The legendary ORE is back: a new economic model has launched, with a monthly rise of over 30 times.

Original Title: “The Return of the Former God Disk ORE, This Time It Multiplied 30 Times in a Single Month”

Original author: Nicky

Original source:

Reprinted: Mars Finance

In 2024, ORE first appeared as the champion of the Solana Renaissance hackathon, and the proof-of-work mechanism it adopted once caused congestion on the Solana network due to excessive transaction volume.

The Solana ecosystem project ORE, which had been dormant for nearly a year, has returned to the market spotlight. This PoW mining protocol, once jokingly referred to as “the one that crashed Solana,” is back with an upgraded protocol, not only driving the token price from $10 to over $600 in the past month but also ranking second in the Solana network with a daily protocol revenue exceeding $1 million, second only to Pump.fun, with this growth almost entirely achieved in DEX.

ORE was created by the anonymous developer Hardhat Chad, whose identity model is inspired by the tradition of Satoshi Nakamoto in Bitcoin. In the early stages of the project, Hardhat Chad independently completed the development of ORE V1. Currently, the team includes members like Neil Shahani who are responsible for project development and community communication.

With the development of the project, ORE has established Regolith Labs as a formal development entity.

In September 2024, Regolith Labs, the development team behind ORE, completed a $3 million seed round of financing, led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Solana Ventures. This funding will primarily be used for team expansion and technology development.

Subsequently, the project team launched version V2; however, the early V2 version failed to completely resolve the incentive misalignment issue, resulting in low mining yields and the ORE price being stuck in a prolonged slump.

After a year of exploration, the team recognized the fundamental value loss problem of traditional PoW and decided to undertake a comprehensive reconstruction. On October 22, 2025, the ORE official released a new announcement, stating that through redesign, it can accumulate protocol revenue, achieve sustainable token economics, and accelerate the mission of creating a native value storage on Solana.

The new protocol introduces a 5×5 grid mining system. Each round lasts one minute, during which miners occupy blocks in the grid by deploying SOL. At the end of each round, the system selects a winning block through a secure random number generator, and the miners on that block share the total SOL of the other 24 blocks proportionally. In addition, one miner from the winning block has the chance to receive an extra reward of 1 ORE (approximately every three rounds). This design transforms a “zero-sum game” into “collective value redistribution,” where the SOL from losers fully flows into the winners, avoiding value leakage.

The agreement also designed a “Motherlode” prize pool mechanism, which will contribute 0.2 ORE to the prize pool each round, with a probability of 1:625 to trigger the prize pool. If the reward is not triggered, the prize pool will continue to accumulate until it is won by a lucky miner in a future round.

Economic Model: Deflationary Mechanism and Value Accumulation

The core innovation of the ORE protocol lies in its value capture mechanism. All mining rewards are subject to a 10% “refining fee” upon extraction, and these tokens will be automatically distributed to other miners based on the proportion of unclaimed ORE they have. The longer miners hold the mined ORE, the more ORE they will receive.

More importantly, the protocol will automatically collect 10% of the SOL mining rewards as protocol revenue, which will be used to repurchase ORE tokens from the open market. In the past seven days, the protocol revenue reached 21,529 SOL (approximately 3.6 million USD), and this mechanism drove the repurchase of 10,381 ORE. Of these, 90% of the repurchased tokens are permanently “buried”, while the remaining 10% are allocated to stakers.

This design allows the net emission of ORE to dynamically adjust between deflation and inflation. When the protocol's revenue is large enough, the entire system will enter a deflationary state.

Currently, the protocol has staked 286,629 ORE, with a TVL exceeding 150 million USD and an APR of 20.93%.

Tokenomics

ORE will maintain its existing maximum supply cap of 5 million tokens and a stable average issuance rate of approximately 1 ORE per minute. However, the introduction of protocol revenue and the automatic burial mechanism means that if protocol revenue is sufficiently large, the net issuance may fluctuate between limited inflation and unlimited deflation. According to Dune data, ORE has been in a deflationary state for five out of the past seven days.

Ecological Recognition: Official Endorsement from Solana

Solana officials are particularly concerned about the profitability of this mechanism. On the morning of November 10, Solana officials quoted a tweet from ORE growth lead Neil Shahani, expressing surprise at its daily income surpassing 1 million dollars.

Solana co-founder toly directly commented: “Ore is money,” and retweeted emphasizing its advantages such as “continuous miner incentives, staking rewards come from protocol revenue rather than inflation, and fees reinvested into the ecosystem.”

The integration scope of ORE is also continuously expanding. The Seeker device from Solana Mobile now supports ORE applications, allowing users to participate in mining directly through their mobile phones, achieving the experience of “mining anytime, anywhere.”

Community Response

Some community users are cautious about the return of ORE. Some users pointed out that participating in mining games may be a negative return behavior, and the real beneficiaries are the ORE holders. The mining mechanism of ORE is essentially a “zero-sum game,” where the SOL from the losers flows entirely to the winners. As the number of participants increases, the mining costs (the SOL invested) rise significantly.

If miners choose to “sell immediately after mining”, they have to bear the price volatility risk under the high cost of “refining fees”; whereas long-term holders can cover costs through “refining” fees, staking rewards, and deflationary appreciation, and even achieve net profits. This understanding encourages more users to choose to hold tokens directly rather than participate in mining.