What is Exocore and What Makes it Unique?

Introduction

Exocore is an upcoming purpose-built layer 1 blockchain co-founded in 2023 by Warren Paul Anderson, Rongjian Lan, and Professor Raluca Ada Popa. Exocore introduces Aggregated Security (AggSec), which combines economic security and cryptographic security to scale decentralized compute for off-chain services.

Despite the popularity of protocols like EigenLayer, only 2% of all staked tokens have been restaked, indicating that the field of restaking still has significant room for growth. Exocore's unique design makes it a blockchain worth watching as it approaches its Mainnet launch in early Q1 of next year.

What Makes Exocore Unique?

The uniqueness of Exocore could make it a dark horse in the restaking space. While most of the field is focused exclusively on single chain restaking (ie: Ethereum), or cross chain staking (ie: Babylon), Exocore stands out as the only player capable of supporting native restaking across every major blockchain type including UTXO chains, EVM chains, Rust chains (such as Solana), MOVE chains, and more.

“AggSec”

AggSec, short for aggregated security, is the term Exocore coined to describe their unique combination of unified economic security with cryptographic security.

Exocore aggregates the economic security from multiple blockchains, via omnichain restaking, then normalizes it across USD using an embedded price oracle. Exocore takes this a step further by integrating cryptographic security such as ZKP, FHE, and MPC into its appchain architecture for developers to use at scale. AggSec can then be extended to any service that needs or wants decentralized compute.

AggSec makes trust programmable by allowing developers to precisely define and implement security parameters through both economic incentives, which make trust conditional, and cryptographic guarantees, which make trust deterministic.

Core Design Principles

The structure of Exocore is built around a few core principles which will guide the future of the network, and are imperative to understand the scope of what Exocore aims to achieve.

• Security First: Exocore prioritizes security at both the protocol and governance levels above all else.
• Protocol Agnostic: By natively integrating the execution environments of all the top chains, Exocore aims to foster seamless cooperation and interoperability.
• Modularly Pluggable: Built with the knowledge in mind that blockchain technology is constantly evolving, Exocore adopts a modular structure designed for adaptability.
• Democratically Governed: Keeping with the core ethos of crypto, there is an emphasis on community-driven, consensus-based governance.
• Permissionlessly Open: Exocore will allow anyone, anywhere, to access, use and build upon its network with no gatekeepers in order to foster innovation.
• Trust Minimized: Decentralized trust does not always have to be trustless; but it should at least be trust minimized. No third-party trust assumptions should be introduced beyond the Exocore protocol and basic cryptographic primitives, such as Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP).
• Reasonably Decentralized: Decentralization is a progressive spectrum. Exocore should be architecturally designed to be reasonably decentralized from inception. Decentralization should be an essential principle for building an open market for decentralized trust.

Conclusion

In a crowded space of restaking, Exocore brings a refreshingly novel approach to the market. They aim to unify diversified liquidity across many distinct blockchains to serve as a security layer and coordination engine for decentralized compute. Exocore is still in testnet however the website hints at mainnet in 2024, so be sure to follow their Twitter so you don’t miss the launch!