Participating and testing Berachain

If you're interested in participating in Berachain's Artio testnet, testing its features, and potentially qualifying for airdrops, here are the simplified steps you can follow:

1. Wallet Setup: If you use MetaMask or another compatible wallet, add Berachain to your wallet. This usually involves visiting Berachain's documentation and clicking an 'Add Testnet' button, then filling in specific details like the network name (Berachain Artio), RPC URL, Chain ID, and others as instructed.
2. Get Test Tokens: Visit the Berachain faucet website (given in their documentation) and enter your wallet address to receive testnet BERA tokens. These tokens are used on the testnet for transactions and testing but don't have real-world value.
3. Explore DeFi Ecosystem: With your testnet tokens, start exploring Berachain's decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. This could include trading on their decentralized exchange (DEX), participating in lending and borrowing platforms, or exploring their governance mechanisms.
4. Participate Actively: Engage with the testnet actively. This could mean making transactions, testing the dApps, participating in governance, and more. Active participation could potentially make you eligible for an airdrop when Berachain launches its mainnet, although it's important to remember that airdrops are not guaranteed.
5. Stay Informed and Safe: Follow Berachain on social media and join their community channels (like Discord or Telegram) to stay updated on new developments, possible airdrop announcements, and security advice. Always ensure you're visiting official sites and communicating through official channels to avoid scams.
6. Feedback and Community Engagement: If you encounter bugs, have suggestions, or want to contribute to the project's development, providing feedback can be valuable. Engaging with the community and contributing to discussions may also enhance your experience and understanding of the project.

Regarding the possible airdrop, here are a few points to keep in mind:

Airdrops in the context of blockchain and cryptocurrency are events where a project distributes free tokens or coins to the community, often as a way of promoting the project, rewarding early adopters, or decentralizing the token distribution. Regarding the Berachain Artio testnet, there are a few key points to keep in mind about potential airdrops:

1. Participation: To be eligible for a potential airdrop from Berachain, you'll need to participate actively in the testnet. This could involve engaging with the platform by using its DeFi applications, testing features, and contributing to the community. Active participation is often a criterion for being selected for an airdrop.
2. No Guarantee: While there are speculations about a potential airdrop for users who actively participate in the testnet, there is no guarantee that an airdrop will occur. Projects may use airdrops as part of their promotional strategy or to reward early users, but the decision to conduct an airdrop, its timing, and the criteria for eligibility are entirely at the discretion of the project team.
3. Stay Informed: To increase your chances of benefiting from a potential airdrop and to stay updated on any announcements or criteria, it's essential to follow Berachain's official communication channels. This can include their Twitter account, Discord server, Telegram group, or official blog. These platforms will provide the most accurate and timely information about any planned airdrop events.
4. Security Precautions: Be aware of scams and fraudulent schemes surrounding airdrops. Always verify the information through official channels and never give out your private keys or wallet seed phrase in response to airdrop promises.
5. Technical Preparations: Ensure your wallet is correctly set up to receive airdrops. This usually means holding tokens in a wallet where you control the private keys, as opposed to holding them on an exchange. However, specific instructions and criteria will typically be provided by the project team if and when they announce an airdrop.

Understanding Berachain Artio Testnet

A testnet is a stage most protocols enter when they are complete enough for usage. Think of them as a new bank launching an incentivized user-involved program that would help ensure security and efficiency of fund transactions without 'playing' with users' actual money. In a case that doesn't suit this analogy, testnets can be utilized by independent enthusiast developers to build and deploy applications on a test network. 

In Berachain's case, Artio is a public testnet, which means that anyone with an internet connection can start participating on Berachain's blockchain by validating, creating, or reading (exploring) transactions as they would for any blockchain. A public testnet like Artio is one of the final stages before a protocol like Berachain is fully set for its mainnet launch. As said before, Proof of Liquidity consensus is what brings real fairness to Berachain, by it avoiding block space manipulation, monopolies, and equipping validators with better options with “bribes” and governance tokens. 

Developers who have been on Berachain's private testnet are now able to participate on the first chain whose mechanics are structured to enable protocols to build their liquidity base, and have their contracts included in a bulk of other contracts where LPs receive BGT. This will let protocols attract liquidity at a lower cost - protocols that are part of a base layer and contribute to the generation of BGT without changing user behaviors on-chain. 

Any protocols, having invited their validators to engage, can "bribe" for more liquidity by: Offering their native token to validators as a bribe; Then having validators direct a portion of BGT rewards to that protocol's pool; Validators then receiving a portion of the bribes. This incentivizes protocols on Berachain to run their own validators with less cost of capital acquisition. That's developers. Users of Berachain can stake BGT emissions to help influence the flow of liquidity and earn the aforementioned bribes and network fees. 

Although Berachain started as an NFT project and has since become a sort of meme, several serious projects like Ramen Finance, Beradrome, Beramarket, and Goldilocks have already started on Berachain and now have thousands of users. Validators – entities that make all the liquidity creation with security possible on Berachain, now have the chance to attract new capital, participate in a new form of governance, which will bring new revenue streams for them via bribes and protocol-building (BGT block) rewards.

Getting Started with Artio Testnet

1. Add Berachain to your wallet

If you are using MetaMask as your primary wallet, you'll be able to add Berachain just by visiting its docs and clicking the 'Add Testnet' button. 

Otherwise, you'll have to complete these key-value pairs in the collection of add-network fields provided by your wallet:

Network: Berachain Artio

RPC URL: https://artio.rpc.berachain.com/

Chain ID: 80085

Currency symbol: BERA

Block Explorer URL: https://artio.beratrail.io/

Other block explorers officially listed by Berachain as of today are:

Lore Explorer: https://berascan.ai/

DexGuru: https://bera-test.dex.guru/

2. Get some faucet BERA tokens 

This can be done by visiting artio.faucet.berachain.com, and entering your wallet address. The Berachain Faucet is set to drop 0.1 testnet BERA every 8 hours to ensure a sufficient balance for all users. 

3. Start exploring the Berachain DeFi ecosystem! 

The Berachain DEX, BEX, is a token swapping and liquidity provision service where users can earn BGT rewards. BEND is a Honey stablecoin-based lending and borrowing service with BGT rewards, BERPS is an up-to-100x leveraged trading service on Berachain, Beratrail is one of the main explorers, and BGT station is the BGT governance hub driven by the said bribes. 

4. Create your first contract

You can start with "Hello, World!" and progress from there by following Berachain's official guide. There are quite a number of boilerplate steps, so we won’t waste internet space copying the same commands from Berachain’s documentation.

Exploring Berachain's DeFi Primitives

BEX is the decentralized exchange and LP system where most users will frequent. Heading over to artio.bex.berachain.com/swap, this interface will pop where a swap pair can be selected and swapped after the wallet concerned is connected. 

For a more involved on-chain activity, one may go for liquidity provision or pool creation, which can be done on the same interface, on the same platform.

For the creation of a pool, the 'Create a Pool' button will assist, which will drop a box to select a token pair and their weight allocation. 

Honey is the protocol's stablecoin. It can be used for lending and borrowing on BEND, where BGT rewards can be earned.  Honey approximates 1 USDC, and is now only available in testnet form - any other claim is behind a scam. 

Berachain's Governance and Rewards

BGT Station is where all the diplomatic fun happens at Berachain. The platform can be used to check for validator incentivization and gauge weight, as well as the top validators and their parameters, the number of active validators, bribe APYs, and BGT supply. If one has an idea to improve Berachain in any way, the exploration of proposals or the creation of a new proposal is suggested, where the interface is self-explanatory. 

To delegate to a validator on the same governance platform, BGT station, the /delegate section will assist, where a validator must be selected beforehand. 

/my-bgt will show your delegations and rewards. If you don’t want to delegate BGT, the token can always be burned for BERA. "Bribes" are mechanics that help validators stand out outside the bounds of standard metrics like uptime. This is usually done by a validator via a command line after installing Berachain's berad from GitHub. More on this here.

Developer Resources and Tools

The best resource to find Hardhat or Foundry-based creation and deployment of contracts, as well as additional information like dependency hunger and even the creation of frontends, is Berachain's own documentation in the Developer Quickstart. 

The official docs include tutorials for ERC-20 contracts on Foundry, WalletConnect deployment with NextJS, and while the Berachain community has also published a set of nice guides/tutorials, a collection of which can be found here.

Berachain is EVM-compatible, even ‘equivalent’, which means that it supports every possible EVM opcode that can be found on EVM.Codes. Regarding gas fees, Berachain is yet to fully define them, but the protocol follows the native read and write operation fees of Cosmos, except for fees in relation to Precompile and deployment addresses where operations happen directly on the chain and not in the EVM. 

Testnet Airdrop and Community Participation

The Berachain Artio testnet offers users a wide range of opportunities to actively engage with the platform and potentially earn rewards. Users can trade on the high-leverage Berpetuals platform to experience thrilling, high-stakes trading. Staking the HONEY stablecoin and supplying assets to the Bend lending platform allows users to earn BGT governance tokens. For those interested in governing the platform, completing Galxe quests and exploring the BGT Governance Hub enables direct participation in important decisions shaping Berachain’s future. To get started, the Berachain faucet provides testnet BERA tokens to fund user wallets. Detailed setup guides also help users connect their wallets to start using the testnet. Perhaps most excitingly, active participation in testnet activities may qualify users for a future $BERA airdrop leading up to the mainnet launch. With this wide range of hands-on activities available, from trading to staking to governance and more, the Berachain testnet offers valuable opportunities for users to contribute and potentially earn rewards as the platform continues developing.

Security and Best Practices

Berachain's mainnet is set to launch in the Q2 of 2024. Ahead of the mainnet launch, Berachain also created Build-A-Bera, an initiative based on Berachain's governance bribes with the aim to help accelerate new projects on the new network by funding them with BGT rewards. 

The community is heavily anticipating the mainnet launch of Berachain not only because the now-in-testnet tokens would become 'real' and that the rewards system is fair and powerful that's already brought much adoption in the space, but also because of Berachain directly tackling the blockchain trilemma by decentralizing through validators and better defined rules for them, securing through a soulbound, non-purchasable, illiquid token BGT that has short-range attack resistance, and scalability by being an EVM on Cosmos, which is already a scale-driven system.   

Conclusion

Artio is a major leap towards the potential widespread adoption of Berachain as a serious competitor in the space regarding features like staking rewards, blockchain speed and scale, stablecoins, and especially fair ecosystems. BGT, being illiquid and non-buyable, keeps the manipulators away, while the rules that Berachain’s well-incentivized validators must follow prevent it from becoming part of the decentralized-is-the-new-centralized landscape that many projects fall into. 

Developers now too have great incentives to build on a network that is largely fair and not without competitive rewards, the project of which even has a program (Build-a-Bera) for discovering and accelerating value-driving new native projects on the chain. Users have the rewards incentive where the rewards may come from several different sources, depending on their on-chain activity preference. Validators can utilize bribes as a new way to compete and stand out from the crowd. 

Additional Resources

Berachain’s documentation is the most fruitful resource when starting to explore the ecosystem, which sits at https://docs.berachain.com/, and taking away the subdomain will give you a nice official website. For the announcements, it’s best to follow @berachain on Twitter, and join their Discord for community discussions and potential direct-to-core-team Q&A.