This is a lengthy piece personally written by Jason Hitchcock, the CEO of Nasdaq-listed company Greenlane Holdings.
He logically addresses three core questions:
Why is the economic model of traditional L1 unfair to token holders?
How does Berachain's PoL mechanism turn 'security budget' into 'shareholder dividends'?
Why would a publicly traded company risk hundreds of millions on a blockchain that the market hasn't fully recognized yet?
If you hold any L1 tokens or are pondering 'what's the endgame for public chains',
this article is worth a serious read.
Greenlane CEO Jason Hitchcock outlines our vision for Berachain and why Greenlane is heavily invested in BERA in the form of a Digital Asset Treasury (DAT).
Hello everyone:
I want to formally articulate our vision for Berachain in writing, and why Greenlane has chosen to operate in the form of a Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) with BERA.
We believe Berachain is advancing a compelling new narrative. If executed properly, the market will have no choice but to confront it. This new narrative can be summarized as: almost all blockchains are operating under the same old rules, while Berachain is functioning under a whole new set of rules.
To understand why we’ve arrived at today, we need to quickly revisit some history.
1. Limitations of the old paradigm.
Bitcoin gave the market its first ability to transfer value without relying on banks. Peer-to-peer in the digital world is a novel concept, but in the initial years, people just found it interesting and didn’t really act on it.
Ethereum’s arrival made money programmable. This gave birth to DeFi, lending markets, decentralized exchanges (DEX), stablecoins, NFTs, DAOs, and nearly all subsequent digital finance experiments.
After Ethereum, the entire industry took years to launch new L1 public chains, but the pitch was almost identical: faster finality, lower fees, higher transaction throughput, new consensus mechanisms, better developer tools. Every chain is trying to be 'more like Ethereum than Ethereum' to compete for users and market.
Some of these improvements are real, but the small incremental optimizations don’t guarantee that new users will suddenly flood into any new L1.
This 'copy-paste' model for infrastructure upgrades highlights the innovative value Berachain provides—because Berachain completely disrupts the previously accepted core logic of L1 public chains.
2. The paradigm shift of Berachain.
Every public chain has a security budget. Bitcoin pays miners through PoW; other PoS networks pay validators fees to maintain network security and notarize transactions.
Paying miners or validators ensures the chain operates securely, and the database is publicly accessible. The native tokens of these chains are usually valued based on network transaction activity fees—but token holders never get a share of these fees.
To put it bluntly: token holders are merely betting on the future growth of the chain without participating in its cash flow.
Among many L1 public chains, what’s missing is 'the mechanism that directly links the success of protocols to the interests of token holders.'
Berachain addresses this issue by rerouting its security budget.
In the Berachain network, validators still get paid, but the remaining 80% of emissions are collectively decided by holders of staked BERA. These emissions can be directed towards those protocols, companies, and applications that should receive growth capital and continue to build on Berachain.
These protocols, applications, and companies do not get capital for free—they need to bid for it. The bidding funds flow back to the holders of staked BERA, while the protocols use the emissions they gain to develop their businesses.
Companies view their distributions as growth capital: to acquire customers, earn revenue by providing services, and then bid for more growth capital with that revenue. The flywheel effect is built into the blockchain and the business ecosystem on top of it: growth capital injected → real revenue output → more capital flows back to holders → cycle continues.
This way of capital allocation creates a self-sustaining cycle, which is fundamentally different from most other public chains:
Capital flows into applications.
This is used to acquire users, deepen liquidity, and grow revenue.
If the model works, they can bid more emissions with the revenue.
The bidding funds flow back to the holders of staked BERA.
Repeat cycle.
This doesn’t mean Berachain is just 'throwing money around.' It’s trying to transform its incentive budget into a self-sustaining capital allocation engine.
Currently, for every $1 of growth capital Berachain invests in a protocol, it can roughly recoup $0.6-0.7. The future goal is: for every $1 of emissions a protocol gets, Berachain hopes to recover $1.20 in returns.
From the perspective of BERA holders: when you stake, you’re not just 'earning yields'; you’re gaining exposure to a network attempting to convert ecosystem growth into recurring economic returns.
Before Berachain, all L1s viewed the security budget as a purely operational expense—holders bore the costs without receiving returns. Berachain, however, views it as growth financing, with returns flowing back to holders in the form of dividends.
The same logic extends to the native DeFi components integrated into Berachain: the stablecoin HONEY generates revenue, the native DEX returns trading fees to token holders, and the lending market BEND distributes revenue in the same way.
3. Real-world analogies.
The closest analogy to what Berachain is doing is a startup studio or holding company—like Constellation Software or Berkshire Hathaway.
Startup studios fund new companies, help them grow, and participate in their rising profits; holding companies allocate capital across a portfolio of operational businesses and expect compounded returns from the portfolio.
Berachain is not entirely equivalent to any one of these (after all, there’s no equity, no board seats, and no traditional ownership). But this analogy is useful because it explains Berachain's design goal: to direct capital towards businesses within the ecosystem and ensure that returns from this capital flow back through the network.
This is different from the usual L1 bets.
The usual L1 bet is: 'Can this chain win enough developers and users to make the token more valuable?'
Berachain’s bet is more targeted: 'Can this chain allocate capital to productive applications, cultivate a real ecosystem, and return more value to those who protect the network?'
This is a much more interesting question.
4. Why this proposition matters now.
The traffic distribution in the crypto industry is changing.
Large platforms like Coinbase, Robinhood, and Stripe have already mastered user relationships. As they bring more users onto the chain, the old routine of 'looking for the next universal L1' will become increasingly difficult. If the biggest platforms control the user interface, many public chains will only be able to compete for the attention of users they do not directly own.
There’s another path. Some chains are born around a dominant application. The clearest current example is Hyperliquid: its application found real demand, built a loyal user base, and then the chain became the infrastructure layer around that demand. In this model, the application comes first, and the chain follows.
This leaves others with a dilemma: if a chain has neither its own distribution channels nor a phenomenal application that already controls demand, what’s the reason for its existence?
Berachain's answer is: to fund the growth of its ecosystem and design the return structure to ultimately flow back to the network.
This answer creates a new system. The right question is: which applications can convert network capital into real revenue?
5. How Berachain will succeed.
To make Berachain successful, two things must be met:
1. Berachain needs to attract protocols that have a real product-market fit (PMF). Not the 400th homogenized DEX, not a simple fork with a new token, and not teams replacing demand with incentives. It needs applications that can convert liquidity and users into revenue.
2. These protocols need to view 'Proof of Liquidity (PoL)' as their best growth capital available. They bid not because they have no choice, but because Berachain provides a more efficient way to acquire users, deepen liquidity, and scale their businesses.
Although it’s still early days, we’ve seen directional trends in Berachain’s arguments: some companies and protocols are building on the Berachain network, finding product-market fit, and creating effective mechanisms for their businesses.
If, in the long run, the above two points fail to gain enough and sustained traction, then Berachain will just be another well-designed mechanism that didn’t achieve sufficient adoption.
5. The core of the bet is what BERA represents.
Berachain is not trying to be another 'faster, cheaper' L1. It’s trying to answer: can a blockchain convert its incentive budget into productive capital? And can these capital returns be structured in a self-sustaining, continuously appreciating manner to flow back to those supporting the network?
If the answer is yes, then Berachain is not just a new chain—it’s a whole new economic model for how chains should grow.
6. Greenlane is betting on this future.
At Greenlane, we are committed to the vision and mission that Berachain embodies. We believe cryptocurrency needs true economic innovation—capable of supporting a chain and the business network on it.
We are buying and staking $BERA to support the future growth of this network.
Time will prove the outcome of this bet. We’ve only just begun.