Core is another one of these hyped up cryptocurrencies that I see no value in. To me it appears to be boring and useless technology that is out there just to raise money for the people involved in it, and that really offers very little to the world of crypto. So I want to walk through the critical flaws and issues I see with Core, the things that would prevent me from having any interest in being an investor in this. This is my opinion and my experience, not financial advice, but if you are thinking about Core, I think you deserve to hear someone make the case for why I would stay away.
What is Core?
Core is built as a layer one blockchain that's compatible with EVM, so it can run Ethereum smart contracts and dApps. But it is hardly on chain. You have got to use outside infrastructure, and this is why almost all of crypto is Web3 theater to me. If you go to their actual link and look at how this works, they have a Web3 provider, which means it's not actually on chain. They use Infstones.com, which is not actually on chain, and none of the stuff is on chain. To me that means the technology is comparatively useless and far behind Internet Computer Protocol.
Internet Computer Protocol actually has exactly what Core is talking about. Internet Computer has a native integration with both Bitcoin and Ethereum, and all of it is done on chain. You have got the Bitcoin layer two on Internet Computer. The Internet Computer blockchain can actually hold a Bitcoin public key, sign transactions, and directly read and write to the Bitcoin network. That is so far advanced beyond what Core does that it's ridiculous to me Core would even launch with these kinds of capabilities. And then you have got Internet Computer Protocol's Ethereum layer two on the same infrastructure. So this is much more advanced than Core.
Real Web3 means everything is on chain
They talk about how the project strives to create an infrastructure that operates at the core of Web3, which Internet Computer has actually done. It's the only crypto where you can build everything fully on chain. Internet Computer has actually done that. But what is Core doing? This took me a minute to even find out how it works, but they tell you to go over to Infstones. And if you Google Infstones a little bit, you'll find that Oracle partners with Infstones to accelerate Web3. Oracle is a massive company. I have a family member that used to work there.
Real Web3 is not having a blockchain and then pushing all the compute off chain back to centralized infrastructure. Because if you don't have all of it on the same blockchain, the stuff that's on the blockchain can't control the stuff that's off the blockchain. That is a fundamental problem. And if Internet Computer wasn't around and everybody was just trying to do their best with the tech they had, that would be one thing. But when you look at what Core is actually saying about itself, that's where it gets hard for me to take seriously.
Leading the Bitcoin scaling wars? Really?
Their roadmap talks about leading the Bitcoin scaling wars. To me that is absolutely ridiculous, talking like they're leading the Bitcoin scaling wars when I wasn't even aware there was a war for Bitcoin scaling in the first place. If you learn about and look at Internet Computer, it is so far and away the best technology for scaling Bitcoin. You have got hundreds of thousands of transactions directly on chain with this, maybe millions now of transactions directly on chain.
You have got people who have already built things like Bitcoin staking apps. You have Chain-key Bitcoin integrated into all kinds of applications, like OpenChat, where you can swap. You can swap ICP for Chain-key Bitcoin. You can swap your USDC that you bring over from Ethereum and swap it straight to Chain-key Bitcoin. I have swapped tens of thousands of dollars of Bitcoin back and forth with ICP, and that's how I initially got my stack of ICP. I did that last year. There are decentralized exchanges built fully on chain on Internet Computer, and all of them have Chain-key Bitcoin. So talking about leading the Bitcoin scaling wars is absolutely ridiculous to me, and this is only one single thing Core does.
The market cap versus what you actually get
Their market cap is around $2.8 billion fully diluted, which is just a little less than Internet Computer. Now, on Internet Computer, the Bitcoin layer two is one single thing it does, along with the Ethereum layer two, along with a complete Web3 infrastructure where you can build everything, like a website, fully on chain. Like OpenChat, a Discord or Telegram style app that's fully on chain with thousands of daily active users who are actually on the chain itself, not on some centralized infrastructure that has a tiny little connection with a blockchain. So when you compare Core to Internet Computer, there's no way I would want to hold this.
They're using a combination of Bitcoin mining hash and proof of stake, and offering what they call revolutionary ideas to solve the blockchain trilemma. Look at how revolutionary it actually is, though. There are 23 validators, and you have got hardly anything happening on chain. You have a few transactions every minute. You compare that to Internet Computer, where you have got thousands of transactions a second with huge amounts of computation that is equivalent to hundreds of thousands of Ethereum transactions a second. And you're telling me Core is the winning project, the one leading Bitcoin scaling? It is absolutely ridiculous to me.
When you look at the accounts around Core, they're mostly talking about Bitcoin. They talk a lot about Bitcoin on the accounts, not even Core itself. This is the kind of honest, skeptical look I try to bring to every project in my Money playlist, because almost everyone else in crypto only makes money by hyping things up.
The apps Core points to as its strength
The number one thing they're hyped up about is the users on Core. The main app, according to DappRadar, where people are actually using Core is on this Glyph exchange. This is the website that is currently generating the largest amount of use of Core, according to DappRadar and according to their own marketing. And seriously, does that look like a several billion dollar project's number one dApp? You click on launch, and what is it? It's just another exchange. It is literally another exchange, another one of these based on bridges, but the functionality is vastly inferior to Internet Computer Protocol in terms of what you can do on it. This app is the biggest strength they're pointing to on chain right now. And then you have airdrops and staking, the same old crap that you see on every single one of these copycat projects. There's a playbook in crypto to rip you off, and this is textbook.
If you look at the top dApps, there are these Blitz games too that are generating a lot of the users. Then you actually look into these games and it's like, well, what does JPEG, what does Joyride have to do with Core? Where is Core even integrated into this? On the Joyride website, I can't see any relationship to Core right away. And yet this somehow is generating users. You click on the FAQs and there are these earn tournaments. It doesn't say it's paid in Core, but perhaps the token is being used with Core somehow. This is one of these quote, play to earn things. Again, it does not appear to have any meaningful amount of data on chain. These are games where you probably have bots trying to clean up these tokens. I wonder how much you actually get. Is this a sustainable business model, having someone download an application and then sending them a small amount of tokens? You probably have to play quite a bit. To me this looks like a guaranteed exit. It is generating a bunch of their users, but there are not that many actual transactions. If you look at the Explorer, there's not a whole bunch of people that I can see interacting with this. And this is what's normal in crypto, unfortunately.
Build on Core versus build on ICP
If you click on the build on Core page, it says create EVM compatible dApps with the power of Bitcoin. Well, you can already do that on Internet Computer, except on Internet Computer you build the whole thing on chain, instead of having to build it on Core and then try to bring other dApps in and bring centralized hosting in with it. I guarantee you it's easier, simpler, and cheaper to build on Internet Computer than doing this. And that's all they even have on the page. The bug bounty rewards section isn't even done.
Who is actually contributing to Core?
If you go to the Core Foundation org, which is different from the Core DAO org, and click on contributors, it is nice. They do actually have people's faces and links to their profiles. Although some of the profiles did not load correctly when I first looked at them, and some of the profiles have pages that say this account doesn't exist. I wonder what happened with that, and why they haven't updated and fixed it. They do have a decent amount of people working on this, but what are these people doing? What exactly are they contributing? Does being a contributor mean somebody who hypes Core up? Does it mean someone doing graphic design or marketing? There's not good transparency about that. If you look at some of their profiles, are they just posting on X and that's their contribution?
Compare that to the DFINITY website. If you listen to what Dominic said, the main way you can tell the quality of a crypto is to find out how many engineers, how many computer science PhDs, how many people with real engineering experience are building on the protocol itself and increasing what the protocol can do. When I look at Core, I can hardly tell who is doing any meaningful amount of work on the protocol itself. Whereas on DFINITY, you can see they have an absolutely massive team of technical staff actually building the protocol.
So I see no reason to hold Core compared to holding ICP, given the market caps and given how many people are working on making the protocol better. If you're holding a token for something, the protocol itself and the engineers building the capabilities of the protocol are probably the most important thing to the foundation of the investment. That is what allows you to build things like ICP as a Bitcoin layer two, that's what allows you to not use Oracles, and that's what gives you an Ethereum layer two as well. That comes from people doing real engineering and building something far superior to anything else.
Off-chain governance and "progressive decentralization"
Now look at the progressive decentralization they talk about. The fact is, according to their own website, they're doing off-chain governance right now. So when you're holding your Core, you're passing resolutions off chain. It says that in the future, maybe there will be fully on-chain governance. On Internet Computer, everybody already has that today. It has been live for years. It has been working for years. These are Core's plans for the future, and Internet Computer has already finished and executed them.
The ecosystem illusion
If you look at all the dApps listed, as a newcomer you would look at this and think, oh, these things are built on Core. If you go to explore the ecosystem, you might assume these things are built on Core. But DappRadar is not built on Core. It has a little tiny integration with Core to put some data on there. And if you look at these wallets, they draw data from the blockchain, but all these apps that look like an ecosystem are not stuff that is actually built on Core and requires Core specifically. These could essentially be built on anything. And many of them are questionable as to whether they're hosted on centralized infrastructure with a tiny little blockchain integration, which is basically meaningless.
What a real on-chain ecosystem looks like
Now if you go to Internet Computer and look at the ecosystem, compare it. Here is a decentralized exchange that's built fully on chain on Internet Computer. Here's another one fully on chain. That is a technical breakthrough. Nobody has built fully on chain, where the website itself is on chain. Nobody outside of ICP has ever done this before. There are two of these decentralized exchanges, and they're built directly on the protocol. So these days, these decentralized exchanges are not just burning transaction fees. When people go to the websites, they're using cycles, and you have to burn ICP to get cycles. You're paying for computation on the network. So the more popular these get, the more cycles get used and the more ICP gets burned.
Then here's the world's fastest ordinals marketplace. Remember how over on the Core side, you have got the team talking about leading the Bitcoin scaling wars, and over here you have got the world's fastest ordinals marketplace actually running. You have got a gold backed stablecoin. You have a game being built fully on chain. You have OpenChat, a fully decentralized real time messaging service that I use every single day. You have got several more DEXs fully on chain, and a fully on-chain social media platform on Taggr. These things are actually building directly on the ICP protocol. Now, some of them, like Tracks, have things that are not on chain, which to me kills a lot of the value of it. But still, something like that is an on-chain Spotify style social media platform. You compare this ecosystem, where things have actually been built, and you cannot build this stuff without ICP. The stuff that's built on Core does not look to me like it needs to be built on Core. They have paid these projects to try to integrate Core with them. But some of these things built on ICP, you cannot build without any other technology. If you'd like to talk through any of this with me, you can reach me directly in the Jerry Banfield Family.
Why I think Core is going to zero
So when you compare Core to ICP, it's just disappointing, which is why, in my opinion, I think it's going to zero. Because once people see there is something far better than almost anything else in crypto in Internet Computer Protocol, and once they see how comparatively lame Core is next to that, I don't think the value holds. Core also has a whole bunch of competition. There are other protocols out there that also think they're leading the Bitcoin scaling wars. And in case you haven't noticed, there are not very many cryptos in the top 100 thriving off of Bitcoin scaling as their narrative. If I'm an Ethereum developer, there's no way I would build on Core. I'm building on ICP. There's just so much more you can do, and it's so much simpler.
To me, some of these could easily be bots trading on the Glyph exchange, and these games could be getting botted for whatever limited play to earn rewards exist. I will say they are doing a good job on their Core DAO YouTube channel. But this is absolutely not decentralized. Somebody owns the real stuff, the media, all the off-chain stuff, because it's not on chain. You can't have real Web3 that way. This is the same pattern I keep coming back to in my other reviews, like why I think Kaspa is headed to zero and why Berachain looks like a zero to me as well. I gather all of these honest, real-time crypto reviews in one place over on my crypto reviews hub.
I am aiming to bring some more balance to a world of crypto where almost everybody makes money by hyping stuff up. I'm your voice of, hey, I don't think this is that good. Anything you're thinking about investing in, you should always hear somebody say this is why it sucks, because if you don't have somebody saying this is why it sucks and somebody saying this is why it's great, you can't have a good perspective on it. So I hope this was useful. If you want to keep going deeper on what I actually do hold and why, come join me in the Jerry Banfield Family, where I share my honest research and you can ask me anything directly.