Berachain will hard-fork on July 7–8, 2026, retiring its BGT governance token and collapsing its dual-token incentive model into a single-token design built around BERA and the staked wrapper sWBERA.
The Berachain Foundation describes PoL Next as the most significant upgrade since mainnet launch. For BGT holders, Reward Vault stakers, and teams built around Boost logic, the fork changes how emissions are earned, claimed, and integrated.
Boost ends, ERAs begins
The main mechanism change is the end of BGT Boost, the vote-based system protocols used to attract emissions regardless of on-chain revenue. It is being replaced by Emission Routing Allocation, or ERAs, which allocates guaranteed, multi-month emission streams to high-growth teams based on demonstrated revenue and utility, rather than epoch-by-epoch competitive bidding.
Protocols that relied on Boost votes to secure rewards without generating fees lose that pathway after the fork.
What BGT users need to do
BGT holders must redeem tokens through the Berachain Hub after activation, where BGT redeems 1:1 for BERA. BGT is deprecated after the fork.
Liquidity providers staked in Reward Vaults need no manual action: the Berachain documentation states that any BGT remaining on a vault from before the upgrade converts automatically to WBERA on the next claim, transparent to the staker.
Teams running integrations with BGT LST dependencies or Boost logic must update their code before the fork.
Emissions move to WBERA
Post-fork emission rates are fixed at the protocol level: 0.4 WBERA per block goes to validator operators and 1.305 WBERA per block to the reward distributor. All rewards are denominated in WBERA.
Participants can exit as native BERA or hold sWBERA, which carries a seven-day unbonding period.
Why the fork matters
Berachain launched with a two-token design: non-transferable BGT for governance and rewards, and BERA as the transferable gas token. That separation anchored emissions to governance participation rather than capital flows.
PoL Next abandons that structure and routes value accrual through BERA and its staked form. The Berachain Foundation has not published an exact block number for the fork. The stated mainnet target is July 7–8, 2026.