Berachain just took a chainsaw to its own token model. The layer-1 network completed the first stage of its Proof-of-Liquidity (PoL) Next upgrade via a mainnet hard fork on July 7-8, killing off the BGT token and consolidating rewards around WBERA and its staked counterpart, sWBERA.
What actually changed
The hard fork introduces fixed per-block emission rates. Validator operators now receive 0.4 WBERA per block, while reward vault distributors get 1.305 WBERA per block. That’s a clean, predictable payout structure replacing what was previously a tangled web of BGT governance votes, boost allocations, and multi-token reward flows.
BGT, the governance and emissions token that once sat at the heart of Berachain’s Proof-of-Liquidity mechanism, has been fully deprecated for all user-facing roles. That includes governance and reward allocation, the two things it was essentially designed for.
Any residual BGT allowances were automatically converted during the upgrade. BGT holders who still have tokens sitting around are being directed to redeem them through the Hub UI.
Stakers now have a cleaner choice: claim rewards as either sWBERA or native BERA. For most vault owners, the transition requires zero action.
The ERA framework and why it matters
Beyond the token consolidation, the upgrade lays groundwork for something called Emissions Return Agreements, or ERAs. These are designed to channel emissions toward projects that actually generate on-chain revenue and utility, rather than those that simply game boost voting mechanics to siphon rewards.
The upgrade didn’t materialize overnight. It follows previous revisions made during PoL v2 in 2025, which had already begun shifting emission distributions toward BERA yields. The testnet deployment for PoL Next ran on May 26-27, 2026, giving the community roughly six weeks to test before mainnet execution.
What this means for the Berachain ecosystem
Berachain’s original design included a tri-token architecture featuring BERA as the gas and staking token, BGT as a non-transferable governance token for reward routing, and HONEY as a native stablecoin. By collapsing everything into the BERA/WBERA/sWBERA stack, Berachain removes that structure entirely.
The risk, naturally, is that removing BGT’s governance function concentrates power in ways the original dual-token design was meant to prevent. If governance now flows through BERA or its derivatives, the separation of economic and political power that BGT represented is gone. Whether that trade-off is worth the simplification depends on how the ERA framework performs in practice.