I remember writing about ORE when it first launched in 2024 and the congestion it caused nearly brought Solana to its knees.

A budding proof-of-work (PoW) protocol then, ORE's explosive popularity showed the enduring allure of mining among crypto natives. Who doesn't love the idea of "earning passive income" and striking digital gold? And as the activity that originally secured Bitcoin, mining has become central to the idea of cryptographically "hard" money.

Last cycle offered little reason to look beyond Bitcoin as crypto's leading store of value, but that is changing. Between its unresolved quantum vulnerability, questions about its long-term security budget, and increasing institutionalization, people are looking at cryptocurrencies that might offer some of the same monetary qualities.

Fittingly, the assets getting the most attention as alternative stores of value retain Bitcoin's PoW foundation while building on it to address some of BTC's shortcomings.

Zcash, for example, pairs PoW and a fixed supply with native privacy and its pursuit to turn quantum-resistant. Newcomers like Pearl hope to improve on the economics of BTC mining and solve its security budget concerns as a result.

And the market has started to reward these ideas. Over the past three months, Zcash and Pearl have gained roughly 170% and 400%, respectively, outpacing Bitcoin's ~25% gain. ORE has joined them, rising approximately 170% and increasingly finding itself in the conversation around alternative stores of value.

Yet unlike Zcash and Pearl, ORE has abandoned computational proof of work altogether.

Today, ORE still operates on Solana, with a maximum supply of 3 million tokens. Its tokens are "mined," or rather distributed through a lottery-like mechanism where participants commit SOL for a chance to win newly issued coins.

That makes ORE an unusual contender for hard money: its design looks more aimed at making mining accessible again while turning Solana's speculative culture toward something more enduring. Let's look at how ORE works and the arguments for and against its potential as a store of value.

How ORE Works

ORE calls its foundation virtual mining. Each round, participants commit SOL to one or more squares on a shared 5×5 grid, hoping to land on the winning one. Here's how it works:

• Commit SOL: Miners deposit SOL across any of the grid's 25 squares, each with an equal 4% chance of being selected.

• Determine the winner: Roughly every minute, one of the 25 squares is randomly selected to receive 1 ORE. Fifteen squares are "split" squares: if one wins, its miners divide the ORE in proportion to how much SOL they deposited there. If one of the other ten "solo" squares wins, a single miner takes the full ORE, with their odds based on their share of deposits on that square.

• Collect winnings: All miners receive most of their deposited SOL back. The protocol keeps 1% of deposits on the winning square and 10.9% on losing squares. The 1% is an admin fee paid to a separate fee wallet on every deposit; the other 9.9% taken from losing squares is the protocol's revenue.

ORE's 5×5 mining grid. Starred squares are "solo" squares. Source: ORE

There's also a jackpot called the Motherlode. An additional 0.2 ORE is issued into it each round, and each round has a 1-in-500 chance of triggering a payout to miners on the winning square.

So "mining" is more of a lottery where participants compete to acquire ORE below market price, though whether they actually secure a discount depends on expenses, the ORE price, and, of course, luck. Claiming newly mined ORE also incurs a separate 10% "refining" fee, which rewards miners who leave their earnings unclaimed.

Much of what miners pay, however, goes toward supporting the asset they are trying to win.

Turning Mining Costs Into Buying Pressure

The 9.9% of deposits the protocol takes from losing squares is its revenue, most of which is used to buy existing ORE from the market. Those purchased tokens are then split two ways:

• 90% are burned and removed from supply. Because ORE's 3 million cap limits the supply that exists at any one time, not the total ever minted, each burn frees room for new ORE to be mined. That mining generates the revenue that funds more buybacks, and so on.

• 10% goes to stakers, rewarding holders who deposit (stake) their ORE with the protocol.

The loop scales with activity: greater mining generates more revenue, funding larger buybacks that can potentially offset new issuance.

Founder Hardhat Chad describes this as addressing proof of work's "value leak." Bitcoin miners spend on electricity and hardware to secure the network, with that money going to outside providers. ORE, by comparison, uses miners' expenditures to buy ORE off the market, directing that spending back toward the asset itself.

ORE has also recently introduced a reserve, which holds a portion of mining revenue in assets including SOL, USDC, tokenized gold (GLDx), and JitoSOL. It deploys these assets as buy orders across different price ranges below the market price, with acquired ORE following the same 90/10 split.

So it doesn't "back" ORE in the traditional sense. Holders can't redeem ORE for these assets, nor does the reserve guarantee a minimum price. Rather, it's a pool of capital the protocol can use to buy ORE during selloffs.

It's a novel approach to distributing and supporting a scarce asset.

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Can ORE Be Hard Money?

But does it mean ORE's hard enough to store value? Let's look at both sides of the debate.

Against

The major objection to ORE as a store of value, as Tulip King argues, is that it doesn't control the blockchain securing it.

Unlike Bitcoin or Zcash, whose native tokens are integral to their networks' security, ORE relies on Solana. Its future is therefore tied to another network's incentives, governance, and development. An upgrade that benefits Solana, for example, might not benefit ORE, and ORE holders would have little say in that decision.

Tulip also questions whether ORE has a compelling reason to exist, noting that Bitcoin has a political and social reason for existing. For context, Zcash was created to bring privacy to cryptocurrency and is now working toward quantum resistance, while Pearl is responding to miners' growing interest in AI and concerns about Bitcoin's long-term security budget. ORE, by comparison, seems to offer mainly fairness and accessibility, giving anyone with a Solana wallet the opportunity to mine. Is that enough to make it a lasting store of value? For many, like lesabrefomo and No Limit Holding's Brian Breslow, it doesn't.

— (@)

For

Proponents, though, like ORE advocate NSE, see these characteristics differently.

To them, accessibility matters. Bitcoin mining has gone from something anyone with a computer could participate in to an industry dominated by specialized hardware and large-scale operations. Bitcoin's not the only one. Both Zcash and Pearl have high barriers to entry for ordinary miners. With ORE, anyone with a Solana wallet and some SOL can participate. Yes, there are still costs, but the barrier to entry is considerably lower. For them, giving people the opportunity to participate in mining, rather than simply buying an asset, is valuable in itself.

NSE also sees ORE's dependence on Solana as a trade-off worth making rather than a weakness. NSE argues that ORE inherits Solana's security and low fees, which lets it concentrate on issuance and distribution, while conceding that it is not fully sovereign. Others, like ORE supporter yourfriendbrett, argue that the design deliberately prioritizes usability over maximal independence of settlement, offering a scarce, accessible asset inside the Solana ecosystem.

Lastly, there's the cultural argument, made by supporters such as pokerchessman and NYSoul2x, which positions ORE as a foil to Solana's frenetic environment of short-lived speculation: a scarce, fairly distributed asset designed to retain value amid this environment.

— (@)

There's something fitting about using a lottery-like mining mechanism on the "casino chain," but directing that activity toward something people might actually want to hold.

ORE's accessibility and cultural fit offer a compelling answer to why it needs to exist. It's responding to the barriers of traditional PoW mining while attempting to turn Solana's speculative instincts toward something more enduring.

While I wouldn't put ORE in the same category as Bitcoin, Zcash, or Pearl, ORE's mechanism design and cultural fit make a compelling case for the project, even if they don't yet establish it as a lasting store of value.

Whether ORE can sustain its momentum and prove resilient over time will tell us more about how far those qualities can take it. For now, it's an interesting experiment in what hard money might look like without its own proof-of-work consensus.