Original author: Nancy, PANews

After being dormant for a year, Core Chain, a Layer 1 public chain, has recently gained market attention again due to its impressive growth. Core’s exponential rise is driven by Bitcoin miner demand and the new BTCFi narrative.

According to the official introduction, Core Chain is a Layer 1 public chain driven by Bitcoin and compatible with EVM. It aims to complement Bitcoin and serve as its highly scalable smart contract platform. The current ecosystem covers wallets, DEX, oracles, cross-chain Multiple tracks such as Chain Bridge, NFT and Gaming. According to the block 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 Binance, Coinbase, Huobi, BNB Chain, Moonpay and Blockchain.com. For example, core contributor Rich Rines is the founder of the smart outbound app AutoReach. He once served as an engineering director in the Coinbase capital flow department and has processed more than $1 trillion in funds.

Prior to this, Core was the originator of mobile mining. It launched a free mining mobile client, allowing players to participate in mining through facial recognition, KYC and other registration procedures, and launched single player, team or Participating in project contributions and other methods to increase user participation are similar to many current staking projects, which has also enabled Core to quickly gain tens of millions of downloads. It was not until December 2022 that Core announced it would officially stop mobile mining.

In January 2023, Core announced that the mainnet was online and subsequently launched airdrops. According to data at the time, the number of claims was as high as 4.1 billion. With the popularity of airdrops, Core has also been listed 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 shows its market popularity. Since then, it has continued to fall, until CORE suddenly started a strong rise in the past half month, with the highest increase increasing by nearly 6.9 times.

Behind this shift is its bet on the BTCFi track. At the end of February this year, Core released a long article on the vision and practice of Unlocking Bitcoin DeFi. It pointed out that there are currently about 1 trillion US dollars of Bitcoin in the market waiting to be unlocked through BTCFi, but for example, the second layer solution of Bitcoin can be scalable. However, operational complexity, capital efficiency, liquidity issues, and other technical barriers have hindered mass adoption of Bitcoin, and the user and developer experience has been overly complex. Core believes that the key to unlocking Bitcoin DeFi is to expand 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 encapsulated Bitcoin coreBTC to unlock the $200 billion market value of BTC DeFi. Among them, non-custodial Bitcoin staking is implemented using absolute time lock technology, which allows users to pledge directly within the Bitcoin ecosystem without the need to transfer Bitcoin to other platforms or packages, which can greatly improve high security and trust. You can also obtain CORE tokens as passive income from Bitcoin;

coreBTC aims to create a more native encapsulated 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 there is a decrease in the value of collateral relative to the value of locked Bitcoin, Core will allow liquidators to force the liquidation of collateral by using coreBTC to purchase the collateral token CORE at a discount and burn coreBTC, thus driving the collateralization ratio up and keeping custody The patient returns to a healthy state. At present, coreBTC has been officially launched and has obtained the security audit of Halborn; the atomic swap technology based on the hash time lock contract HTLC can realize trustless point-to-point native assets with other blockchains (such as ERC 20, BRC 20, NFT and Ordinals, etc.) The exchange does not require a central authority, oracle or relay, which enhances its own efficiency and user experience while maintaining decentralization and trustlessness.

What’s more worth mentioning is that Core’s innovative consensus mechanism, Satoshi Plus, is also one of its core strengths. It can integrate Bitcoin miners and mining pools into a safe and secure environment by combining Delegated Proof of Work (DPoW) and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) In a scalable smart contract platform. Recently, SpiderPool, one of the top ten spider mining pools in terms of Bitcoin computing power, also announced that it has participated in dual mining of its hashing power in Cores Satoshi Plus consensus mechanism. Currently, 50% of Bitcoin’s computing power is involved in Core’s simultaneous mining. In addition, due to its compatibility with EVM, Core can unlock more innovative applications and use cases for Bitcoin. Compared with other similar protocols, Core believes that it has advantages in many aspects such as EVM compatibility, block time and trust. For example, Stacks, Rootstock, etc. lack EVM compatibility, Sovereign Rollups has fraud proof issues, etc.

Judging from recent developments, Core is accelerating its own ecological development. For example, in February this year, Core launched the Core Pioneer Program, which plans to provide Web3 developers with more than $300,000 in reward support, aiming to allow developers to focus on implementing decentralized applications in the Bitcoin ecosystem; the following month, the Core Foundation was established with a scale of A US$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 US$15 million in funding for projects in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia; the Core Foundation announced the issuance Core Journey NFT aims to provide exclusive rewards for users who actively participate in Core ecological projects and community activities; in addition, the Core Foundation also launched the six-month airdrop incentive program 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 under the Bitcoin halving may be important reasons for the rapid rise of Core.