Core Crypto: A Blockchain "Secured by Bitcoin" Without Forking Bitcoin. Here's How the Engineering Works.
Is it possible to have a blockchain that is "secured by bitcoin" without forking bitcoin? That's the promise being sold by core crypto, which launched with network-native Satoshi Plus consensus hybridizing proof-of-work (PoW) and delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) in a bid to "have its cake and eat it too": Bitcoin's hash rate along with a DPoS mechanism's native security. The elevator pitch is convincing enough: leverage the most battle-tested crypto security model (Bitcoin mining) to back an execution layer that can finalize every few seconds. But with Core launching with ~200 validators, and an already sub-10-second block time as of March 2026, curious minds will want to know how the engineering squares up.
Most L1s choose a side. They choose PoW and accept slower finality and security. Or they choose PoS and accept faster but ecologically dubious "finality." The bet Core is making, simply put, is that we don't have to choose. To understand how that bet pays off, we need to understand the three distinct systems that make up the network: non-custodial Bitcoin miner delegation, CORE token staking, and a validator election process that factors in both.
The Specific Problem Satoshi Plus Was Engineered to Fix
Bitcoin today can handle roughly seven transactions per second. While it has unparalleled 51% resistance due to the astronomical real-world cost of acquiring enough hash power to pull one off, its security model does not easily allow native smart contracts and block times have consistently hovered just under ten minutes. EVM-compatible chains such as Ethereum (post-Merge) or BNB Chain solve one of these problems at the cost of the other. They derive security from PoS instead of hashpower, meaning mining security is decoupled from physical mining rigs.
Core's developers saw an opportunity: is it possible to have Bitcoin miners delegate some of their current hashpower to another, independent chain without diverting any of that delegated mining's reward, or modifying their Bitcoin Core wallets to accommodate such functionality in any way? Satoshi Plus allows miners to not run any new software, or modify their mining pool configuration in any significant way. Bitcoin miner delegation to a Core validator is encoded into the metadata of a Bitcoin coinbase transaction, having zero effect on the miner's current operation or mining pool payouts.
"This delegation model is non-custodial: miners never actually send BTC to anyone." Also, "put simply, the core network doesn't neatly map to any taxonomy we've seen so far. It's neither a Bitcoin sidechain (2-way peg), rollup (posting on Bitcoin L1), nor native PoS chain (miners have skin in the game). We've referred to it in the Core protocol docs as 'Bitcoin-aligned' since it parasitically utilizes Bitcoin's hash rate without posing direct competition."
How Satoshi Plus Actually Works Under the Hood
There are currently three groups participating in the consensus loop: Bitcoin miners (who delegate hash power), CORE holders (who delegate stake), and validators (operators who run consensus nodes and produce blocks). Each round, the network calculates a hybrid score for each validator candidate. The score calculation itself consists of two parts. The first part is total Bitcoin hash power delegated to the validator candidate (aggregated by the network when it looks at each Bitcoin block header). The second part of the score is total CORE staked to that candidate by other accounts. Delegation can be done by sending CORE to a validator's "delegate" address through the core app, or through any other core wallet compatible wallet.
It defines a relative importance between these two factors, hash power versus token stake. Right now it's not 50/50; the latest spec goes through some intermediate changes and has been adjusted by an ordered series of governance votes throughout the past year or so. Highest-scoring validators are voted into the active validator set, and once in the active set each validator gets to propose blocks on a round-robin schedule (much like normal DPoS networks such as EOS, BNB Chain). Block times are currently hovering just over 3 seconds on the main network, averaged.
Slashing penalizes failed validators by taking a part of staked CORE tokens and delegated rewards. This is common for most DPoS implementations. The result: a blockchain capable of sustaining DeFi-level transaction volume and attaching some fraction of its security budget to Bitcoin mining rigs.
Nuance
Embedded within that purpose statement though is a nuance regarding "security" within this model. Bitcoin miners are not securing Core transactions as they are securing Bitcoin transactions on their own chain. They are merely attesting that they trust the network by redirecting their hash power toward specific validators. That is an entirely different pipeline of hash power to reputation score to BTC validators; it is not hash power securing blocks directly. That nuance is important when discussing Satoshi Plus's true security model vs what is implied by the header marketing buzz.
What Bitcoin Miners Gain from Delegating
The incentive picture for miners is simple. There is no additional cost to delegating hashpower to a Core validator as the metadata attached to the coinbase transaction is opaque to miners outside of the coinbase transaction and has no bearing on either Bitcoin block validity or mining pool payouts. In exchange, the miner collects CORE token rewards emitted by network blocks proportional to the hashpower delegated.
In addition to Bitcoin block rewards plus transaction fees, for a large mining operation already scaling, that's additional revenue. The core price on the various exchanges where USD can be traded for tokens determines how much that revenue is worth in fiat currency. At current spot exchange rates that supplemental revenue is modest for large pools and can be nontrivial for mid-tier mining operations. There's also a feedback loop here. As more total hash power is delegated to the core validator set then the network's security score increases. In theory that can attract additional developers and users which increases demand for the core token and thus raises the value of miner rewards in the next period. Whether or not that flywheel can spin up quickly enough to change outcomes for miners remains to be seen and is a function of adoption.
Overall around half of Bitcoin's hash power has been allocated to Core validators at one time or another, according to the team's public dashboard. This number fluctuates often depending on market conditions.
Why DeFi Activity on Core Might Migrate from Orbs or Keep
EVM chains are at this point table stakes if a new L1 wants to attract developer attention. Core has mostly differentiated itself with its Bitcoin-native selling point: a chain that's partially secured by Bitcoin miners can meaningfully reach Bitcoin-holding institutions or retail end users that want yield on their BTC, without requiring those users or institutions to bridge onto a chain they may not trust. One application of that premise was lstBTC, a liquid-staked BTC token that Core built in partnership with Maple Finance before a legal dispute. BTC holders could earn yield by staking into Core, while custodially interacting with infrastructure they trusted and were familiar with (e.g., licensed firms like BitGo) that were based on Bitcoin.
It managed (and subsequently failed to renew) more than $150M of customer funds on the platform pre-breakup. Core also supports other lending and DEX protocols which use the core app as an on-ramp, all of which have TVL significantly lower than Ethereum/Solana, but rising notably in Q2/Q3 2025. Developers evaluating Core's potential compared to other mid-tier PoS chains like orbs price (a distinct market which pivoted to L3 tech itself after launching as Ethereum Classic 2.0), or keep network price (a privacy-centric use case that doesn't inherently align with most of Core's native projects) are doubling down on Bitcoin alignment.
Bitcoin buyers and sellers likely won't care too much about all of these arguments though. The thing that is being sold to builders here insofar as a core thesis goes is that Bitcoin ($1.2 trillion market cap) has a massive moat as an underleveraged store of capital; that being able to offer those capital holders native yield without them having to sell BTC is a structural benefit. There's already been trillions of dollars in cumulative TVL just on lending markets from JustLend DAO on TRON and others to show people how liquid these can be outside of Ethereum/Solana, so what the real experiment will be here for Core is if that liquidity can be imported with a Bitcoin-centric sales pitch.
The Engineering Tradeoffs That Don't Show Up in the Deck
You could probably fill pages writing about the technical nuances of consensus mechanisms. But no consensus mechanism validates for free, and Satoshi Plus comes with tradeoffs that deserve consideration of their own. Bitcoin miner delegation as currently implemented acts more as a signaling mechanism than an actual security budget being risked. Bitcoin miners effectively have zero security budget on Core they can immediately throw at a bad actor during an attack. They can only retrospectively pull back their hash power delegation. Response against an attacker in real-time is therefore reliant on the DPoS slashing conditions; as such, the real-time security profile looks more like a DPoS chain and less like a PoW chain. Market sentiment on that hybridized consensus model is being embedded into the core coin price across all exchanges that list it, but the technical nuance of that model is more nuanced than the price reflects.
Second, consider size of validator set. Core will have 200 validators, far more decentralized than BNB Chain (which has 40 active validators as of Q3), but far less decentralized than Ethereum after The Merge (which counts 900,000+ validators). Concentration risk embedded in these current delegation scores thus far would be even greater if only a small number of mining pools elected to delegate.
Third, note that the balance between the hash power delegation score and token stake score is another parameter governed by the protocol. This means that the relative influence can shift back and forth between miners and stakers depending on how the protocol is governed. Pure PoW networks don't have this problem since there is only one input to consider. Core builders and users have been debating all three of these design levers. There will be more on-chain governance votes in the future to tweak them that are not priced into market expectations for the network.
Last but not least, the USD price of the core token is material to validator incentives: if the price falls low enough then block rewards cease to be significant, and there's no reason to delegate your hash power. Of course that creates reinforcing negative feedback in the other direction. Satoshi Plus is real innovation, and it actually solves a coordination problem between Bitcoin security and EVM execution latency that we didn't previously have an elegant answer for. Compared to Bitcoin Core endogenously, Core is exponentially faster to settle and execute; compared to EVM chains with PoS security, we get another trust and security triangle in the form of the world's largest mining network.
That being said, just as with other cryptocurrencies, the Satoshi Plus design can still only be as strong as its weakest leg. For end users and builders looking at where to build, where to migrate to, or where to park BTC-denominated capital, Core is just one of several networks that should receive due diligence on architectural tradeoffs.
