After a year of silence, the Layer1 public chain Core Chain has recently gained market attention again due to its impressive growth. Core's exponential growth is due to the demand from Bitcoin miners and the new narrative of BTCFi.
Core Chain is a Bitcoin-driven, EVM-compatible Layer 1 public chain that aims to complement Bitcoin and serve as a highly scalable smart contract platform. The current ecosystem has covered multiple tracks such as wallets, DEX, oracles, cross-chain bridges, NFTs, and Gaming. According to the block browser, as of April 2, Core has achieved more than 230 million on-chain transactions and more than 15.63 million wallet addresses.
Core Chain is operated by the decentralized organization Core DAO, with more than 50 contributors from Binance, Coinbase, Huobi, BNB Chain, Moonpay, etc. For example, core contributor Rich Rines is the founder of the smart outbound dialer AutoReach, and he worked as the engineering director of the Coinbase fund flow department, processing more than 1 trillion US dollars in total.
Prior to this, Core was the "forefather" of mobile mining. It launched a free mining mobile client, allowing players to participate in mining after registering through facial recognition, KYC, etc., and launched single-player, team or project contribution to increase user participation. This gameplay is similar to many current staking projects, which also made Core quickly gain tens of millions of downloads. It was not until December 2022 that Core announced the official cessation of mobile mining.
In January 2023, Core announced the launch of the mainnet and subsequently launched an airdrop. According to data at the time, the number of airdrops was as high as 4.1 billion. With the popularity of airdrops, Core also landed on several mainstream exchanges such as OKX, Huobi and Bybit. According to the price trend of CoinGecko, CORE hit a historical high in February 2023, which also shows its market popularity. Since then, it has continued to fall until the past half month when CORE suddenly started a strong rise, with the highest increase nearly 6.9 times.
Behind this transformation is its bet on the BTCFi track. At the end of February this year, Core published a long article on the vision and practice of "Unlocking Bitcoin DeFi", pointing out that there are currently about $1 trillion of Bitcoin in the market waiting to be unlocked through BTCFi, but for example, although Bitcoin's second-layer solution can achieve scalability, operational complexity, capital efficiency, liquidity issues and other technical barriers have hindered Bitcoin from being adopted on a large scale, and the user and developer experience is too complicated. Core believes that the key to unlocking Bitcoin DeFi lies in expanding Bitcoin's incentive alignment from Bitcoin assets to smart contract platforms.
To this end, Core announced the launch of non-custodial Bitcoin staking and Core's native packaged Bitcoin coreBTC to release the $200 billion market value of BTC DeFi. Among them, non-custodial Bitcoin staking is achieved using absolute time lock technology, which allows users to stake directly within the Bitcoin ecosystem without transferring Bitcoin to other platforms or packaging, which can greatly improve the high security and trust, and can also obtain CORE tokens as Bitcoin passive income;
coreBTC aims to create a more native packaged Bitcoin. To this end, Core introduces roles such as custodians, porters, guardians, and liquidators to achieve security, decentralization, trustlessness, permissionlessness, and censorship resistance. In particular, if the value of the collateral decreases relative to the value of locked Bitcoin, Core will allow liquidators to force liquidation of collateral, using coreBTC to purchase the collateralized token CORE at a discount and burn coreBTC, thereby driving up the collateral ratio and restoring the custodian to a healthy state. At present, coreBTC has been officially launched and has obtained a security audit from Halborn; the atomic exchange technology based on the hash time lock contract HTLC can realize trustless peer-to-peer native assets (such as ERC20, BRC20, NFT, and Ordinals, etc.) between other blockchains. The exchange does not require a central agency, oracle, or relay, which enhances its own efficiency and user experience while maintaining decentralization and trustlessness.
Judging from recent developments, Core is accelerating the development of its own ecosystem. For example, in February this year, Core launched the Core Founder Program, which plans to provide more than $300,000 in rewards to Web3 developers, aiming to allow developers to focus on implementing decentralized applications in the Bitcoin ecosystem; the following month, Core Foundation established a $5 million innovation fund to promote the Indian decentralized application ecosystem on Core Chain; in the same month, Core Chain launched the Core Venture Network, which will provide $15 million in funding for projects in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia; the Core Foundation announced the issuance of Core Journey NFT, which aims to provide exclusive rewards to users who actively participate in Core ecological projects and community activities; in addition, the Core Foundation also launched a six-month airdrop incentive plan, Core Ignition, this month.
From this point of view, the huge expectations for the explosion of the BTCFi ecosystem and the income needs of miners after the Bitcoin halving may be the important reasons driving the rapid rise of Core.
Moreover, the current circulation of CORE is very low, only 2.35%, and the market value is only 170 million, so there is still a lot of room for upward movement, and you can wait for a pullback and buy on dips.
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