This exponential growth is driven by increased demand from Bitcoin miners and the new BTCFi (Bitcoin Finance) narrative.
#CORE Chain is a Layer 1 public chain powered by Bitcoin and compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). It is designed to complement Bitcoin and provide a highly scalable smart contract platform. The project ecosystem already covers multiple areas such as wallets, decentralized exchanges (DEX), oracles, cross-chain bridges, non-fungible tokens (NFT) and games. According to data from Blockchain Explorer, as of April 2, Core has achieved more than 230 million on-chain transactions and has more than 15.63 million wallet addresses.
Core Chain is operated by the decentralized organization Core DAO, with more than 50 contributors from well-known institutions such as Binance, Coinbase, Huobi, BNB Chain, Moonpay and Blockchain.com. Among them, core contributor Rich Rines is the founder of the smart outbound dialer AutoReach. He served as the engineering director of the fund flow department of Coinbase and handled more than 1 trillion US dollars in funds.
Prior to this, Core was a leader in mobile mining, launching a free mobile client that allows users to participate in mining through registration steps such as face recognition and KYC, and increases user participation through single-player, team or project contribution. This model is similar to many current staking projects, allowing Core to 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 its mainnet and subsequently carried out an airdrop activity. According to data at the time, the number of airdrops reached 4.1 billion times. Under the airdrop craze, Core has also landed on many mainstream exchanges such as OKX, Huobi and Bybit. According to the price trend of CoinGecko, CORE hit an all-time high in February 2023, which also reflects the popularity of its market. However, the price has been falling since then. Until the last half month, Core suddenly began to rise strongly, with the highest increase reaching nearly 6.9 times.
Behind this transformation is its major bet on the BTCFi sector. At the end of February this year, Core released a long article on the vision and practice of "Unlocking Bitcoin DeFi", pointing out that there are about $1 trillion of Bitcoin in the current market waiting to be unlocked through BTCFi, but the current second-layer solution of Bitcoin, although scalable, has complex and technical barriers in terms of operation, capital efficiency, liquidity, etc., which hinders the large-scale adoption of Bitcoin. Core believes that the key to unlocking Bitcoin DeFi lies in extending Bitcoin's incentive mechanism from Bitcoin assets to smart contract platforms.
Therefore, Core announced the launch of non-custodial Bitcoin staking and Core native packaged Bitcoin (coreBTC) to release the value of BTC DeFi. Among them, non-custodial Bitcoin staking uses absolute time lock technology, allowing users to stake directly within the Bitcoin ecosystem without transferring Bitcoin to other platforms or packaging. It has a high degree of security and trust, and can obtain CORE tokens as passive income of Bitcoin;
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, when the value of collateral decreases relative to the value of locked Bitcoin, Core will allow liquidators to force liquidation of collateral and push up the collateral ratio by purchasing collateralized CORE tokens at a discount and burning coreBTC, and restore the custodian to a healthy state. At present, coreBTC has been officially launched and passed the security audit of Halborn; the atomic swap technology based on hash time lock contract (HTLC) can realize trustless peer-to-peer native asset exchange with other blockchains, such as ERC20, BRC20, NFT and Ordinals. This not only enhances its own efficiency and user experience, but also maintains decentralization and trustlessness.
It is worth mentioning that Core's innovative consensus mechanism Satoshi Plus is also one of its core advantages. By combining Delegated Proof of Work (DPoW) and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), Bitcoin miners and mining pools are incorporated into a secure and scalable smart contract platform. Recently, SpiderPool, one of the top ten Bitcoin hashrates, announced that it has participated in Core's Satoshi Plus consensus mechanism for dual mining. Currently, 50% of Bitcoin's hashrate has participated in Core's simultaneous mining. In addition, due to its compatibility with EVM, Core is able to unlock more innovative applications and use cases for Bitcoin. Compared with other similar protocols, Core believes that it has advantages in EVM compatibility, block time, and trust. For example, Stacks, Rootstock, etc. lack EVM compatibility, and Sovereign Rollups have fraud proof issues.
Judging from recent developments, Core is accelerating the development of its ecosystem. For example, in February this year, Core launched the Core Creator Program, which plans to provide more than $300,000 in reward support to Web3 developers, aiming to allow developers to focus on realizing decentralized applications in the Bitcoin ecosystem; the following month, the Core Foundation established a $5 million innovation fund to promote the Indian decentralized application ecosystem on Core Chain; at the same time, Core Chain launched the Core Venture Network, which will provide $15 million in funding support 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.
In summary, factors such as the expected explosion of the BTCFi ecosystem and the increased demand for minersâ income after the Bitcoin halving may be one of the important reasons driving the rapid rise of Core.
