In this work we study the properties of a new algebraic variant of the degenerate Bernoulli polynomial βk (m, x) and study the corresponding degenerate Bernoulli number βk (m, 1) = m k β k (1/m), where β k (λ), λ = 0 is the standard degenerate Bernoulli number. Our approach relies on a new algebraic framework for generating functions and the action of a symbolic evaluation function on powers of polynomials. We show that βk (m, x) displays surprising links with other mathematical objects (such as Circulant matrices and Galois fields) and enjoys many interesting algebraic, symmetric and dynamical properties that could be deployed to perform efficient computations.