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Berachain’s token tanks ahead of its $2.7b Boyco unlock. Ethena’s PT tokens hit Aave, setting off yield-loop mania. BitcoinOS completes the first bridgeless BTC round-trip to Cardano. And IOTA bets big on Starfish and MoveVM. A Q&A potpourri.

In other news…are you coming to Permissionless IV Brooklyn in June? Tickets are $399 (for now!), but you can get one for half price with a unique 50% off discount code if you successfully refer 5 new subscribers to the 0xResearch newsletter. Scroll down for details.

Monday Mailbag

The state of Berachain

Q: Hey, is Berachain okay?

A: BERA has taken a severe beating in the last month. Since the start of April, the token is down about 60% to $2.89 today.

The probable cause? The Boyco funds unlock on May 6 at 8:30 am ET (12:30 pm UTC).

Boyco is Berachain’s pre-launch liquidity provision campaign. It sought to simplify and make transparent the opaque practice of liquidity raising. The idea was to help Berachain dapps focus on finding product-market fit and go to market. 

To the team’s credit, they executed quite the spectacular overcoming of the so-called “cold start problem” that every L1 faces to bootstrap liquidity into its own ecosystem. Billions of liquidity was onchain before mainnet was even live.

But what goes up, must come down.

About $2.7b of TVL in pre-deposit vaults will be unlocked on Tuesday, alongside 2% of the total supply (10m) in BERA rewards. Markets are pricing in an imminent BERA dumping and exodus of TVL.

If you’d like some hopium, Berachain co-founder Smokey would like to remind you that “no new tokens are hitting the market for 9 months” after Boyco.

Ethena 🤝 Pendle 🤝 Aave

Q: What’s all this excitement around USDe PT tokens on Aave? 

A: Aave listed the first-ever Pendle PT tokens last week.

Macauley covered this last week on 0xResearch but here is a recap of the trade in simple terms:

1. Ethena’s USDe can be staked for a basis yield.

2. Stake USDe with Ethena for the sUSDe receipt token, or with Ethereal (Ethena’s DEX) for eUSDe.

3. Deposit the receipt token into Pendle for a principal token (PT) to lock in a fixed yield but give up a future ENA airdrop.

4. Aave lists sUSDe and eUSDe PTs as collateral.

5. DeFi degens rush to supply their PT assets for additional yield, then borrow stablecoins against it to pursue looping strategies for more yield.

It’s a beautiful example of the kind of positive sum games that a public blockchain can unlock when you have composability.

But I guess if eking out an additional basis point on every dollar of your capital doesn’t excite you, then it’s a speculative house of cards built on nonsense.

As of today, about $280m of “PT eUSDe May” and $115m of “PT Ethena sUSDe 31JUL2025” has been supplied on Aave.

Both markets hit their caps pretty quickly. In particular, the July sUSDe market filled within minutes of launch, largely thanks to one whale. Aave quickly responded by lifting caps on both markets — the eUSDe market was raised from $250m to $400m and the sUSDe July market from $85m to $170m.

In Ethena-related news, native USDe launched on the TON chain last week. Holding staked USDe will also give you an additional 10% APY (in TON) on top of native ~3-4% in sUSDe rewards.

— Donovan Choy

IOTA’s latest pivot

Q: Is IOTA’s “Rebased” mainnet with a Sui-derived consensus protocol finally the breakthrough that gets real‑world traction, or is it just another way to burn the last of the 2017 ICO war chest while chasing fresh buzzwords?

A: IOTA’s history reads like “greatest hits” of crypto trends: tangled DAGs, an EVM sidechain, and now running Move-based smart contracts. The consensus protocol, Starfish, is built on Mysticeti (the same DAG engine Sui adopted) but rewires enough plumbing so that calling it “Sui‑derived” sells its own contributions short. The foundation says it spent two years refactoring Mysticeti and still keeps 90 researchers on payroll. 

To your question, the short answer is: It’s too soon to tell. But Starfish is not just rebranding. To use a car metaphor, think of it like starting with Sui’s Mysticeti frame but swapping in a new engine. The silhouette looks familiar, but it drives — and maybe survives stress tests — differently.

Pairing it with the MoveVM also sidesteps Solidity’s bloat and slots IOTA into the same “object‑centric” design space as Sui and Aptos, which is trendy for good reasons like parallel execution.

But IOTA still needs: (1) neutral governance — previous centralization missteps linger in memories; (2) a killer dapp that exploits native DAG throughput rather than merely mirroring Ethereum; and (3) credible tokenomics for new builders, not just legacy bag holders. If those pieces land, Starfish could mark IOTA’s renaissance. The next 12 months of onchain activity will tell the tale.

Moving BTC like a boss

Q: BitcoinOS just shuttled one bitcoin to Cardano and back without a traditional mint and burn bridge, using a new “xBTC” wrapper and BitSNARK proofs. Slick proof of concept — but what’s to stop someone forging the Cardano leg and walking off with the real coins on Bitcoin?


A: In other words, how does Bitcoin itself know a withdrawal on another chain is real, and is this anything more than a headline‑grabbing stunt?

The safety hinges on a zero‑knowledge light client compiled into a BitVM‑style Bitcoin script. Think of it as a self‑contained verifier that lives in a Taproot leaf: It accepts a small proof that a transaction is final on Cardano that burns exactly one  xBTC to a given address.

If the proof fails, the script refuses to release the locked BTC. That requires a similar challenge-response game to BitVM’s approach, according to L2 Iterative Ventures’ Weikeng Chen.

“The last step generates a BitSNARK that can be challenged by verifiers if the proof is incorrect,” Chen told Blockworks. “It would be instructive to see how this can be carried out on Bitcoin mainnet by a diverse set of verifiers.”

That means, in principle, only Bitcoin’s usual miners enforce the logic — no federation or multisig needed.

Rival experiments, such as Bitlayer’s BitVM Bridge on the Monad testnet, chase the same bridgeless vision but are still pre‑mainnet and rely on their own custom circuits. Today, BOS uses a controlled path: Cardano ⇒ Bitcoin with bespoke circuits. But the principle is chain‑agnostic: Once a zk light client exists, any L1/L2 that exposes deterministic state can plug in.

The remaining hurdles are practical: Proof costs must keep falling, and every target chain needs audited circuits. Still, moving mainnet BTC without custodians for the first time is slick. It’s the first concrete proof that zk‑enabled “programmable Bitcoin” can police its own exits. That can be a real boon for Bitcoin‑native DeFi.

— Macauley Peterson

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The ongoing battle for memecoin market share

Can Raydium’s LaunchLab rival pump.fun?

Danny: It’s interesting that Raydium is building an architecture that's modular and letting other brands create their branding identity on top of it, then capture some portion of the fees for themselves. That's the Morpho model. It’s also introducing some customizability around the bonding curve parameters. The bigger question at play is: Is it gonna work? Or is the pump.fun brand too strong?

Westie: I think it's a pretty viable and interesting model. Even if Raydium doesn’t necessarily have a relationship with the end user, this lets it attract the players who do. Especially those within the memecoin sector — Bonk being the perfect example. This launchpad lets Raydium have a partnership with players that have the distribution, so it's a match made in heaven.

On Boop’s airdrop

Danny: There were some strange criteria for this launchpad’s airdrop. Basically you had to launch a token that reached a certain market cap in order to claim your airdrop. That already reduces the time until you can claim it. It seems there were also some limits around who could get a certain tier of the airdrop. There was a ton of gamification around this.

Westie: This airdrop was so devious. I was curious so I did some math. If you were to basically manipulate your token price to $5 million in market cap — which was what you needed to have your 30-day waiting period wiped out — you'd only need to spend $13.5k to get it off the bonding curve, then it was burned forever. So you were incentivized to buy enough of your own token to $5 million market cap. Once it gets there and you're unlocked, then you just sell it all again.