BeraPaw

Rejected venues wait the longest for re-review; a rejection has to earn another look before the scheduled date.

BeraPaw is a liquid staking protocol on Berachain. TVL was $39.8M at the 2026-08-14 survey, below the $100M materiality line, and size alone rejects it: one practice advising 100 households moves $1M to $8M into a venue on the same research, and at this size that book becomes the exit crush, whatever the protocol’s quality.

Kill criteria: the events that revoke this verdict
• TVL sustained above $100M for 30 days

The research file

Mechanism applicability

BeraPaw documentation identifies pBERA as a liquid-staked BERA token minted against BERA, WBERA, sWBERA or LBGT. Underlying assets are pooled across Berachain validators and a native staking vault; holders can separately stake pBERA into stpBERA for auto-compounded validator rewards. This establishes liquid-staking membership with validator, vault and token-liquidity dependencies. It does not validate claimed backing, delegation, contracts or reward allocation.

Current observation and scope

The DefiLlama protocol API read on 2026-08-15 showed only about $32K of tracked BeraPaw TVL on Berachain, far below both the prior survey and the shared v1 dossier’s $100M threshold. Current primary documentation still describes the pBERA mechanism and publishes contract addresses, so product identity remains observable. The decline is not treated as proof of an incident; governance, contracts, audits, validator concentration, incidents and current operating status remain deferred.

Exit applicability

BeraPaw says pBERA can be burned for BERA without a protocol fee, but redemptions enter a queue governed by validator-exit mechanics. A faster sale depends on available pBERA liquidity, while stpBERA first adds a vault unstaking step. At the current surveyed scale, even a modest advised position could dominate protocol or secondary liquidity. That capacity problem is sufficient under the shared dossier without claiming that the advertised 1:1 backing has failed.

Why the class rule decides

The shared v1 below-materiality dossier controls this application. Reopen only after a reproducible survey shows at least $100M of protocol TVL continuously for 30 days and current product activity is independently observable. The reopened memo must then verify backing and supply, governance and delegation control, contracts and audits, validator and vault concentration, incident history, fees, and observed queued and secondary exits under stress. Reaching the threshold would trigger review, not approval.

Sources

The claims above trace to these. Where a number could not be independently verified, the thesis says so.

• BeraPaw Docs — pBERA mechanism and redemption · primary · accessed 2026-08-15
  Supports: pBERA, liquid staking, validator allocation, native staking vault, queued redemption, stpBERA
• BeraPaw Docs — deployed contracts · primary · accessed 2026-08-15
  Supports: pBERA contract, BeraStaker, staked pBERA, deployment evidence
• DefiLlama — BeraPaw survey record · secondary · accessed 2026-08-15
  Supports: current TVL, Berachain, liquid-staking category

Inherited controls

The verdict above grades the protocol layer. Every position also inherits the asset it holds and the chain it settles on. The least safe layer sets the position’s grade, and the position table names which one that is.