.
Honestly homies just get some gBERA or iBGT (and stake it). It keeps it simple, maximizes your rewards, and gives you more time to chase the more degen plays that you will probably be chasing on Berachain or elsewhere.
If you are super into Berachain and a long time bera tho, I would recommend playing around with a small amount of shmoney and trying to farm BGT yourself. If and when you get more comfortable with this process, you can even scale this up. Although i still recommend using an LST you trust due to the time and effort required to farm BGT well and max your rewards on your own.
Hit me up with any Qs you guys have, and hope u idiots found this helpful.
And while we wait for mainnet, get ur moms credit cards ready for the $YEET sale on day 1 of mainnet. Yeet.
tank you for help crayon eater like me