# Berachain Public Testnet “Artio” is live

Source: https://medium.com/berachain-foundation/the-bera-era-has-begun-49a18c6d77c0
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Berachain-Public-Testnet-Artio-is-live?index=0x65a66962e186940e7036570b821ff4e68bfd8d5482bc4ce92f59face08fb9840c216e47b
Submitted by ciefa.eth on 2024-01-16 UTC, 1 upvote, 0 comments

## Summary

Berachain has launched its public testnet, "Artio," and the article presents the chain as an EVM-equivalent L1 built on the Cosmos SDK that uses Proof of Liquidity (PoL) consensus, a variant of delegated proof of stake. Under PoL, users earn BGT, a soulbound staking token, only by providing liquidity to chain-enshrined DeFi primitives such as a native AMM DEX, a perps exchange, and a stablecoin lending platform. The article says validators direct BGT rewards across governance-approved protocols, and that users can delegate BGT to earn $HONEY fees and bribes or burn it one-way into BERA. It also states the chain has about 100 validators and plans a mainnet launch later this year.