Is Ore The Next Bitcoin… on Solana?
Guess who's back after breaking Solana?
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Bitcoin on Solana - that’s Ore for you. Reigning in a new era of experimentation on Solana, Ore explores the possibilities of deploying a Proof-of-Work (PoW) contract on Solana, a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chain. This seemingly unique architecture took the industry by storm, with Ore’s popularity skyrocketing upon its launch in April, becoming the top-used Solana application in record time.
Ore isn’t just making waves, it’s causing tsunamis. And I mean that as the overwhelming mining activity on Ore caused Solana to face chain-wide congestion, with users facing a high volume of failed transactions (throwback to 2021 days). Eventually, Ore v1 had to be paused. But this was not the end, as Ore v2 is now back with improved mechanism designs, a $50,000 victory from the Solana Renaissance Hackathon, and a $3 million fund raise.
Despite the improvements in v2, Ore’s price has been on a downward trend as shown above. Is this the end of Ore? This article seeks to answer that by diving into the architecture of Ore, analyzing its traction, the potential use cases (a building block of PayFi, a critical piece to decentralized and efficient AI), and questions whether this is really the next Bitcoin or just bare metal.
The Origin of Ore
Ore was founded by a pseudonymous developer known as HardHat Chad (who distributed hard hats during Token2049 as merch - definitely unique). In an interview with Empire, HardHat chad shared that the idea stemmed while he was brainstorming around the possibilities of bringing Bitcoin onto Solana. Going back to Q1 and Q2 2024, the market saw an influx of new projects as well as significant price increases of projects within the Bitcoin ecosystem - primarily Runes and Ordinals, widely perceived as NFTs (non-fungible tokens) on Bitcoin.
Following this wave of attention that fell upon the Bitcoin ecosystem, multiple projects explored the potential of bringing Bitcoin assets onto either Etheruem or Solana. Some examples include Zeus Network and Pups. HardHat Chad on the other hand, employed a different approach from these ‘bridges’, and thought about re-writing Bitcoin as a smart contract to be deployed on Solana. Instead of bringing the Bitcoin over, build the Bitcoin. HardHat Chad also highlighted that the main aim of doing so was to reinvent the fair launch meta, with an aim to realize Bitcoin’s original vision of being a currency that everyone can mine and use for transactions.
The Team Behind Ore
HardHat Chad, alongside his co-founder and teammates are part of an entity known as Regolith Labs, which is in charge of maintaining Ore’s software. In addition to Ore, Regolilth Labs is also developing other software tools, with one recent example being Steel - a modular framework for building smart contracts on Solana.
With the traction it has received for Ore, Regolith Labs raised a $3 million round led by Foundation Capital, with significant support from Solana, with the round seeing participation from Colosseum (powers Solana’s online hackathons) and Solana Ventures. Nonetheless, HardHat Chad made sure to keep to his promise of creating a fair system for Ore, and no investors were allocated $ORE.
With an understanding of the origin of Ore, let’s transition into the mechanism of Ore - the realization of HardHat Chad’s ideation.