This is the Bong Bear OG equivalent article and is needed for BearGate and InfinityGate.
Henlo, please note everything written after this statement may, or may not be, psyops. This is written for education and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Most of this was written by Napzilla who has a lot of bear jpegs and edited by Janitooor who also has a lot of bear jpegs and is also a seed investor in Berachain. Remember anon, do your own psyops.
Henlo, and furthermore, Ooga Booga. This story begins as most epic stories begin: shitposting. And ends by having brought you, dear degen, up to date with the latest chapters in the unfolding story of the Beras. We’ll have arrived at the pending launch of a novel L1 and have shared tales of a >2000x (at modest estimates) return for OG holders of some distinctive NFTs. You will learn all about it very thooon. But first we should note that we’re embarking on a project which is doomed from the outset. There is really no way that any one person, group, or project could write a canonical Bonga Bera 101, as they’d miss so many chapters, pastas, and characters of this hilarious, ridiculous, deranged community and culture. Be that as it may, we will with a heavy heart, attempt to relay at least the tip of the iceberg for future polar bera archeologists. Just the tip.
But where were we? Ah yes, shitposting. At first there was only shitposting. Olympus had taken off and the memes with it. In the Olympus discord, the off-topic channel was the center of the shitposting world. All day, every day the most mentally ill degenerates in all of crypto would be in there creating absurd copypastas, memeing everything, and paying Hard Rock Nick their hard-earned (via OHM rebase) money to FUD their own bags. Anyone who spent any significant amount of time with the off-topic Ohmies surely remembers it as one of the greatest experiences in their crypto journey. It was the best of times.
For a brief period from August to November 2021, buying into anything OHM-adjacent was a sure bet. Every play printed money and the INCOOOM possibilities were impossible to ignore. An Ohmie releasing an NFT collection? A guaranteed 5x. A project where your OHM yield could be increased further? Better get in there. A way to leverage your staked OHM to buy more OHM, better known as (9,9)? YES SIR! On second thought, maybe you should be very careful about that one… Rome? Pls ser.
Enter Smokey the Bera (fka Patcho, the leader of the opposition to OIP-18) and Papa Bear. Smokey was always the face and primary shill of the project. Papa Bear was more lowkey since he was locked in the art dungeon being forced to draw the beras, but would occasionally be given a break to post a few messages. They started some classic off-topic shilling of their NFT project that Ohmies could not ignore: cute pictures of bears smoking bongs. The average off-topic Ohmie is about 100x more likely than the crypto population at-large to be a massive pothead, so this project resonated deeply. It didn’t take much to get buy-in from the newly wealthy degenerates who spent their days and nights posting “?hades” in Discord. These folks were sure to buy up a reasonably priced NFT made by two of their very own. At the time it was just a fun project targeted towards a raucous community who had money to spend, nothing more. Who could have predicted that buying a picture of a bear smoking a bong would be one of the most profitable plays in recent crypto history?
The Bong Bears mint occurred on August 27th, 2021. 100 absolutely zooted beras priced at .069420 ETH (~$225 at the time) each, plus 6 honoraries and 1 accidental duplicate (the glitch bera… devs were too damn high). The mint was unlike most others at the time. The standard process was (and generally still is) to click a mint button and receive a random NFT from the collection. But the beras have always done things a little differently. For this mint, all of the bong beras were available to view on OpenSea beforehand, so everyone could peruse the collection and choose the bear(s) that they wanted to buy before they were open for purchase. The technically illiterate (and generally illiterate) devs didn’t know what the hell they were doing, so they created the beras as OpenSea Shared Storefront NFTs (ERC-1155) instead of as their own contract (ERC-721). This would have future implications which will be discussed later, but at the time nobody in the community gave a shit, they just wanted something new and shiny to buy.
The price of gas was high on that fateful day in August, as it always was when the price of one Ethereum was over $3,000. In fact, the gas fee to purchase one OG bonga bera was almost as much as the price of the jpeg itself. This didn’t stop the Ohmies (and anyone else lucky enough to be aware of the sale) from buying every single one of those beautiful baked beras. The Bong Bears (and Olympus off-topic) discord was a madhouse during the mint. Each potential buyer had their eye on a bear or two that they would bid. Once the clock struck 8:00 EST, the Bong Bears minted out in about 30 minutes.
Gas wars claimed more than a few casualties that day, as many hopeful buyers ended the frantic mint period as unfortunate noberas. Some of the more rare-looking beras, like the astronauts, had many people bidding, so those willing to pay the most in gas got the bears. It hurt to miss on the bera you wanted. Not just emotionally, but financially as well. Failing a $200 gas transaction is no joke, even for people making thousands of dollars (in OHM) every 8 hours. Some aspiring buyers failed one transaction and were unable to afford to try again for another bera. A true tragedy.
As with any NFT mint, the flippooors surfaced in the following days. These paper-handed former beras flipped their future-generational-wealth-providing jpegs for fractions of an ETH. For the sake of their mental health, we hope that these individuals have not been following the trajectory of the beras after they sold. Speaking with some of the earliest OGs such as Kalius and tweakalot, they remember complaining (“WEN MARKETING”) that they’d been rugged (semi-sarcastically) because there was little to no communication for days… until Smokey showed them the light.
The flipping continued for a few weeks before stronger hands took control. The last sub-1 ETH sale occurred on September 24th, 2021, which non-coincidentally was the day of Olympus’s FOHMO 3.
Olympus’s periodic FOHMO events are a way for the Ohmie community to take a peek behind the scenes to see what the team is up to. The events are (or at least were during the good ol days) a massive hypefest of (3,3) with Zeus and the Olympus team speaking about their ongoing work and allowing other community members to ask questions and talk about their own projects to a large audience.
But FOHMO 3 was a very special one. OHM was at $600 each and climbing rapidly, and the Ohmies were in a frenzy. Upon joining the event held in the Olympus Discord, listeners were met with two bera profile pictures on the main stage, and many others in the audience. Zeus and Wartull, the founder and very early contributor of Olympus were rocking the fuck out of their honorary beras. The Ohmies took note with a little help from all the other beras spamming the chat, and the thin floor was swept, bringing the floor price up to 3 ETH, a low that was never seen again. Indeed legend has it that Zeus was the very first sweepooor of the bears.
This dichotomy between left curve and right curve within the bera community has been a core pillar of the dynamic tension which has given the project and community such vibrancy. On the one paw, pictures of stoned bears loved by knuckle draggers, on the other paw pictures of stoned bears loved by some of the biggest gigabrains in CT and DeFi (Zeus, Wartull, DCF, etc). Throughout these early days, midcurvers (such as Mark11 on the Agora Podcast) were perplexed by these tensions. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that these signals were early premonitions of how this tension would continue to build… but that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Suffice it to say these tensions still exist throughout DeFi and we can only ’majin the midcurve salty tears when the smell of honey wafts through CT like the lil cottage in Goldilocks…
Thus began the meteoric rise of the beras. In the aftermath of FOHMO 3, many beras exchanged hands. Nobody knew what was to come, they just liked the art. Many high-profile Ohmies were sporting bera pfps in Discord and on Twitter, and life was good. We will simply not mention anything that happened to OHM starting in December 2021, we will just focus on the success of the beras.
Life was good if you were a bera. The Bong Bears discord was popping and the beras were shitposting their days away. But something was brewing. Something that would change the NFT game, and possibly the future of crypto.
Bonga Bera Pro did not come entirely as a surprise. Smokey and Papa dropped some hints in Discord, although most assumed it was just a meme due to the launch of Olympus Pro at around the same time (as well as the release of the new Bond movie - No Time to Die). Olympus Pro was a BONDing service that allowed other protocols to own their own liquidity via Olympus. The concept of rebasing, popularized by Olympus, was a millionaire-maker for Ohmies and was being duplicated ad-nauseam across every possible L1, becoming the second most forked contract in DeFi behind Uniswap. So why couldn’t an NFT rebase? As it turns out, they can, and on October 16th, 2021 (with based announcement video made by passytee of OhBabyGames) all OG Bong Bear holders were airdropped a brand new Bond Bear in their wallet, making the Bong Bears the first rebasing NFT ever. By this point, Smokey and Papa had looped in their ol’ bera fren Dev Bear to help make a contract. Little did Dev Bear know that this was the beginning of their cunning plan to entice him away from big FAANG tech to the world of bears. This meant there were also 25 Bond Bears available via contract mint, giving aspiring beras the chance to buy in for far less than it would cost to purchase an expensive OG. The bonda beras shared the art style of their predecessors, but these bears were James Bond themed. Get it? Olympus bonding and rebasing… rebased James Bond beras. You gotta love it.
Once the first bera rebase (or rebera) occurred and the bera devs released the roadmap showing many more rebases to come, the train could not be stopped. Bera holders unconditionally loved the beras for the art and vibes before this, but with an actual plan to give each holder exponentially more bears, the passion and belief in the project reached a whole new level. Bera believers went all-in on the project and started hoarding the Bong and Bond beras, knowing that they would generate a massive den down the line. And for the sharp eyed bears, it dawned that the Bongb Bears were indeed another 10k PFP Animal Drop, but being released through the novel mechanism of rebasing bears, with less than half released so far.
The next rebase, The Boo Bears, arrived on October 29, 2021 with 271 bears (44 available for mint) decked out in festive costumes to celebrate Halloween. For this collection, the rebase NFTs were no longer beardropped into holder wallets (other than one legacy beardrop for each OG holder), but instead could be claimed through the Bong Bears website. An interesting aspect of these new beras is that some were wearing costumes representing protocols like TempleDAO and Rome (don’t judge, these were popular at the time), and certain community members wanted to get their hands on them. Consequently, the bera OTC market really started to heat up. This would be a good time to note that none of the bera collections have any attribute metadata, and therefore there's no way to rank rarity. All beras are 1/1s, just like each wonderful holder. This brings a unique element to the bears that almost no other collection can recreate. Holders are generally happy to straight up trade bear for bear because, as the saying goes, 1 bera = bera.
It was around this time when the Bera community engagement reached a different level. An individual with formidable cleaning skills started DM-ing beras and sweeping floors at meme prices of 3.3 eth for Boos and 4.2 eth for Bonds. His name was Jani and he would go on to reunite dozens of families and adopt cubs and do seemingly -EV trades by swapping down collections and leaving oodles of ETH on the table while saying esoteric things such as “He who controls the floor, controls the beraverse.” Indeed Jani operated (with a lot of help from Kalius, the resident human-to-bera directory) as the de facto OTC bera clearing house for reuniting familia (by this point even midcurve Mark11 was aboard the bera train with Jani helping to bring the Olympus Agora podcast bera hohm) until the adoption of sudoswap as the preferred platform for reconnecting familia and the arrival of some janitors with larger dens… but more on that later.
It was also around this time a certain wizard started sending feetpics to Zeus and blackmailing him together with his best friend, former fluffy gang member and lowlife, Mr Bera. You can see The Mr. Bera Adventures and follow the story here. Penny would go down in bera history for getting an OG Bong Bear for sending feet pics to a grown man for 69 days straight. Aspiring OF “models” take note.
Then came the babies. The Baby Bears collection dropped on December 16, 2021, right in time for the holiday season. Resident reporter FW remembers:
”This was when I joined, I remember it so vividly. At the time, 40-50 Beras were huddled up in VC. Papa, Devon, Smokey, Chupe, Kalius, $er, and the regulars all there. *The Website wasn't available so we had to mint DIRECTLY off the contract*. With a mint price of 0.42069 it was daunting for noberas to enter but some did.”
This rebera included 571 babies, with 74 of those available to mint by the public. Indeed, many of the babies were Christmas and holiday-themed. While exciting and festive, these beras held another secret. Each bera from the previous collections had a baby version! The airdropped and claimed beras had no guarantee that the owner of the previous bera would receive the baby version of it. So of course, the bera community being the hilarious degenerates that they are set off to try to reunite “families.” In the weeks following, the bong beras Discord was alive with OG, Bond, and Boo bera owners trying to find a way to get their matching babies. If they were able to find the owner, many utilized the P2P swapping protocol sudoswap (now known as OTC sudoswap) to safely trade bera for bera. Some were successful, some are still looking to this day. Godspeed soldiers 🫡. But if we learned anything from the babies, it’s that the beras agree with Vin Diesel on one thing:
Over the months after the OG mint, the beras loved to joke about a “Berachain.” Sometime after the baby bera drop, Berachain took the giant leap from meme, to full-fledged reality. The devs decided to actually do something. Dev Bear (bearmo these days) joined the Bong Bears Discord in mid-November 2021 “part-time” and immediately joined in on the bera shenanigans, though we now know that the duo’s cunning plan had succeeded as they then became a trio. He waited a few weeks before dropping the most remarkable alfa on the unknowing beras.
So now some lucky beras were aware that there was potentially a chain in the works. Nobody knew the first thing about it, other than the name. The hype was generally contained within the Bong Bears Discord, but once the team was ready for a real announcement, nobody was truly ready for what was to come…
From December 2021 to March 2022 A LOT happened. During the beginnings of what evolved into the latest bear market, the new and old beras started spending more time in Voice Chat (VC). From late night Poker games initially starting with OGs such as Kalius, Penny, and Kedi later joined by Chupe, $er, and even newer Beras like FW - a regular rotation of VC's started happening.
Whether it was connecting over the fall of the OHM/Rome/bulla market, or bonding over these Bears Smoking Weed, the origin of "VC is where the real alfa happens” began. Even the newer entrants became giga Bullish. Whispers of this "BeraChain" would happen during these late night hang outs. Turns out, the Beras are gamers and the VC crew started playing Warzone together. Occasionally Dev Bear would join in VC and play, and then it became a regular occurrence. Between bopping noobs, the KeyBoardMaster (Dev) and the VC crew became tight. Also, during this time staples in the community such as PFP joined as well and countless lore, copypastas, and more were born.
On March 14, 2022 Dev Bear posted a proposal in the OlympusDAO forum looking for comments on an upcoming proposal to have Olympus participate in a seed round for “BeraChain.” The proposal was seeking $500K in OHM (now worth about $3.50) for 2% of the genesis token supply at a $50M fully diluted valuation. The proposal received mostly positive comments, and a whole lot of “Berachain fixes this” copypasta. Four days later, the OIP-87 vote went live and passed with flying colors, with 78% of votes (118K OHM) in favor of proceeding with the partnership and seed. The other 33K OHM in votes… ngmi af. This was a major win for the beras, and further proof that Ohmies 🤝 beras.
This was the beginning of the hard core memetics within the community. "Berachain isn't real", "Berachain fixes this," etc began here and turned out to be an effective method to gain traction in CT and Discord. This was also the beginning of Smokey’s reduction of the 5 minute elevator BD pitch to classics such as “Henlo'' and “Ooga booga” sprinkled with the occasional “furthermore.” From this point on, the beras were more than just a community of stoner degenerates. They were a community of stoner degenerates with a chain on the way. If it exists, that is.
Which brings us to the Berachain Discord. A real Discord created for a fake chain. A testament to the hubris of humanity. It opened to the public on April 3rd, 2022 and the beras started filing in. Two days later, Smokey posted a cryptic announcement:
“Berachain is not an EVM-compatible blockchain built using the Cosmos SDK and is mostly definitely not launching this summer on a brand new Proof of Liquidity consensus engine. Since Berachain isn’t real, we will not be rolling out any additional information about chain mechanics, partnerships or fundraising over the next few weeks.”
Historians still have no idea what the hell he was talking about, but in crypto, if you build it, the degenerates will come. So they came, and being degenerates and all, they aped hard into every bera NFT available. Floor prices skyrocketed as everyone looked for any smidgeon of exposure to Berachain, which again, did not and does not exist. It was during these wonderful times that new janitors stormed the scene: BurstingBagel, BeraMan69, and Digits Capital to name a few, but we’re of course forgetting many, many more.
From April to August 2022 the Beras really began to gun the marketing engine. From podcasts to Twitter Spaces it seemed that Berchain was becoming more real. During this period, the market exploded after the Terra Luna situation, so pivots had to happen and things went into hibernation for a bit. During this time, the bears rebased. Who would’ve thought that during the down only market, these GUD JPEGS of Bears smoking weed would be making people lots of $HONEY.
Around this time Some Canadian Beras met up in Montreal. PFP began grinding out Stickers and creating bera memes just because he was passionate about the community. This led to lots of memes, copypastas, and emotes that are still used to this day. Community events such as Poker Nights, Spaces, and a Rap Night continued happening with regularity that coincided with the opening of the new server.
Let’s get back to the NFTs for a minute. The beras had to wait patiently for the next rebase. The devs would like you to believe that the increased focus on Berachain was the reason it took so long, but the reality is that Papa Bear (still locked in his art dungeon) had a lot of drawing to do to produce the fourth rebase: The Band Bears. Another very fun to collect set, the banda beras are a collection of 1,175 jammin beras released on 4/20/22 (blaze it). The public was able to mint 107 of them, which continued to expand the community. Each of these musical beras was styled after a musician. Somehow, with this new art the bera team had managed to create an even more compelling way to encourage users to trade for beras that fit their taste. It was not uncommon to see wild OTC trades like Johnny Cash for Bob Dylan or Future for George Michael. Each artist had both an OG version and a baby version, so it was possible to collect both variants of Chad from Nickleback… if that’s what you’re into.
It was around that time that some events unfolded which make an honorable mention to $er, who Papabear has called “the backbone of the community,” worthwhile. As well as being the self described “Mall Cop of the Bongbears,” $er has been one of the OGs stoking the cultural fires of the beras and looking out for the underberas since OG times. Here is how Sila, a fellow community member, puts it: “0xSerJaMad was the first person in crypto to guide me through it all, saved me from multiple rugs and taught me how to mint from the contract. 99% of the time if he’s got beef with someone he’s both right and looking out for the smaller individual. Seriously the man will look out for other sometimes to his own detriment.”
As with every rebera, the next one was a stealth drop. The 2,355 Bit Bears by Berachain (what does it mean??) were born on August 24, 2022. Those with Honeylist in the Berachain Discord got a head-start of a couple minutes on the public to snag the 112 mintable ones, but almost everyone squandered the opportunity because they thought the announcement was a scam. Crypto is a traumatizing place, so you can’t blame them too much, you can only feel sorry that they missed out on an incredible opportunity. This batch of NFTs had a different art style than the rest, replacing the jovial signature designs of Papa Bear with pixelated little beras courtesy of PixelBera (who is developing Beratone which allows you to play with your lil bittys in-game).
Building off of a proven successful idea, the Bit Bears collection contains an 8 bit version of every prior bera. As you can imagine, once the beras revealed a week or so (it felt like months) after the mint, owners of every prior rebase immediately went hunting for their little pixel bois. One of the most efficient ways to reunite families was through the new and improved sudoswap.
In the previous months the chads at sudoswap had released a 0 to 1 innovation in NFTFi, enabling pools (either single sided or LP) with various configurable curving mechanics. Gigabrain bera, DeFi Ted of ParagonsDAO, was the bera visionary who paved the way for later berawhales (janitors) such as BurstingBagel, BeraMan69, deepname99 and Digits Capital to add pools for bits, bands, babys, boos, and bonds. It caught on like wildfire and adoption of sudoswap gave the community unprecedented ability to essentially swap any two bears without the hassle of finding an individual to trade with.
We could say more, but that’s a topic for another day when we’ll talk more about bera adoption of other tools such as Llamalend (borrow and lending against bears), Puttyfi (exotic options, puts, calls on bears), Caviar (fractionalising bears) and more. Suffice it to say whenever the beras jump into a new NFTfi service, adoption is massive (in some cases >95% of volume are the beras). To put this into perspective, volume across each of the rebases on sudoswap, at time of writing, is 2226 ETH which puts the Bong Bear rebases into spot #4 on sudoswap, and that doesn’t even take into account OTC and volume on other services.
There is still one more planned rebase left, and it’s potentially the most exciting one yet. This will be the most accessible collection yet, as it will spawn 4,713 new beras into the ecosystem, with 115 available for mint. As Smokey hinted at on The HoneyCast (check out the whole thing, but specifically at around 40:00 for this alfa), this rebase is expected to occur on Berachain. Everything has been building up to this, and the team will certainly deliver another incredible set of blazed beras.
You now know at least the tip of the iceberg of what there is to know about the Bong Bears. If you haven’t been too stoned whilst reading this, you now understand that the Bong Bears are indeed just another 10k Animal PFP Drop, which have so far given OGs a > 2000x return with the final rebera still on the way. IYKYK this has been a 0 to 1 innovation in community building, NFT distribution, and ecosystem development. When compared to other NFT collections, the Bong Bears and all their rebases need to be considered as a single collection to be able to make an apples-to-apples comparison. Even then, which other NFT project builders have the cajones to attempt an L1? Which L1 has seeded their ecosystem with a fanatical community with early stakes in the ecosystem? And all without a penny spent on marketing. What will the future hold for these zooted degens? When will The March of the Beras occur? Nobody knows for certain, but one thing is for sure: it has been one hell of a journey. Now go read Berachain, Cults and the Dawn of The Honey Jar if you haven’t already and learn about the FAT Bera Thesis. You will be glad that you did.
Ooga Booga.
Shoutout to the outstanding bera fam for their contributions to this article. None of this (both the article, and the overall success of the beras) would be possible without you: Kalius, Katamari, $er, Chupe, FW, Penny, noobsnax, Tez, and many more.