After a year of silence, the Layer1 public chain Core Chain has recently regained market attention due to its impressive surge. Core's exponential growth is attributed to the demand from Bitcoin miners and the emergence of BTCFi narrative.

In just half a month, Core's explosive growth nearly 7 times: The revolutionary BTCFi behind it

TL;DR

According to official sources, Core Chain is a Layer1 public chain driven by Bitcoin and compatible with EVM. It aims to complement Bitcoin while serving as a highly scalable smart contract platform. Currently, its ecosystem covers multiple tracks such as wallets, DEX, oracles, cross-chain bridges, NFTs, and gaming. As per data from the blockchain explorer, as of April 2nd, Core has facilitated over 230 million on-chain transactions, with wallet addresses surpassing 15.63 million.

Core Chain is operated by the decentralized organization Core DAO, with over 50 contributors from platforms like Binance, Coinbase, Huobi, BNB Chain, Moonpay, and Blockchain.com. For instance, one of the core contributors, Rich Rines, is the founder of AutoReach, an intelligent allocator, and has previously served as an engineering lead at Coinbase’s Funds Flow department, handling over $1 trillion in funds.

Previously, Core pioneered mobile mining by launching a free mining mobile client, allowing players to mine after registering through processes like facial recognition and KYC. It introduced various engagement methods such as solo mining, teaming up, or contributing to projects to enhance user participation. This approach, similar to many staking projects today, led to tens of millions of downloads. Core officially discontinued mobile mining only in December 2022.

In January 2023, Core announced the mainnet launch and subsequent airdrops. It received immense traction, with over 4.1 billion claims reported. Riding on the airdrop’s success, Core was listed on mainstream exchanges like OKX, Huobi, and Bybit. CoinGecko’s price trend shows that CORE reached its all-time high in February 2023, indicating its market appeal. However, it went through a prolonged downturn until its recent surge, which saw a staggering increase of nearly 6.9 times in just the past half month.

This shift is fueled by its focus on the BTCFi track. In late February this year, Core unveiled its vision and practice of “unlocking Bitcoin DeFi,” noting that around $1 trillion worth of Bitcoin is awaiting unlocking via BTCFi. While second-layer solutions for Bitcoin could enhance scalability, operational complexity, capital efficiency, liquidity issues, and other technical barriers hinder mass adoption. Core believes that aligning Bitcoin incentives from Bitcoin assets to smart contract platforms is key to unlocking Bitcoin DeFi.

To achieve this, Core announced the launch of non-custodial Bitcoin staking and coreBTC, a native wrapping of Bitcoin, to unlock $200 billion in BTC DeFi value. Non-custodial Bitcoin staking utilizes absolute time lock technology, enabling users to stake directly within the Bitcoin ecosystem without transferring to other platforms or wrapping, ensuring high security and trust. Users also receive CORE tokens as passive income.

coreBTC aims to create a more native wrapping of Bitcoin, introducing roles like custodians, movers, guardians, and liquidators to ensure security, decentralization, trustlessness, permissionless, and censorship resistance. Notably, if the collateral value falls relative to the locked Bitcoin value, Core allows liquidators to forcibly liquidate collateral by purchasing CORE tokens at a discounted price using coreBTC and burning coreBTC, thereby boosting collateral ratios and restoring custodians to a healthy state. Currently, coreBTC is live and has undergone security audits by Halborn. Atomic swap technology based on Hash Time Lock Contracts (HTLC) enables trustless peer-to-peer exchange of native assets (such as ERC20, BRC20, NFTs, and Ordinals) with other blockchains without central agencies, oracles, or relays, enhancing efficiency and user experience while maintaining decentralization and trustlessness.

Another noteworthy innovation of Core is its consensus mechanism, Satoshi Plus, which combines Delegated Proof of Work (DPoW) and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), integrating Bitcoin miners and pools into a secure and scalable smart contract platform. Recently, SpiderPool, one of the top ten Bitcoin mining pools, announced its participation in Core’s Satoshi Plus consensus mechanism for dual mining. Currently, 50% of Bitcoin’s hash power is involved in Core’s simultaneous mining. Moreover, due to EVM compatibility, Core can unlock more innovative applications and use cases for Bitcoin. Compared to similar protocols, Core believes it has advantages in EVM compatibility, block time, and trust, among others. For instance, Stacks and Rootstock lack EVM compatibility, while Sovereign Rollups face fraud proof issues.

Looking at recent developments, Core is accelerating its ecosystem development. For example, in February this year, Core launched the Core Innovators Program, offering over $300,000 in rewards to Web3 developers, aiming to decentralize Bitcoin ecosystem applications. The following month, the Core Foundation established a $5 million Innovation Fund to promote the Indian decentralized application ecosystem on Core Chain. Additionally, Core Chain launched the Core Venture Network, providing $15 million in funding for projects in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. The Core Foundation announced the issuance of Core Journey NFTs this month, providing exclusive rewards to users actively participating in Core ecosystem projects and community activities. Furthermore, the Core Foundation launched the six-month airdrop incentive program, Core Ignition.

Thus, the massive expectations of the BTCFi ecosystem explosion, coupled with miners’ income demand post Bitcoin halving, may be key factors propelling Core’s rapid rise.

Forwarded Title: In just half a month, Core’s explosive growth nearly 7 times: The revolutionary BTCFi behind it

After a year of silence, the Layer1 public chain Core Chain has once again garnered market attention recently due to its remarkable surge. Core’s exponential growth is attributed to the demand from Bitcoin miners and the emergence of the new BTCFi narrative.

According to official introductions, Core Chain is a Layer1 public chain driven by Bitcoin and compatible with EVM. It aims to complement Bitcoin while serving as a highly scalable smart contract platform. Currently, its ecosystem covers multiple tracks such as wallets, DEX, oracles, cross-chain bridges, NFTs, and gaming. As of April 2nd, according to the blockchain explorer, Core has facilitated over 230 million on-chain transactions, with wallet addresses surpassing 15.63 million.

In January 2023, Core announced the mainnet launch and subsequent airdrops. According to data at the time, the number of claims reached as high as 4.1 billion. Riding on the success of the airdrop, Core was listed on mainstream exchanges like OKX, Huobi, and Bybit. CoinGecko’s price trend shows that CORE reached its all-time high in February 2023, indicating its market appeal. However, it went through a prolonged downturn until its recent surge, which saw a staggering increase of nearly 6.9 times in just the past half month.

This transformation is backed by its bet on the BTCFi track. In late February this year, Core released a vision and practical essay titled “Unlocking Bitcoin DeFi,” pointing out that approximately $1 trillion worth of Bitcoin is currently awaiting unlocking through BTCFi. However, existing second-layer solutions for Bitcoin, while scalable, face operational complexity, capital efficiency, liquidity, and other technical barriers hindering widespread adoption, with user and developer experiences being overly complex. Core believes that the key to unlocking Bitcoin DeFi lies in aligning Bitcoin incentives from Bitcoin assets to smart contract platforms.

To achieve this, Core announced the launch of non-custodial Bitcoin staking and coreBTC, a native wrapping of Bitcoin, to unleash $200 billion in BTC DeFi value. Among these, non-custodial Bitcoin staking utilizes absolute time lock technology, enabling users to stake directly within the Bitcoin ecosystem without transferring to other platforms or wrapping. This significantly enhances security and trust and allows users to earn CORE tokens as passive income.

coreBTC aims to create a more native wrapping of Bitcoin, for which Core introduces roles such as custodians, movers, guardians, and liquidators to achieve security, decentralization, trustlessness, permissionless, and censorship resistance. Particularly, if the value of collateral falls relative to the locked Bitcoin value, Core allows liquidators to forcibly liquidate collateral. They do so by purchasing the collateralized token CORE at a discounted price using coreBTC and burning coreBTC. This action helps increase the collateral ratio and restore custodians to a healthy state. Currently, coreBTC is officially live and has undergone security audits by Halborn. Furthermore, atomic swap technology based on Hash Time Lock Contracts (HTLC) enables trustless peer-to-peer exchange of native assets (such as ERC20, BRC20, NFTs, and Ordinals) with other blockchains without central agencies, oracles, or relays, enhancing efficiency and user experience while maintaining decentralization and trustlessness.

Another noteworthy aspect is Core’s innovative consensus mechanism, Satoshi Plus, which combines Delegated Proof of Work (DPoW) and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), integrating Bitcoin miners and pools into a secure and scalable smart contract platform. Recently, SpiderPool, one of the top ten Bitcoin mining pools, announced its participation in Core’s Satoshi Plus consensus mechanism for dual mining. Currently, 50% of Bitcoin’s hash power is involved in Core’s simultaneous mining. Additionally, due to EVM compatibility, Core can unlock more innovative applications and use cases for Bitcoin. Compared to other similar protocols, Core believes it has advantages in EVM compatibility, block time, and trust, among other factors. For example, Stacks and Rootstock lack EVM compatibility, while Sovereign Rollups face fraud proof issues.

These developments suggest that the massive expectations of the BTCFi ecosystem explosion, coupled with miners’ income demand post Bitcoin halving, are significant factors driving Core’s rapid rise.

Disclaimer：

This article is reprinted from [Panews], All copyrights belong to the original author [Nancy，PANews]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
Translations of the article into other languages are done by the Gate Learn team. Unless mentioned, copying, distributing, or plagiarizing the translated articles is prohibited.