Core Chain: Unlocking $1T in Bitcoin Value - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2024

all right thanks everybody for coming out really here uh really happy to chat all things Bitcoin and all things core with you guys so to quickly kind of summarize core is a L1 blockchain that's powered by Bitcoin fully evm compatible in trying to unlock the trillion dollars of trap Bitcoin liquidity before we jump into it I want to take everybody back 10 years ago 10 years ago there was no way to take your Bitcoin stack and earn passive yield if you wanted to go out and earn additional Bitcoin you had to engage in maybe risky lending or become an amazing Trader which isn't necessarily what all of us are the best at well now with core in this btcy ecosystem you can earn passive yield or engage in a whole bunch of new applications that are trying to unlock additional Bitcoin utility a little bit about me uh so I've been in the crypto space for quite a long time I've been helping the core team go zero to one and then prior to that I was at coinbase leading money movements engineering for three and a half years helped move a couple trillion dollars but I'm a zero to one guy so the core opportunity was something that I couldn't pass up and I've been passionate about crypto for a really long time so I fell down the crypto Bitcoin Rabbit Hole more specifically back in 2013 and in 2013 this idea of this nons Sovereign store value this perfect digital gold just absolutely blew my mind mind I couldn't believe anything like this was was even possible and just at that point there was such this amazing idea in community of taking Bitcoin Beyond just store of uh store of value being a full medium of exchange and with that I think it's important to do a little bit of table setting on what Bitcoin brings to the table so Bitcoin through its proof for work consensus unlocked uh this perfect scarcity by taking energy and bringing it into this this beautiful digital Gold by solving the Byzantine generals problem and solving the Byzantine General problem means aligning all the different actors crypto economically so they behave honest versus be behave Byzantine and this is what Satoshi really brought to the world with uh with proof of work there's also perfect scarcity in Bitcoin we've all heard the meme they'll only ever be 21 million Bitcoin and it has this beautiful hard ratchet monetary policy where every four years like tomorrow uh we do this thing called the havening where the Bitcoin block reward gets cut in half and with that uh the network will eventually have to survive just on transaction fees but it's very easy to understand very different than something like the usfed since I first got involved in crypto the amount of crypto applications has exploded I remember when it was just Bitcoin then we had the rise of ethereum crypto kitties we have salana we've had nfts you name it it's all come to pass and the rate of change in crypto is only accelerating but in the Bitcoin space it's largely remained the same we've had tap rout we've had segwit so we've had some major protocol upgrades but the core protocol really remains unchanged however Bitcoin is still easily the dominant asset by market cap it's around 50% today and if the cycle continues to go as it is this might actually continue to expand and I think there's a little bit of square in the circle there how do we justify lack of technical Innovation but still being the dominant asset well the demand for Bitcoin is only growing and we've seen especially in such uncertain Economic Times having this non-sovereign store value has global appeal and now at the Advent of the spot Bitcoin ETFs everyone now can have access to the next best thing of spot Bitcoin we've had the largest fund managers in the world we've had people in their retirement accounts now everybody can hold Bitcoin if you can self custody you should still do that but for some people you can't and this is the next best thing Bitcoin is also now legitimized it's now part of the financial system there's also a ton of demand for new utility on top of Bitcoin and we really saw start early last year with ordinals which are nfts on bitcoin and then we saw BRC 20s now runes these programmable token standards people are trying to do more with their Bitcoin they want more than just digital gold but with these new use cases we're starting to bend Bitcoin and maybe contort it into some ways that it wasn't meant to be originally used and with that we've driven up the transaction fees very far and in general we're kind of causing this tension in the Bitcoin Community because Bitcoin is naturally slow low inexpensive it's this digital settlement layer and that's one of the reasons that it succeeded so well of being digital gold however this is a challenge as people want more utility but can't necessarily do all these things on the Bitcoin base layer and if I was to summarize bitcoin's a trillion dollar asset today it has no native staking yield no smart contracts Financial Primitives and is not very scalable so we're kind of locked out of these traditional use cases on bitcoin and we're now in a new wave of Bitcoin scaling there was the fork Wars starting in 20177 with bsv Bitcoin cash they were parasitic limited scalability and no smart contracts then we had the experimentation phase Stacks PR Nakamoto we have rsk limited smart contracts very limited scalability and there kind of neutral to Bitcoin now we're in the alignment phase which is how do we benefit Bitcoin be independently scalable and have full smart contracts and if I was to characterize this new wave it's separating Bitcoin the asset from Bitcoin the rail itself and there's no contradiction here we can still have Bitcoin this perfect digital gold exist in these other systems that are higher throughput in lower fee and still have Bitcoin be this digital settlement layer for high value transactions where expensiveness isn't really as much of a concern and this is what core is trying to do it's trying to unlock this on top of Bitcoin core launched an early 2023 so before Bitcoin got cool again there's been 15 million plus addresses there's been a couple hundred million transactions there's over 5 million core holders in a massive community and if I was to summarize why core started in 2023 it was because we've been in Bitcoin for a long time and no one was trying to scale Bitcoin so we said hey we should do it ourselves it's also important when I talk about kind of the design behind core The Guiding principles and core was designed to be for all Bitcoin holders and that's really important because we're trying to unlock a trillion dollars we can't be subdividing we have to have Solutions and products that to the needs of all these different people who have different trust assumptions risk thresholds and we have options from uh staking all the way to full btcy to kind of handle those different uh different needs on top of it had to be Bitcoin aligned it had to give back to bitcoin we need to keep Bitcoin secure and decentralized for all these other pieces to flourish on top of it and there's two ways to do that additional transaction fees or with additional block rewards that go to the Bitcoin holders as well as the Bitcoin miners to help with that transaction fee only model that we discussed earlier finally it had to be Community Driven it had to have the community in mind and be a fair launch Fair launch was so critical to the success of Bitcoin the holders were the early users of the network and I and the community strength of any project is really what helps deliver lawn term value and core is no exception the core Toshi I'd stack up with any of the communities in crypto and it's helpful to think about um kind of with three different lenses unlocking Bitcoin the network Bitcoin the asset and then BTC 5 or Bitcoin def for short um so Bitcoin the network Satoshi plus consensus is a novel consensus mechanism that we brought to the world early last year it has three parts it has non-custodial Bitcoin staking delegated proof of work and then delegated proof of stake and for the delegated proof of work component Bitcoin miners produce blocks on the Bitcoin chain and they add a little bit of data to it for non-custodial Bitcoin staking you issue a time lock on the Bitcoin L1 both are totally trustless and auditable and verifiable on your favorite Bitcoin block Explorer and then the delegated core staking happens just on the core chain but the idea is we take these three different ingredients we uh we run a function over it and that's how we elect our validator set and for helping to secure the core chain all these different participants earn core rewards in these core rewards they can either invest in the core ecosystem or they can invest additional Bitcoin or Bitcoin Opex and the idea being a secure and decentralized Bitcoin is a secure and decentralized core chain it's this really nice reflexive Loop together and we're currently halfway there so there's around 50% of the Bitcoin hash rate currently secur in the core chain for just being a year off launch that's pretty good but we call it the road to 100 and we won't be happy until we get to all 100% talking about Bitcoin the asset so we announced yesterday that non-custodial Bitcoin staking went live this is a one of one-of-a-kind product where it's totally trustless on the Bitcoin chain so you issue a time lock to yourself and you proably lock up that Bitcoin Capital it then gets relayed over to the core chain and doing so we've helped make Bitcoin a yield producing asset for the first time with Bitcoin being yield producing asset for the first time it's going to unlock a wave of new defi opportunities with this new Financial primitive we're super excited about it there's also core BTC which is the enshrined bridge of the core chain it's an over collateralized bridge and on top of it we think that this can become the Bitcoin for defi although we do welcome all Bitcoin derivatives on top of core finally talking about btcf so so far again I talked about earlier the tvl of Bitcoin is so small relative to these other ethereum based assets stable coins Etc but the market cap of Bitcoin is still easily the largest so we think over this next cycle this graph is going to change dramatically and Bitcoin is actually going to become the dominant asset by tvl it's just math it's a trillion plus dollars today if only 10 to 30% of that which is the ethereum comp makes it into defi it will easily overwhelm anything we've seen today and the defi landscape is going to be backed by a harder money and it's going to change dramatically over the next year or two core also is fully evm compatible if you think about building a healthy developer ecosystem you have to make it easy so core was full evm from day one giving us access to the 10 years of institutional tooling the all the tutorials the amazing developer audience and it really was an easy Choice it's also helped core Chain's evm ecosystem grow rapidly this is a whole wave of Bitcoin Centric apps all launching on core today there's also a bunch of multi-chain daps and infrastructure it's an amazing time to build on core come to our booth come chat with us but then on top of it if you want to participate in these applications we're running a core ignition incentive program and it pays to be early uh core also has a deep belief that we need to onboard billions of people into web 3 which I know is kind of a trit comment at this point however it's really critical for cryptog goo mainstream I refer to the core team as Crypt Maxis what I mean by that is we believe it should be in the hands of everyone and we have to do our best to get it there so we've got a couple partnership that are pretty key on this so one is Satoshi app which is a cashless onboarding mechanic how do people get their first crypto to then go participate in these different ecosystems like core there's also element wallet the flagship wallet of the chain that's a native onchain messenger and P2P payments app you can think about it like crypto on easy mode if we're going to onboard tons of users to web 3 it has to be simple and easy we have to get rid of understanding these really clunky user interfaces we also announced our First forign Institutional onboarding we partner with Valor and announced this yesterday for the first yield bearing Bitcoin ETP this is going to be again a one-of-a-kind product and the idea here is yield bearing Bitcoin products are now available to institutional investors we're going to take this throughout the world over this year and we think it's going to usher in again a whole new wave of protocols we also agreed to partner on a core ETP that we're so excited about so again to summarize core is trying to unlock the trillion dollars of trap Bitcoin liquidity it's got native staking yields smart contracts Financial Primitives and it's extremely scalable best-in-class scalability of any side chain or any Bitcoin L2 launched or unlaunched and it's an amazing time to get involved so I want to take you back to where we started thinking about 10 years ago it's totally fine if over the last 10 years maybe you did try to become a Trader or maybe you TR trusted a centralized lending uh Lending Group that might not be around anymore or maybe you didn't participate at all well now is the perfect time to get involved in the Bitcoin economy with core you can earn more Bitcoin through passive yield through uh participating in defi protocols really the possibilities are endless and now is a fantastic time to get involved so thanks so much for the time and uh join the core ecosystem [Applause]