Our Vision
Why we're building CompoundORE and what makes ORE special
What is Money?
Money is usually defined by the functions it performs:
Medium of exchange – money is used to buy and sell goods and services, avoiding barter.
Unit of account – money provides a common measure for pricing and comparing value.
Store of value – money should retain value over time so it can be saved and used in the future.
The U.S. Dollar
The U.S. dollar, the official currency of the United States, is the most exchanged currency in the world. The U.S. dollar is a fiat currency and has value because the US Government declares it legal tender, not because it is backed by a physical commodity like gold or silver.
- Its value comes from government authority and public trust.
- It must be accepted for tax payments and debts.
- It has no intrinsic value; the material it's made from is worth far less than its face value.
The U.S. dollar was originally tied to gold beginning in 1792, when the Coinage Act defined the dollar in terms of a fixed weight of gold and silver, allowing paper money to be redeemed for precious metal. For much of the 19th century, this gold backing provided monetary stability, though it was suspended during the Civil War when the government issued unbacked paper currency to finance wartime spending.
In 1879, the United States formally returned to the gold standard, fixing the dollar's value to gold and allowing full redemption, a system that remained in place until the economic pressures of the Great Depression. In 1933, amid widespread bank failures and deflation, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended gold convertibility for U.S. citizens, banned private gold ownership, and later revalued gold from $20.67 to $35 per ounce, effectively weakening the dollar while maintaining gold backing for foreign governments.
This partial gold standard continued under the Bretton Woods system established in 1944, which made the U.S. dollar the world's primary reserve currency and allowed foreign central banks to exchange dollars for gold at a fixed rate. By the late 1960s, rising U.S. deficits and global dollar accumulation made it impossible to maintain gold convertibility. On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon ended the dollar's exchangeability for gold, permanently dissolving the gold standard.
Since then, the U.S. dollar has functioned as a fiat currency, backed not by gold but by government authority, economic strength, and public trust, marking a fundamental shift in the global monetary system.
While the U.S. dollar is second to none when it comes to medium of exchange or unit of account, it hasn't been a good store of value for decades. During the Great Depression, the dollar was devalued to $35 per ounce of gold. An ounce of gold now costs nearly $3,500 per ounce—a 100x increase over 93 years or nearly a 5% loss per year, 93 years in a row. A horrible store of value.
Bitcoin: Digital Gold
Unlike the U.S. dollar, Bitcoin's value lies in its decentralization, fixed supply, and independence from government control. Unlike a fiat currency that can be expanded by central banks and is subject to inflation, Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21 million coins, making it attractive to those seeking a hedge against monetary debasement.
Bitcoin operates on a borderless, permissionless network, allowing peer-to-peer transfers without reliance on banks or intermediaries, which can be especially appealing in regions with weak financial institutions or capital controls. Additionally, its transparent, rule-based monetary policy contrasts with discretionary central banking, leading to the frequent representation of Bitcoin as "digital gold."
Bitcoin vs. Ethereum
While both Bitcoin and Ethereum are blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, they were designed for different core purposes, which leads to important differences in how they function and are used.
Bitcoin was created primarily as digital money and a store of value. Its design emphasizes security, decentralization, and monetary scarcity, with a fixed supply of 21 million coins and a relatively simple scripting system. Because Bitcoin's functionality is intentionally limited, it is often compared to digital gold—a hedge against inflation and a long-term value store rather than a platform for complex applications.
Ethereum, by contrast, was built as a programmable blockchain. Its native currency, Ether (ETH), is used to pay for computation on the network, enabling smart contracts, decentralized applications (dApps), decentralized finance (DeFi), NFTs, and DAOs. Ethereum prioritizes flexibility and innovation, allowing developers to build complex systems directly on the blockchain. Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum does not have a fixed supply cap, though recent upgrades have introduced mechanisms that can reduce net issuance and made Ethereum a compelling store of value.
Ethereum vs. Solana
While Ethereum and Solana are both smart contract blockchains, they were built with very different design philosophies, performance characteristics, and trade-offs.
Ethereum prioritizes decentralization, security, and long-term stability. It has the largest developer ecosystem and supports a vast range of applications, including DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and stablecoins. Ethereum scales primarily through layer-2 solutions (such as rollups), which keep the base layer highly decentralized but can add complexity. Its architecture emphasizes resilience and neutrality, making it the dominant platform for high-value and institutional use, though base-layer transactions can be slower and more expensive during congestion. While these layer-2 solutions offer performance and scalability, they are inherently not decentralized and offer a confusing consumer user experience.
Solana focuses on high throughput and low transaction costs at the base layer. It uses a unique design (including Proof of History) to process thousands of transactions per second with very low fees, making it attractive for consumer-scale applications like gaming, payments, and high-frequency trading. This monolithic approach is much easier for consumers to navigate as you can do everything with Solana and do not need to navigate bridging between different chains.
Why ORE?
As one of the fastest and most widely used blockchains in the world, Solana has become the ideal home for a new generation of digital assets and financial applications. While many other digital stores of value exist and provide immense value to their users, none are native to Solana, and thus rely on risky third-party intermediaries to use with protocols on Solana.
ORE is designed from the ground up to serve as a Solana-native store of value with maximal freedom and minimal trust assumptions. By choosing to exist on Solana rather than as a new L1, ORE does not need to incentivize its own set of miners.
Importantly, ORE also serves a critical role for Solana. Before ORE existed, Solana served as both a crypto "digital oil" and "digital gold." Solana users needed Solana to use applications on the chain, hence "digital oil", and they often saved it as a crypto store of value "digital gold." These two objectives are at odds with one another. Price increasing exponentially is great for a "digital gold" and ruinous for a "digital oil." If the price of Solana did a 100x, then it would suddenly become much more expensive to use apps on the chain.
If we let Solana focus on what it does best—being cheap and fast—then it becomes the best "digital oil" for crypto consumers. ORE can serve as the "digital gold" for Solana.
The Leaky Bucket Problem
ORE has a fixed supply cap of 3 million tokens, like Bitcoin with a fixed supply cap of 21 million tokens. Unlike Bitcoin, however, ORE does not need to incentivize Solana's miners. As a result, ORE can take nearly all of the Solana spent by ORE miners and reinvest it into the ORE ecosystem via buybacks.
This solves the "leaky bucket" problem of every other crypto store of value.
The "leaky bucket" problem: each cryptocurrency has a certain level of inflation used to incentivize its miners, and the more valuable the token becomes, the more buying pressure is required to offset miners selling. Miners need to sell because they have expensive hardware to pay for and real-world expenses to cover, such as electricity.
ORE, in contrast, can be mined on a smartphone at no expense.
The result is ORE is super hard money. There will never be more than 3 million in circulation, and it is unlikely we ever get there given a small fraction of that is in circulation and buybacks typically more than offset new issuance.
Super Productive Money
Not only is ORE super hard money, it is also super productive money. Since I've been invested in ORE, it has generated a real 15-20% yield. That is yield more than token inflation.
That kind of return is insane in traditional finance and equally unheard of within crypto. Most crypto stores of value that have a yield approaching anywhere near this level also have material inflation. A 20% yield typically means you are suffering at least that level of inflation and thus you need to keep that yield to maintain your ownership of the network.
With ORE, you can have your cake and eat it too.
This is the foundational idea that led me to building CompoundORE. A store of value as special as ORE deserved its own "leakless" DeFi protocol.
The CompoundORE Vision
CompoundORE has no token and is bootstrapped off my balance sheet. As one of the largest holders of ORE and CompoundORE's largest customer into perpetuity, this is the product I willed into existence for myself.
CompoundORE's first mission is to make accumulating easier and more efficient. All you need to do is deposit your ORE and then we will compound it for you, making sure you earn yield on your yield. While that is nice, it is table stakes in today's world.
We also offer you the ability to get a fiat cash advance on your ORE yield—and we offer it to you without charging any interest or exposing you to liquidation risk. How can we do this? We can do this because it is my money and I believe in the long-term value of ORE.
While we could stop there and many would, what would be the fun in that?
AutoBorrow: The Perpetual Motion Machine
Our initial product suite will also ship with AutoBorrow—the ability to take out a new cash advance after you pay off your first cash advance. Once you opt into this feature, we will also give you the option to pick what token you want to receive and where you want that token sent.
At this point you now have an ultra-hard and productive money capable of supporting fiat cash advances to buy other productive assets.
The first idea that comes to mind is using this perpetual motion machine to send Solana to your autominer so you can mine ORE into perpetuity without lifting a finger.
I plan on setting up half a dozen wallets so I can run various mining strategies in addition to stacking ORE and other valuable assets on Solana—from IndieSOL to things like JLP, TurboORE, sBTC, silver and gold on Solana, and stocks on chain via Remora.
The possibilities are endless.
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