How To Get Started With Berachain's Testnet?

Introduction

Berachain has been quite possibly the most long-awaited chain launch in crypto history. For years, traders have heard tales about whether it’s real or not - as of the Testnet launch this week, it is officially real. Led by a team of 4 pseudonymous bears, they’ve raised a $42M Series A at a $420.69M valuation, just another piece of the meme lore that has made Berachain so popular among crypto natives. Perhaps nothing speaks to their devotion to memes as much as the original NFT collection that created the Bera universe, Bong Bears, which is a collection of 100 “absolutely zooted” bears.

Bong Bear #62, Source: Opensea

Since Berachain is likely to be one of the largest airdrops this year, we wanted to take an early dive into the ecosystem to give our readers our review of the platform, how to use it, and how to potentially make money off of this upcoming airdrop with no monetary investment from yourself.

Quick Review and How To Use

First things first, it’s important to remember this is just a Testnet and it has been live for under a week, so bugs and latency issues are to be expected. Berachain has launched with a couple dApps already live, including a DEX, block explorer, a perpetuals exchange, and a few others. These are all common dApps on other chains so it’s nothing crazy, but nice to have things available to use out of the gate.

Berachain Faucet

In order to use the chain you need Testnet Bera to pay for gas on transactions, so I first went to the Bera faucet to get some free tokens. All you have to do is enter your wallet address, complete a quick captcha to prove you are not a bot, and then the website will send you some Bera to get started. While in theory this is great, the high traffic on both the site as well as the network itself caused a number of errors while I was trying to claim. I ended up waiting a few hours until traffic had died down, and then was able to use the faucet with no problem.

Next, I added the Berachain RPC to my Metamask Wallet (any EVM compatible wallet should work fine) using this guide. This allows you to transact on Berachain, and also see your Bera balance on your wallet.

If you scroll down on the faucet page, you can see the current live dApps on Bera and use the provided links to go directly to their respective sites. I recommend interacting with as many of these as possible to drive up your wallet activity in case there is an airdrop for Testnet users.

Currently Live dApps

Aside from using the above dApps, I also deployed a number of contracts on the testnet myself. As some developers on Testnets such as Celestia received 6 figures in airdrops just from deploying a few applications, I believe it is worth a shot. Even as someone who is not a developer, by using a contract creation tool like ThirdWeb I was able to deploy multiple contracts in under an hour. Simply connect your wallet to the site, create your account, skip past the payment methods tab, and navigate to the Contracts page. From there, you can pick your desired contract type and easily deploy it within minutes.

Conclusion

While we don’t know the mechanics of the airdrop, we know one is coming. It’s quite common for chains to airdrop tokens to developers and so with that knowledge, we believe it is very worthwhile to spend even an hour playing around with Bera. Since it is a Testnet, it costs $0 to use, yet the upside is massive.

We look forward to seeing new additions to the chain as it continues to develop, and we will keep our Beluga readers informed of any new information on the airdrop side. Until then, happy farming!