Written by Ryan Hong, Venture Contributor.

The b14g Merge Marketplace is a Bitcoin staking and order matching primitive enabling Core’s Dual Stakers to access the highest native BTC and CORE yield on-chain.

Core is designed to offer Bitcoiners yield across the risk curve—from lower yield solo staking to higher yield Dual Staking. The Merge Marketplace creates a more efficient Dual Staking market by connecting solo BTC stake and solo CORE stake, offering higher yields for all.

Thesis

1. Demand for Bitcoin yield products is accelerating, and there is value to be captured. The Bitcoin ecosystem contains nearly $900B of dormant capital. Core’s non-custodial Bitcoin staking will continue to be a leading Bitcoin staking product because of its security, simplicity, and utility in securing Core chain. As custodial setups, diluted points, and unsustainable yields continue flooding the BTC yield market, Core’s Dual Staking (and by extension, the Merge Marketplace) value proposition will become increasingly evident and realized by the market.
2. A Pareto improvement for Dual Staking. The best DeFi primitives maximize simplicity and composability—Morpho tightened rate spreads through order matching, creating a win-win opportunity for all lenders and borrowers. Similarly, the Merge Marketplace enables a more efficient market with higher yields for users in the best case and delivers the original would-be Dual Staking yield in the worst case. If Dual Staking is to succeed, so will the Merge Marketplace.
3. The b14g team embodies a rare combination of market intuition and first-principles thinking. Initially joining the Core ecosystem through the 2024 BTCfi Summer Hackathon, the team has a grassroots history of solving the right problems on Core. Their idea of Merge Staking, a staking model that later took shape in Core’s Dual Staking mechanism, was an early signal of their mission-driven mindset of building great products, only possible on Core.

Merge Marketplace

The Merge Marketplace is an order-matching protocol that integrates Core’s non-custodial BTC staking and Core staking to maximize rewards for both stakers.

• For BTC Holders: If you have BTC but no CORE, you can team up with a CORE holder on the Merge Marketplace. Together, you meet the threshold for higher yield tiers without acquiring more CORE yourself.
• For CORE Holders: If you have CORE but not enough BTC to optimize your staking tier, you can find BTC holders seeking CORE partners. Joining forces increases your share of higher-tier yields.

dualCORE Vault (liquid dual-staking CORE)

Staking CORE secures the Core network and yields PoS rewards, but doing so requires users to lock their CORE tokens into illiquid positions. Core’s native Liquid Staking Token (stCORE) was introduced to solve this. However, there are two fundamental drawbacks of stCORE:

• stCORE has a 7-day redemption period
• stCORE yield is derived from the base staking rate, not Dual Staking rates

b14g addresses these two issues through dualCORE:

• Earn maximum Dual Staking yields and daily autocompounding
• Use dualCORE for transfers, sales, or DeFi activities on Core

Traction

Since launching in December 2024, the Merge Marketplace has seen consistent growth in total CORE staked, distinct users, and adoption among Core validators and delegators.

Driven by its position as the highest Core-native and real yield (block rewards) opportunity, here’s an overview of the Merge Marketplace and dualCORE in its first two quarters of being live:

• Total CORE ($) staked on Merge Marketplace: 14M CORE ($7M)
• Total BTC ($) staked on Merge Marketplace: 1,239 BTC ($103M)
• Total Distinct Stakers: 4,345
• CORE in dualCORE Vault: 11M CORE ($5M)
• Total dualCORE Holders: 2,955

The Team‍

Bee, Eileen, and Mas have intimate experience building and growing web3 companies like oracles, yield aggregators, security solutions, and games since 2017. Their early experiments with Merge Staking built on Core’s Hybrid Satoshi Plus were an early signal of their ingenuity.

One month after Dual Staking launched, they introduced the Merge Marketplace. Two months later, they launched dualCORE, a testament to their strong market intuition, ability to execute, and deep commitment to building on Core.

Looking Forward

b14g is expanding the utility of dualCORE within the Core ecosystem. The team is focused on deepening liquidity on dualCORE pairs, catering to institutional demand, and enabling dualCORE as a collateral and borrowable asset.

The team will also introduce dualBTC and other yield aggregation products for CORE and BTC. For now, check out dualCORE Vault and the Merge Marketplace.

Check out b14g Twitter here: https://x.com/b14g_network