Say goodbye to the bubble incentive vicious cycle, Core's three main revenue engines build the BTCFi economic flywheel

Author: Frank, PANews

As the early DeFi reliance on bubble-incentivized models becomes unsustainable, market sentiment has completely shifted, and investors are now pursuing more sustainable “real yields.”

BTCFi is a highly imaginative narrative within the DeFi sector. As the largest and most consensus-driven core asset in the crypto world, Bitcoin’s enormous liquidity potential has long been suppressed. Due to the lack of native infrastructure, Bitcoin’s DeFi potential has not been truly activated for a long time, making it the largest “sleeping capital” in the crypto market.

Core DAO, with its unique “Satoshi Plus” consensus mechanism and non-custodial staking technology, has successfully opened a breakthrough in the BTCFI field. It not only enabled Bitcoin to achieve native staking and yield generation under the premise of “HODLing” by 2025 but also validated its institutional-grade security standards by listing on the London Stock Exchange.

Standing at the new milestone of 2026, Core is no longer content with being just a passive “yield tool.” With the release of its latest roadmap, Core is building a vast ecosystem that includes smart asset management (AMP), liquid staking tokens (LST), and a new Bitcoin bank (Bitcoin Neobank). This new strategic direction also signifies that BTCFi is entering the next phase of competition, shifting from simple staking yields to leveraging real business scenarios to enable Bitcoin to generate sustainable “blood-making” capacity.

Activating Sleeping Capital, Evolving Bitcoin into a Yield-Generating Asset

Looking back at Core in 2025, it was a year dedicated to building trust among highly risk-averse Bitcoin holders and institutional players. It proved to the market that Core is a safe and reliable “native Bitcoin yield infrastructure layer.”

From a technical perspective, the SatoshiPlus hybrid consensus mechanism is the core foundation for Core to achieve this goal. This mechanism innovatively combines proof of work and delegated proof of stake, allowing Bitcoin miners to delegate their hash power to Core’s DPoS network for validation without consuming additional computational resources.

Data shows that over 90% of global Bitcoin hash power is currently participating in maintaining the security of the Core network. This means that although Core is compatible with the EVM ecosystem at the application layer, its security directly inherits the formidable hash power barrier of the Bitcoin mainnet, creating an independent security fortress outside the Ethereum ecosystem.

In the BTCFi sector, the main risks to asset security often come from cross-chain bridges or centralized custodians. Core’s biggest technological breakthrough is achieving true “non-custodial staking.” Users can leverage Bitcoin’s native time-lock technology to stake BTC without transferring it out of cold wallets or wrapping it as WBTC. Instead, they connect to Core Foundation’s staking platform, linking the Core blockchain mainnet with Bitcoin’s mainnet wallet, and through the time-lock mechanism, staking rewards are settled every 24 hours. This “no movement of coins, only movement of rights” risk-free yield model completely eliminates third-party custody risks and is recognized by the market as the true “Bitcoin-native risk-free rate.”

Once the technical security issues of non-custodial staking are addressed, Core’s “dual staking” mechanism allows users to stake Bitcoin while also staking additional CORE tokens as a “yield amplifier,” thereby achieving higher compounded yields than staking Bitcoin alone, greatly enhancing the competitiveness of Bitcoin yield products.

This innovative mechanism design has also gained recognition from institutions and the market. By 2025, Core became the largest BTCFi protocol and established deep partnerships with top institutional custodians such as BitGo, Cobo, and Ceffu. Most importantly, Bitcoin yield-based ETP products supported by Core’s underlying technology have been officially listed on the London Stock Exchange and are open to retail investors in the UK. This marks that Core’s security model has passed the most stringent compliance audits in traditional financial markets.

It can be said that the launch of Core’s solution has opened new channels for yield generation, allowing massive Bitcoin assets that were previously dormant in cold storage and only used as defensive assets to be smoothly transformed into financial assets capable of generating ongoing income. For traditional institutions limited by regulatory policies and unable to participate in ordinary DeFi products, the Core platform offers a very safe, compliant, and attractive solution.

Making Bitcoin “Move,” Building a Blood-Making Engine with Three Main Drivers

If Core solved the trust issue of whether Bitcoin “dared to move” in 2025, then its 2026 roadmap’s core mission is to demonstrate the value-added logic of how Bitcoin “moves” in the market.

In this strategic upgrade, the Core team did not stop at simple protocol optimization but officially launched three core engines: AMP (Asset Management Protocol), LST (Liquid Staking Token), and Bitcoin Neobank - SatPay (Bitcoin New Bank). These three pillars work together to build a complete business cycle—from asset appreciation to liquidity release to real-world consumption—aiming to provide Bitcoin holders with a completely new yield pathway different from previous models.

AMP: Institutional-Grade Strategy Encapsulated for the “Everyman”

First, the “democratization” brought by AMP’s institutional-grade strategy. For most Bitcoin holders, DeFi still has high barriers—complex strategies, cumbersome operations, and potential slippage risks. The emergence of the AMP asset management protocol essentially introduces a smart “fund manager” into the Core ecosystem.

By integrating with Core’s underlying infrastructure, AMP directly accesses basic staking yields and leverages Core’s existing user network and composable DeFi modules to establish initial asset scale and strategy execution foundation.

Building on the underlying yields, AMP layers advanced hedging and arbitrage strategies such as basis trading and delta-neutral strategies to enhance returns. The resulting compound yields, after deducting a portion as protocol fees for sustainability, are distributed to participating users.

This distribution mechanism not only improves the overall yield of user assets but also enhances the protocol’s attractiveness and capital stickiness. Crucially, the protocol systematically reinvests the retained fee income into CORE tokens. Under this development, ordinary retail investors can enjoy stable alpha returns previously accessible only to quant funds. AMP simplifies operational procedures and, through strategic combinations, achieves risk diversification, turning “passive earning” into stable income based on real market competition rather than mere token subsidies.

LST: The Key to Unlock Trillions of Liquidity

Additionally, in traditional staking models, security and liquidity are often mutually exclusive—staking yields usually require locking assets. Core’s LST (Liquid Staking Token) engine aims to break this deadlock, fully liberating trillions of Bitcoin liquidity from cold wallets.

Its yield model is as follows: after staking BTC on Core, users receive LST tokens representing their staked share. These LSTs automatically carry the underlying staking rewards, and users can also deposit LSTs into Core’s lending protocols as collateral or provide liquidity on DEXs (Decentralized Exchanges) to earn additional DeFi yields.

Supported by the London Stock Exchange ETP foundation, LSTs have the potential to become the underlying assets for yield-generating BTC ETFs, structured products, and BTC savings accounts within Core’s roadmap. As the market matures, these yield-capable LSTs are expected to become the foundational “building blocks” of Bitcoin’s yield ecosystem, similar to stETH in the Ethereum ecosystem, maximizing capital efficiency.

SatPay: The New Bitcoin Bank and Self-Repaying Loans

If the first two engines are still at the on-chain financial operation level, SatPay is a heavyweight application connecting to the physical world. This new Bitcoin bank built on Core chain is fundamentally different from traditional digital banks like Revolut.

In traditional banking systems, spending usually means decreasing principal, but in SatPay, spending can be seen as an asset-preserving behavior because users can stake their Bitcoin or LST tokens to lend out stablecoins for daily expenses via a debit card. Since the collateralized assets continue to generate yields, the system automatically uses these interest payments or even principal to repay previous loans without selling appreciated assets (interest).

This innovative “spend while earning” model enables asset preservation during consumption, realizing the maximum value of idle Bitcoin—allowing loyal Bitcoin holders to meet daily expenses without selling assets. This core logic perfectly solves the long-standing contradiction between long-term HODLing and improving quality of life.

Moving Away from Bubble Subsidies, Building a Real Income-Driven Value Flywheel

Once Bitcoin achieves asset security through non-custodial staking and is enriched with applications like AMP and SatPay, the final piece of Core’s new roadmap is how to precisely capture and feedback the value of these extensive commercial activities to CORE token holders.

Core’s answer is a self-sustaining economic flywheel model driven by business income, rejecting reliance on inflation: first, shifting from simple yield rates to business revenue and rejecting inflation dependence; second, creating a flywheel effect of economic growth and establishing a buyback force driven by commercial income.

In the early stages of crypto market development, most projects’ yields heavily depended on high inflation subsidies of their tokens, which, while attracting hot money in the short term, were fundamentally unsustainable.

The Core team chose a more challenging but correct path—building a financial system with active “blood-making” capability. With support from top institutional partners and exponential growth in assets under management (AUM), the fees, management charges, and lending interest generated within the ecosystem will translate into substantial real business income. These profits are not just digital bubbles but real cash generated from genuine financial interactions.

To address the specific flow of these real incomes, the Core team designed a highly sophisticated capital return mechanism, converting ecosystem profits into token value support. Currently, strategy management fees from the AMP protocol, transaction fees from the SatPay system, and minting fees for LST assets all flow into the overall ecosystem fund pool. The Core team has also proposed using these real profits to buy back CORE tokens on the secondary market.

Unlike common “buyback and burn” approaches, Core re-injects these repurchased CORE tokens back into the community. This cycle—where useful products attract capital, generate income, and strengthen buybacks—truly forms an upward economic flywheel.

Re-examining this evolutionary path, it becomes clear that the Core team has successfully outlined an advanced trajectory from foundational infrastructure to commercial operation. In this newly recognized Bitcoin grid model, Bitcoin will no longer be just dormant digital gold but will evolve into a freely flowing bloodline across the entire financial market. Meanwhile, Core is no longer merely a yield-generating financial tool but has transformed into a proactive, blood-making financial ecosystem.

While other Bitcoin Layer2 protocols on the market are still immersed in accumulating TVL data or issuing reward points to fill valuation gaps, Core has clearly taken the lead, breaking out of the industry’s vicious cycle and pioneering a new BTCFi path driven by real commercial value.