Berachain Co-Founder Admits Over-Allocation of Tokens to VCs, Reveals Plans for Buyback

Speaking on the Unchain podcast, the founder admitted that the team had sold too many tokens to venture capitalists before its launch, which occurred nearly a month after the mainnet went live on February 6.

Despite its early success, the project soon faced backlash. On February 11, traders raised concerns over airdrop allocations, tokenomics, and potential insider trading. Analysts identified issues with the token’s distribution, highlighting how early investors and insiders benefited from the network’s staking mechanism.

Smokey admitted that a “vast majority” of BERA tokens had been allocated during the project’s early fundraising stages, including its seed rounds in early 2022 and its Series A funding round. He explained that, at the time, the team had not anticipated the scale of Berachain’s eventual growth. Reflecting on the token’s rollout, he acknowledged that, in hindsight, the team would have structured its token distribution differently.

“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] supply to VCs,” he said in an interview clip shared on X.

In response to the community’s concerns, Smokey revealed that the team is now actively working on “non-trivially buying back portions” of the BERA token supply from venture capitalists. This initiative aims to reduce dilution and ensure a fairer distribution of tokens within the Berachain community.

“We totally sold too much to VCs, and our goal now is to make sure that we do right by people over time in light of that,” he added.

Meanwhile, BERA’s market presence expanded as major South Korean exchanges Bithumb and Upbit listed the token on February 6. Bithumb offered BERA in its KRW market, while Upbit supported trading in KRW, BTC, and USDT pairs. Both exchanges required deposits to be made exclusively through the Berachain network, rejecting transactions from other networks. 

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