Core, the Student Blockchain, has been making waves in the crypto space with its groundbreaking innovations and idealism. Its origin lies in the deep appreciation for the history of the crypto ecosystem, combined with an even greater excitement for Core's role in shaping its future. Core's "student mindset" is directly inspired by Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, who crafted it out of a wide-ranging knowledge of various disciplines. With Satoshi's original genius as its foundation, Core DAO seeks to emulate his student mindset with Satoshi Plus consensus.
One of the foundational guiding principles of Core's blockchain development is the Road to 100%, which aims to achieve 100% of Bitcoin mining hash power actively delegated to Core's Satoshi Plus consensus. This effort is essential to the early hardening of the Core network as an anchoring in Bitcoin solidifies security and decentralization. In the long run, Core will also help to secure Bitcoin as miners benefit from CORE rewards.
With the Core network secure, much of the development efforts are presently focused on the foundation of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) development. Core's integrations with Layer Zero and Switchboard have been prime focuses. With these projects, the stage is set for a wholly decentralized, self-sovereign, and wide-ranging platform. As assets and data continue to flow onto Core via the Core Bridge and Switchboard oracles, DeFi applications on Core can harness increasing levels of complexity. DEXs can remove extractive middlemen, protocols can automate on-chain borrowing and lending, and decentralized derivatives platforms can offer a glimpse into the future of self-directed financial applications.
In addition to external integrations, the decentralized Core development team is frequently looking for opportunities for internal upgrades. One notable agenda item is to sharpen Core's burning mechanism, where 10% of transaction fees and block rewards are burned in each transaction. This burn mechanism provides contractionary pressure on CORE's circulating supply, enabling optimizations such as mitigants against spam/sybil attacks. Core contributors are looking into optimizing the burning mechanism using the best elements of EIP-1559 and other approaches to burn more CORE when the network is congested.
Furthermore, Core developers are considering improvements to node election and distribution, where only 21 validators are being elected to the validator set, so rewards are only shared among them. To further optimize decentralization, the validator quorum may be gradually increased, first to around 42 and ultimately expanding to even more in the long-term future. Additionally, rewards may eventually be partially doled out to unelected validators, largely to cover hardware costs, in order to incentivize more validators to be active.
Making Web3 decentralized, secure, and scalable is the core mission of Core. However, accessibility is just as critical. For that reason, Core is perpetually thinking up the best ways to make Web3 more accessible. One example of a focus in the medium-term is account abstraction, which can dramatically improve security, simplicity, and the user experience on Core. From a security perspective, account abstraction can power two-factor authentication (known as multi-signature security) for crypto wallets, providing another layer of security when engaging with DeFi apps. This security buff is paired with parallel simplicity improvements as account abstraction permits greater flexibility for users related to security preferences.
While underlying blockchain infrastructure is always designed to maintain user self-sovereignty, account abstraction also allows users to enlist the help of whitelisted accounts to recover otherwise lost wallets when seed phrases are forgotten. This upgrade can ameliorate one of the biggest UX problems plaguing adoption. In addition to that user-focused upgrade, account abstraction can also be used to cost-effectively bundle transactions, enable protocols to pay transaction
One of the most important long-term objectives for Core is scaling solutions. Although network congestion has not yet had a significant impact on major ecosystem events, Core will eventually need layer two or even layer three scaling solutions. Currently, Core developers are most enthusiastic about zkSync and StarkNet's ZK-rollups. Future updates will provide additional information on scaling solutions and other technical advancements.
