Author: Frank, PANews

As the early DeFi model, which relied on bubble incentives, became unsustainable, the market sentiment has completely changed, and investors have begun to pursue more sustainable "real returns."

BTCFi is an incredibly imaginative narrative within the DeFi space. As the largest and most widely accepted core asset in the crypto world, Bitcoin's enormous liquidity potential has long been suppressed. Limited by the lack of native infrastructure, Bitcoin's DeFi potential has failed to be truly activated for a considerable period, becoming the largest "dormant 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 native staking and interest-earning of Bitcoin in 2025 while maintaining hands-free access to the cryptocurrency, but also validated its institutional-grade security standards by listing on the London Stock Exchange.

Standing at this new juncture in 2026, Core is no longer content with merely being a passive "income-generating tool." With the release of its latest roadmap, Core is building a vast system encompassing Intelligent Asset Management (AMP), Liquidity Staking (LST), and a Bitcoin Neobank. This new strategy signifies that BTCFi is entering the next stage of competition, moving beyond simple staking yields to focusing on how to leverage real-world business scenarios to enable Bitcoin to generate sustainable revenue.

Activate dormant capital and allow Bitcoin to evolve into an interest-bearing asset.

Looking back at Core in 2025, it was a year of building trust with extremely risk-averse Bitcoin holders and institutional clients. It proved to the outside world that Core is a secure and reliable "Bitcoin native yield infrastructure layer" for the market.

From a technical perspective, SatoshiPlus, a hybrid consensus mechanism, is the core foundation upon which Core achieves this goal. This mechanism innovatively combines Proof-of-Work and Delegated Proof-of-Stake, allowing Bitcoin miners to delegate their computing power to Core's DPoS network for verification without consuming additional computing power.

Data shows that over 90% of the global Bitcoin hashrate is currently involved in maintaining the Core network. This means that while Core is application-layer compatible with the EVM ecosystem, its security directly inherits the robust hashrate barrier of the Bitcoin mainnet, thus building a security fortress independent of the Ethereum system.

In the BTCFi space, the main security risks to assets often come from cross-chain bridges or centralized custodians. Core's biggest technological breakthrough lies in achieving true "non-custodial staking." Using Bitcoin's native time-locking technology, users don't need to transfer their BTC out of their cold wallets or encapsulate it as WBTC. They simply connect their Core blockchain mainnet and Bitcoin mainnet wallets on the Core Foundation's staking platform. Through the time-locking mechanism, staking rewards are settled every 24 hours. This risk-free return model, where "the coins don't move, but the stakes do," completely eliminates the risk of third-party custody, and is therefore widely recognized by the market as the true "Bitcoin's native risk-free interest rate."

After addressing the security challenges at the technical level with non-custodial staking technology, Core's "double staking" mechanism allows users to stake CORE tokens as a "yield amplifier" while staking Bitcoin, thereby obtaining higher compounded returns than staking Bitcoin alone, significantly enhancing the competitiveness of Bitcoin-based interest-bearing financial products.

The innovative mechanism design has also gained recognition from institutions and the market. In 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 and traded on the London Stock Exchange, and are also open to retail investors in the UK. This signifies that Core's security model has passed the most stringent compliance audits in traditional financial markets.

The launch of the Core solution has opened up new avenues for generating income, allowing massive amounts of Bitcoin assets that were previously dormant in cold storage as defensive assets to be smoothly transformed into financial assets that can generate continuous returns. For traditional institutions that are restricted by compliance policies from engaging in ordinary DeFi products, the Core platform provides a very safe, compliant, and attractive solution.

To get Bitcoin moving, three engines are building a lifeline.

If Core solved the trust problem of whether Bitcoin "dares to move" in 2025, then its core mission in the 2026 roadmap is to show the market the value-added logic of how Bitcoin "moves".

In this strategic upgrade, the Core team did not stop at simply optimizing the underlying protocol. Instead, they officially launched three core engines with more strategic partners: AMP (Asset Management Protocol), LST (Liquidity Staking Token), and Bitcoin Neobank - SatPay (Bitcoin New Bank). These three engines together build a complete business loop from asset appreciation to liquidity release, and then to real-life consumption, attempting to provide Bitcoin holders with a new path to returns that is completely different from previous forms.

AMP: Democratizing Institutional-Level Strategies

First, there's the "democratization" of AMP's institutional-grade strategies. For most Bitcoin holders, DeFi still presents a high barrier to entry; complex strategies, cumbersome operations, and potential slippage risks deter many. The emergence of the AMP asset management protocol essentially introduces an intelligent "fund manager" into the Core ecosystem.

By connecting to the Core underlying infrastructure, AMP directly obtains basic staking rewards and relies on the existing user network and composable DeFi modules of the Core chain to establish the initial asset scale and strategy execution foundation.

On top of the underlying returns, AMP constructs a return enhancement layer by layering advanced hedging and arbitrage strategies such as basis trading and Delta-neutral strategies. The compound returns generated by the protocol, after deducting a portion of transaction fees that serve as sustainable revenue for the protocol, will be distributed to participating users.

This allocation mechanism not only improves the overall return on user assets but also enhances the protocol's attractiveness and fund stickiness. Crucially, the protocol systematically reinvests retained transaction fee revenue into CORE tokens. With this development, ordinary retail investors can also enjoy the stable alpha returns previously only available to quantitative funds. AMP not only simplifies the operation process but also diversifies risk through strategy combinations, turning "passive income" into stable income based on real market dynamics, rather than simply token subsidies.

LST: The Key to Unlocking Trillions in Liquidity

Furthermore, in traditional staking models, security and liquidity are often mutually exclusive, and assets must usually be locked to obtain staking rewards. Core's LST (Liquidity Staking Token) engine attempts to break this deadlock, completely freeing trillions of dollars of Bitcoin liquidity from cold wallets.

Its yield model is as follows: After staking BTC on Core, users will receive LST tokens representing their staked share. These LST tokens not only automatically carry the underlying staking yield, but users can also use LST as collateral in lending protocols within the Core ecosystem, or provide liquidity in DEXs (decentralized exchanges) to earn additional DeFi yields.

With the foundation of London Stock Exchange ETPs, and according to the Core Foundation's roadmap, LST also has the potential to become the underlying asset for income-generating BTC ETFs, structured products, and BTC savings accounts. As the market matures, these interest-bearing LSTs are expected to become the foundational interest-bearing assets of the Bitcoin ecosystem, much like stETH is to the Ethereum ecosystem, maximizing capital efficiency.

SatPay: Bitcoin's New Bank and Self-Paying Loans

If the first two engines are still at the level of on-chain financial operations, then SatPay is a major application that connects the physical world. This new Bitcoin bank built on the Core chain is fundamentally different from traditional digital banks like Revolut.

In the traditional banking system, spending means a decrease in principal. However, with SatPay, spending can be seen as an asset preservation behavior. Users can pledge their Bitcoin or LST tokens to borrow stablecoins and use them for daily expenses in a debit card manner. Since the pledged assets continue to generate returns in the background, the system will automatically use these interest and even principal to repay previous loans without having to sell the appreciating assets (interest).

This innovative "spend money while making money" model enables consumption without asset devaluation and maximizes the value of idle Bitcoin. It allows loyal Bitcoin holders to meet their daily living expenses without selling assets, perfectly resolving the contradiction between long-term Bitcoin hoarding and improving one's life based on this core logic.

Say goodbye to bubble subsidies and build a value flywheel driven by real income.

After Bitcoin achieved asset security through non-custodial staking and has been widely applied through products such as AMP and SatPay, the final piece of Core's new roadmap is how to accurately capture and feed back the value of these massive business activities to CORE token holders.

Core's answer is an economic flywheel model that rejects dependence on inflation and is driven by business revenue: first, it shifts from simple returns to business revenue and rejects dependence on inflation; second, it realizes the flywheel effect of economic development and establishes a repurchase force driven by business revenue.

In the early stages of the crypto market, the returns of most projects were heavily reliant on the high inflation subsidies of the tokens themselves. While this model attracted hot money in the short term, it was inherently unsustainable.

The Core team has chosen a more challenging but correct path: building a financial system capable of generating its own revenue. With the support of top-tier institutions and the exponential growth of assets under management (AUM), transaction fees, management fees, and lending interest generated within the ecosystem will translate into substantial real business revenue. These profits are not fictitious bubbles, but real money generated from genuine financial interactions.

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

Unlike the common "buy-and-burn" approach, Core returns these repurchased CORE tokens back to the community. This logic—from a good product attracting funds and generating revenue to increasing buyback efforts—truly creates an upward economic flywheel.

Re-examining this evolutionary path reveals that the Core team has successfully outlined a progressive curve for the transformation from infrastructure development to commercial operation. In this new model architecture, widely recognized as the Bitcoin grid, Bitcoin will no longer be dormant digital gold, but will evolve into freely flowing blood throughout the financial market. Simultaneously, Core will no longer be just a single interest-bearing investment tool, but has evolved into a financial ecosystem with proactive self-sustaining capabilities.

While other Bitcoin Layer 2 protocols on the market are still indulging in the practice of collecting TVL data or issuing points tasks to exploit existing users and trying to fill valuation gaps with empty promises, Core has clearly taken the lead, breaking out of the industry's vicious cycle and pioneering a new path for BTCFi driven by real business value.