August 2025 Berachain Upgrade 🔱

Our next upgrade brings to Berachain four approved Improvement Proposals.

Bera-reth and Bera-geth are new forks of ParadymXYZ's reth and Ethereum Foundation's go-ethereum, under the upstream software licenses.

WARNING

All users, whether hosting an RPC or running a validator, must upgrade their Execution Client to either Bera-reth or Bera-geth, and upgrade to Beacon Kit 1.3.0, to continue following the chain.

August 2025 Upgrade Timeline

Date	Milestone
July 30, 2025	Beacon-Kit 1.3.0-rc1, Bera-geth v1.011602.0-rc4 and Bera-reth 1.0.0-rc.8 released for installation to Bepolia
August 1, 2025	Bera-geth v1.011602.0-rc5 released
August 4, 2025	All Bepolia infrastructure partners expected to be upgraded
August 6, 2025 @ 1600 GMT / 1200 EDT	Bepolia upgrade activates
TBD	Mainnet upgrade instructions posted
TBD	Mainnet hardfork activates

New Chain Clients and Genesis Files

Chain	Client
Bepolia	Bera-geth v1.011602.0-rc5
Bepolia	Bera-reth v1.0.0-rc.8
Bepolia	Beacon-Kit v1.3.0-rc1

Chain	Genesis file & md5 hash
Bepolia	b659cbef86a6eded371d8e443abf2c0b

Berachain will release stand-alone executables and Docker images for Linux ARM and AMD64 architectures. All clients are easily compiled for other systems and architectures with a few minutes' time; review their respective READMEs for details.

Operators currently running Geth or Reth can upgrade to our forked versions while retaining their current chain data files. Operators migrating from other clients should sync a new node with a snapshot.

Upgrade instructions

Test your modifications on non-production infrastructure to verify your upgrade process and new chain launch procedure that refers to Bera-reth/Bera-geth.

No configuration changes are needed aside from the new executables.

TIP

If you duplicate your EL installation to test, don't duplicate the (reth) discovery_secret or (geth) nodekey files to avoid interfering with your production node's peering.

Stop your current execution and consensus clients.
Install the new genesis files linked above into place, and verify their md5 hash.
Install Beacon-Kit and either Bera-geth or Bera-reth into place. See below for additional steps for Bera-geth.
Start both clients.

Geth Additional Steps

For bera-geth you must run bera-geth init after the genesis file has been installed to upgrade the chain data to reflect the new genesis. As a rule of thumb, invoke bera-geth init the exact same way you invoke bera-geth node to run your chain client.

We recommend this be made a permanent part of every geth startup.

Our recommended startup process now includes this.

bash

bera-geth init --datadir /path/to/geth/datadir /path/to/eth-genesis.json;

The geth datadir should contain the following directories:

bash

tree datadir;

# [Expected Output]:
# datadir
# ├── keystore
# └── geth
#     ├── blobpool
#     └── chaindata

Confirm upgrade

Beacon-Kit should log the following on startup:

	+==========================================================================+
	+ ⭐️ Star BeaconKit on GitHub @ https://github.com/berachain/beacon-kit    +
	+ 🧩 Your node is running version: v1.3.0-rc1                              +
	+ ♦ Eth client: unknown (version: unknown)                                 +
	+ 💾 Your system: linux/amd64                                              +
	+ 🍴 Deneb1 Fork Time: 1740090694                                          +
	+ 🍴 Electra Fork Time: 1746633600                                         +
	+ 🍴 Electra1 Fork Time: 1754496000                                        +
	+ 🦺 Please report issues @ https://github.com/berachain/beacon-kit/issues +
	+==========================================================================+

August 2025 Berachain Upgrade 🔱 ​

August 2025 Upgrade Timeline ​

New Chain Clients and Genesis Files ​

Upgrade instructions ​