Berachain Retools Liquidity Incentives as BGT Gives Way to sWBERA on Mainnet

Berachain has completed the mainnet deployment of PoL Next, a protocol-level overhaul that retires its soulbound BGT governance and reward token in favour of a new staking instrument, sWBERA. The change, confirmed via the network’s official changelog, restructures the “Proof of Liquidity” mechanism at the heart of Berachain’s consensus design, with direct consequences for validators, liquidity providers and any decentralised application that had built around the old token flow.

The upgrade is not a testnet trial. It has been pushed live on production infrastructure following what Berachain describes as extensive discussion on its governance forum, positioning the move as a planned evolution of the network’s tokenomics rather than an emergency patch of the kind Berachain has previously had to deploy.

From soulbound BGT to a staked wrapper

Under the original design, BGT — the Bera Governance Token — was earned by depositing assets into whitelisted liquidity pools and could not be transferred or sold. Validators directed BGT emissions toward specific pools, and holders could burn the token for BERA, the network’s native gas asset, but only in one direction. The mechanism was intended to deter mercenary capital that extracts rewards without committing durable liquidity.

PoL Next replaces that pipeline with sWBERA, a staked wrapped version of BERA. According to Berachain’s changelog, the new system is designed to align staking and liquidity incentives more directly, doing away with the one-way burn mechanic in favour of a staking wrapper that the network says may simplify participation while preserving the link between liquidity provision and validator rewards.

Migration risk for validators and integrated protocols

The practical burden of the transition falls first on validators, who previously competed for delegation by steering BGT emissions toward popular pools and must now recalibrate strategies under the new token structure. The relationship between staking yield and liquidity rewards is being reset as sWBERA takes over as the incentive vehicle, altering the economics that underpinned validator competition on the chain.

Protocols that embedded BGT mechanics into their products — including liquid staking derivatives and yield optimisers built on Berachain — will need to update their integrations. Any smart contract that referenced BGT-specific functions for emissions, delegation or burning requires migration, and Berachain has urged developers to monitor official documentation for deprecation timelines on BGT-related endpoints.

For liquidity providers, the change means adapting to a different reward token and, potentially, different strategies for optimising returns, since the mechanics that governed how BGT accrued and could be redeemed no longer apply in the same form.

Infrastructure build-out continues alongside the upgrade

The timing of the transition coincides with continued infrastructure investment in the Berachain ecosystem, including expanded stablecoin support from major exchanges such as Bybit, suggesting that trading and settlement rails around the network are broadening even as its core incentive architecture is being rebuilt underneath them.

For a network whose entire consensus proposition rests on tying validator security to DeFi liquidity, the shift from BGT to sWBERA amounts to a rewrite of the incentive layer that underpins that model. Whether the new system delivers the intended alignment between staking and liquidity provision — without disrupting the integrations built around the old one — will depend on how smoothly validators, protocols and liquidity providers complete the migration in the weeks ahead.

Read more: Tokenised Equities Hit Record $3.86bn Monthly Volume as Regulators Watch Closely