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Berachain is retiring the HONEY name and rebranding its native stablecoin as Bera USD (BUSD), but unlike a conventional token migration, users will not receive a new asset or move funds to another contract.
The Berachain Foundation said on Aug. 19 that HONEY and BUSD are the same token using the same smart contract. Only the token name and ticker are changing. Wallet balances, liquidity positions, and the underlying stablecoin remain in place as applications update their interfaces from HONEY to BUSD.
Berachain said the new branding is aimed at making the product easier to identify as it targets more institutional users. HONEY was recognizable inside the Berachain ecosystem but gave little indication to newcomers that the asset was designed to track the US dollar.
A recent DefiLlama snapshot put HONEY circulation at approximately 10.5 million tokens, down about 40% over one month, meaning the rebrand arrives after a substantial contraction in its outstanding supply.
1/ Introducing Bera USD ($BUSD)!$HONEY is rebranding. Same token, same contract, new name and symbol. pic.twitter.com/S5NxvlOwgj
— Berachain Foundation 🐻⛓ (@berachain) August 19, 2026
The most important part of the announcement is what is not happening.
There is no HONEY-to-BUSD token swap and no new contract address. Users should not need to send tokens to a migration contract or claim replacement assets.
That point is particularly important because token rebrands often attract phishing campaigns offering fraudulent migration links.
Berachain’s existing stablecoin contract remains the identifier users should rely on rather than the ticker displayed by a wallet or decentralized exchange. A recent block explorer transaction identifies the HONEY contract as “0xFCBD14DC51f0A4d49d5E53C2E0950e0bC26d0Dce.”
Wallets, exchanges, and decentralized finance applications may not all update the displayed name simultaneously. Berachain said it expects vendors to complete the BUSD rollout shortly after the announcement.
The network itself currently holds around $60.4 million in stablecoins, according to a recent DefiLlama snapshot, with Tether’s USDt (USDT) accounting for more than 63% of that total.
There is one technical consequence.
Because the token name forms part of its EIP-712 signing domain, changing HONEY to Bera USD changes the domain separator used to validate certain cryptographic signatures.
Berachain warned that pre-signed permits and offchain approvals created using the old HONEY name will become invalid and need to be signed again.
Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 712 domains can include a human-readable name, version, chain ID, and verifying contract. Changing one of those domain values changes what a valid signature is signing against.
OpenZeppelin’s ERC-20 permit implementation similarly initializes its EIP-712 domain using the token name. Permits allow users to approve token spending through a signature instead of submitting a separate approval transaction.
That means a user who signed a HONEY permit but has not yet submitted or used it could see the transaction fail after the rename.
This is narrower than a token migration. Berachain has not said ordinary balances must be moved or that users need to recreate every previously executed onchain transaction. Its warning specifically concerns pre-signed EIP-712 authorizations created under HONEY.
The choice of BUSD creates another issue Berachain will need to manage: The ticker shares the same name as what used to be one of crypto’s most recognizable stablecoins.
Bera USD has no connection to the former Binance-branded BUSD stablecoin.
The older BUSD was issued by Paxos on Ethereum under a partnership with Binance. New York’s Department of Financial Services ordered Paxos to stop minting it in February 2023 over unresolved issues concerning Paxos’ oversight of its Binance relationship.
Paxos subsequently ended its relationship with Binance and stopped issuing new BUSD. Binance later phased out support for the stablecoin. Existing Paxos-issued BUSD has not disappeared entirely: Paxos said as recently as March 2026 that it no longer mints BUSD but still permits eligible customers to redeem it for dollars or convert it into USDP.
That leaves two unrelated assets potentially appearing under the same BUSD ticker.
For Berachain users, the practical rule is simple: Bera USD is the renamed HONEY contract, not Binance USD, and not a newly issued replacement token.
The rebrand is mostly cosmetic. The exception is sitting one layer deeper, where previously signed EIP-712 permits carrying the HONEY domain can no longer be relied upon after the name change.
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