As a long-term supporter of BTC, I have been following the situation of BTC Fi.

These days I'm looking at @Coredao_Org CORE DAO and found that the consensus mechanism of this chain is designed quite cleverly.
In fact, by 2025, many people are no longer so concerned about the consensus of the chain itself. Even if L2 does not have a consensus mechanism and only relies on the consensus of L1, occasionally there may be some new L1, but they are nothing more than the same PoS+EVM.
But actually, this matter is still very, very important, the security of the chain determines the upper limit of the chain.
Actually, in the BTC community, compared to memes or AI agents, it's really considered old-school. People who hold BTC are inherently skeptics and it's hard for them to believe in other projects from the bottom of their hearts.
So, a new BTCL2/sidechain must carefully design a 'secure and pure' mechanism in order to gain the trust of BTC holders/BTC miners.
So CORE came up with this mechanism called DPoW. When this mechanism came out, it can be said to be really knowledgeable.
First of all, everyone knows that the essence of BTC mining is to run a client and continuously collide hashes with chips to obtain the right to mine and mint coins.
So, CORE introduced a rule that miners can get extra rewards by slightly increasing their workload when running the client. What does it require miners to do? - Add a string of characters to the OP_RETURN area of the BTC block.
What area is OP_RETURN? It is a blank area left by Nakamoto and early developers when designing BTC, in which you can write some very short content.
The previous inscription was actually transferred by writing remarks in the OP_RETURN area.
Speaking of the main point, what is this string of characters used for? It is used to allow miners to vote for which nodes to support on CORE and in return, they will receive some CORE token rewards.
Pick a block at random for example, block at height 877845, which was mined by Foundry USA, the largest mining pool in the world in terms of hash rate. The OP_RETURN area in the block header transaction contains information about voting for CORE nodes.
The beauty of this design lies in its strict adherence to the requirements of the BTC community. The fundamental requirement of the BTC community is that its foundation must be immutable, rock-solid, and absolutely unchangeable. Even if future innovations are pursued, they must be built on the premise of zero alterations to BTC.
On the other hand, for example, ETH will make significant changes for the ecosystem - such as launching blob to help L2 reduce costs.
To be honest, the longer I stay in this industry, the more I realize that sometimes it's not just about money when it comes to 'bribing' key figures. It's actually a technical job, like bribing miners.
If you try to ask BTC miners to run an additional client in order to mine more income, miners will most likely ignore you completely due to security concerns.
However, if they are asked to add a small tag in the OP_RETURN area of the BTC chain, which is almost effortless and absolutely secure, in order to earn some additional rewards, the attitude of the miners will naturally become 'why not'.
According to the CORE's statistics panel, there are currently 568EH/s of computing power choosing to join CORE's mining. Now the total network computing power of BTC is approximately 850EH/s, which means that more than 2/3 of the computing power has participated in CORE.
This number is very high. For reference, if you have 51% of the computing power, you can perform a double-spending attack on BTC.
If you rent BTC computing power from Nicehash, it will cost approximately $50,000 per day for 1EH/s.
PS: Of course, joining the computing power of CORE is considered a "collaborative level" rather than a "control level", so CORE cannot control the BTC network.
CORE only used some CORE token distribution to gain the support of 568EH/s computing power, which is indeed a design that fully understands the temperament of the BTC community and miners.
This is equivalent to the fact that the CORE chain is actually endorsed by 2/3 of the computing power of the BTC network.
Of course, it should be noted here that the protection provided by these BTC hash rates is actually based on certain economic assumptions:
- Miners are good and isolated: most miners will not collude in wrongdoing;
-Miners are long-term oriented: there is no capital punishment, but misconduct can lead to loss of future rewards.
So, relying solely on this BTC computing power is not enough. CORE's consensus mechanism also has two other parts:
Second BTC Collateral (Non-Custodial)
CORE's native currency staking for the third time
So far, the overall framework of CORE's consensus mechanism has been clarified, consisting of three parts:
DPoW: Attracted 2/3 of the computing power of BTC
PoA: Staked 5,800+BTC (worth $5.8 billion)
DPoS: Staked 16% of CORE native token (worth $160 million)
At least from the Staking perspective, this consensus gives people a feeling that this chain is very secure.
I looked at some penalty mechanisms again, and if you run a CORE node, there will be two types of penalties, namely Slashing and Jailing.
Reduction: If the block production process is missed, that is, if there is a work stoppage, a portion of the daily node income will be forfeited;
Imprisonment: If double sign behavior is done, that is, malice, the margin will be forfeited and the running node will be permanently banned.
At the same time, there are also some community bots monitoring suspected missed blocks or double-signing behavior, and once detected, they can receive rewards.
However, what needs to be discussed is that the CORE consensus is based on the premise that "the rich will not randomly select", which is different from traditional PoS. The traditional PoS has a very high deposit ratio, for example, in ETH, if you run a node and behave maliciously on the network (such as double signing), then your principal will be directly fined.
The consensus of CORE, BTC computing power, and BTC staking represent more of an endorsement by the wealthy - they will not randomly choose is a major premise. Because they will only be penalized and forfeit future rewards, not lose the principal. The nodes that lose the principal are the CORE coins participating in the PoS voting.
It's like the elders of the Senate nodding their heads and the wealthy in the town agreeing, but they won't put their own wealth into it.
However, the flaws do not hide the beauty. It is not easy for this mechanism to drive such a large scale of computing power. It is both a tribute to the BTC community and a real subsidy to BTC miners.
CORE's consensus mechanism requires mining for 81 years, to be honest, this narrative is very good. BTC halves every 4 years, approaching the day of depletion, so every future subsidy is extremely precious.
After all, this industry is called blockchain, and the way those blocks are linked together in consensus is always crucial.