Originally, the project started out as it's own PoS network, that would run on Tendermint, like THORChain, but for a network of colocation providers as the validators, which would essentially be issued bonds on the blockchain for their data center and energy production / low-cost electricity margin infrastructure value, but they would be paid yield from fees of the mining token hashrate hosted at their facilities. Most people think of mining as just the hardware cost, but industrial scale operations rely on economies of scale, which take into account the CAPEX and OPEX with infrastructural costs being a major buildout. So think of the network as a separate 2-tier token system of value, for the infrastructure of the data centers, which stake for yield from fees of the hashrate token which represent the hardware inside the data center, generating the mining rewards. Most hashrate tokens only account for the latter value. And a lot of the times, they have empty rack space, which is why colocation providers became popular, and I saw this very early on before anyone else (early 2019), and I proposed a network for colocation providers, that would issue a hashrate token based on the hashrate capacity they wanted to host for retail miners to buy directly through a token, but they would also have a separate token which represented their fees from the hashrate token, which they could stake on the blockchain network; this works, but there are some issues with having some level of centralization (albeit, better than anything else to this day), now we have Mars and BTCST (which are fully centralized, but just use the blockchain and smart contracts for automation and transparency), as well as Compass Mining (which is essentially what I tried to do, but minus the blockchain and tokenization part). But none of them are doing it in a fully decentralized way. Think of it like WeWork, but for Proof of Work, which makes more sense (than WeWork itself, at the time, when I tried to use this analogy, people laughed at me because they couldn't understand it and only thought of how bad of a business WeWork was because of the controversial financial documents for their IPO), because the workers at the office space would be mining hardware, paying a subscription premium (and in my blockchain network model, that subscription-based premium would be simply the network fees from the hashrate tokens, sort of like LP fees), at data center space rented to the mining hardware, which spend its entire lifetime hosted there (by all means). I tried to pitch this to some VCs, but fell on deaf ears, all were too busy with DeFi and Uniswap at the time. Now Compass Mining is successful, congrats to them; they validated the idea of a colocation network (but not on the blockchain). So since no one saw the potential, I started focusing on DeFi to get better insight into how it worked and how it could be potentially applied to my current system, and that's when I began working on the new version of the project, Corehash, which scrapped the colocation network idea, because it was prone to centralization to some extent, and you couldn't have hashrate freely flow in and out of the system, it would be through the dedicated mining providers, which worked well for all intents and purposes, so the idea still works, but I found something even better. (The goal here is to Decentralize Mining.) Once I learned about how Uniswap worked, I realize how I had come up with a similar formula (although it's completely different, by syntax it looks very similar) years ago this whole time, when I first came up with the token hashrate model for hashrate staking. Basically, instead of x*y=k, it's x/y=k, and x=total hashrate supply, y=token staked demand, k=token hashrate or market equilibrium. This also allows you to swap seamlessly between multiple hash algorithms, like how you can swap ERC20 tokens with Uniswap (originally, I called this Arcade Mining, where mining is kind of like an arcade, with each algorithm being different arcade games you could play with your hashrate token). This enables all sorts of amazing things you can do with hashrate liquidity tokenized through this model, as it's based on sort of a vault reserve that grows over time, and can be used for DeFi, rather than a fixed unit hashrate token (e.g. 1 token = 1 TH @ 35c/kwH). Most importantly, it was the idea of leveraging liquidity mining for a ecosystem protocol, but for literally mining hashrate itself. So pivoting from colocation providers, into a fully decentralized mining protocol that can be liquidity mined to earn fees from the protocol/vault mining fees taken directly from mining rewards.
