Smokey The Bera 🐻⛓@SmokeyTheBera
Bm Folks,
I wanted to put something out here to set the story straight in light of the recent hit piece. I also didn’t want to write a knee-jerk response without getting feedback from our legal team (given allegations made) and some of our largest stakeholders who have been exceptionally supportive, so my apologies for the lag time here.
To get straight to the point: the story’s framing is (A) incomplete and (B) inaccurate. We understand there is an appetite for dramatic narratives in a market where everyone is down bad, but this story in particular seems to be put together with the direct input of some bad faith actors, namely some very specific disgruntled ex-team members.
We first were made aware of Jack contacting tokenholders, former employees, and ecosystem projects several weeks ago, asking all sorts of leading questions (many entirely unrelated to the topics in the final article) about Berachain. During his brief tenure as an investigative reporter at Blockworks, he began asking tokenholders questions that were both misleading and factually wrong. Despite having never been contacted by Jack, our communications team decided to proactively reach out to him, and provided the following statement.
“Blockworks' reporting on this matter is both inaccurate and incomplete. Brevan Howard remains one of the largest investors in Berachain. Their investments involve several complex commercial agreements, but they participated in the series B fundraise on the same paperwork as all investors.” — Smokey the Bera
Jack was then terminated from Blockworks as their editorial business was wound down, and we’ve had no further discussion before this piece was released in Unchained today.
Let’s set some facts straight:
- Brevan Howard co-led our Series B a year ago, out of their Abu Dhabi office, via Nova, a new liquid-only vehicle on the same terms as all other investors. Nova had approached Berachain to lead the round some months prior to this.
- Nova’s compliance team required a provision to guard for a scenario in which Berachain failed to TGE and get listed, and thus the LOCKED BERA purchased in the financing would not be an eligible investment via Nova’s liquid strategy. Thus, we entered into the side letter posted in the article and committed Nova to additional commercial arrangements including an agreement to provide liquidity on the network, which was only possible upon launch. The side letter wasn’t created to close the deal with a party who otherwise would not have been interested, or to prevent against post-launch losses, as the article implies, and generally has precedent, as noted by external counsel mentioned in the reporting.
- In contrast to everything implied in this piece, Nova is still one of, if not THE, largest tokenholder in Berachain. They are a liquidity provider, a holder of both LOCKED BERA acquired in the Series B, and liquid BERA purchased on the open markets, and have continued to be supportive through highs and lows. If anything, they have increased their BERA exposure over time, despite running a liquid fund in a harsh alt environment.
There are several other claims in the story that are flatly untrue. No other purchasers were issued MFNs in the Series B, despite claims in the article. Nova remains a locked tokenholder in Berachain despite allusions to the contrary etc.
To any of our community members, friends, tokenholders etc who might be reading this, I’d like to apologize in advance for all of the messages that you’ll have to deal with as a result of this media cycle. People love an opportunity to dunk on Berachain, Bera PA etc and the combination of half-truths and excluded information here has provided a great opportunity for some to do so. In a perfect world, I could speak even more explicitly about some of the topics mentioned, but I’ve also got an obligation to respect the confidentiality and compliance restrictions that we’re accountable to, with the best interests of our tokenholders in mind.
Will do my very best to respond to DMs and comments while staying on top of my responsibilities to our team and ecosystem. And thank you to those folks who reached out and offered their kind words or support as opposed to blindly doubling down on the article.
Revenge arc remains on, even if we’re taking a few sucker punches.
