Bitcoin mining has been a big topic this year. Especially with a pro-crypto White House, growing global regulatory clarity, and the focus on AI. The Lightning network, the payment scaling layer operating on the bitcoin network, has also gained significant adoption in 2024. Then there is American Bitcoin, a company focused on helping every day Americans accumulate bitcoin. Everywhere you look, there is news about bitcoin.
Amid all this buzz, though, it’s been a tough year for bitcoin investors and miners alike. The price of bitcoin today is lower than it was on January 1 this year when bitcoin was hovering at around $94,000. Not only that, but for much of the year we have been reporting a shift from bitcoin mining to AI data centers and high performance computing. The market has become more competitive, and the rewards are not paying the numbers that people had once hoped. Nor is bitcoin necessarily fulfilling its promise.
Dr. K, the CTO of Quai Network, delivered a presentation at PorcFest 2025 in June. The speech during the event wasn’t the first time he had called bitcoin miners “energy brokers.” His speech was compelling. He referred to how there could be a world where the dollar is no longer the currency of choice. Instead, he sees energy as the future.
If You Want a Monetary System, You Can’t Just Have a Store of Value
“At Quai Network we have reimagined how you can use Proof of Work,” Dr. K explained. “We’ve created a new consensus mechanism, a variation on proof of work, but proof of work nonetheless.”
The outcome of this new project is that you end up with 50,000 transactions per second. Bitcoin doesn’t even do this [50k] every hour today. You end up with low consistent fees. Dr. K calls this new consensus mechanism “Proof-of-Entropy Minima”.
The problem with bitcoin is that everybody is hoarding it, Dr. K explained. People are more likely to spend dollars than bitcoin if they want to make a transaction. “To have a sustainable proof-of-work system, you need to be generating fee revenue to pay the miners,” he added. Fee revenue that can’t be generated when people and institutions are hoarding.
Qi: The Energy Dollar
Bitcoin needs to get more fee revenue; it needs to get people to transact and not just hoard. This is one of the problems they are trying to solve at Quai network. To do this, the company has issued two tokens, one is deflationary and acts as a store of value – Quai. The other is an energy dollar called Qi. It has cash-like properties and works similarly to a stablecoin.
Dr. K explained how up to 70% of crypto transactions take place in stablecoins. Even more if we only look at transactions on centralized crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, or Kraken. Dr. K feels this activity continues to legitimize fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar.
Instead of using stablecoins, Dr. K believes that the Qi token could be an alternative. He explained how the Qi token is related to the cost of producing a hash, which is energy.
“We just relate it to the cost of the production of a hash,” Dr. K explained. “The value of Qi is always related to the cost of production.”
The company has implemented an “Unspent Transaction Output” (UTXO) model for its native Qi token. This has helped give the token cash-like properties.
Dr. K and Quai Network aren’t the only ones to have raised this topic. In October Elon Musk posted on X that “Bitcoin is based on energy: you can issue fake fiat currency, and every government in history has done so, but it is impossible to fake energy.”
Miners are Not the Problem. Proof-of-Work Economics is.
Dr. K believes that bitcoin is a more superior store of value than gold. But it’s also this value that is the biggest challenge for bitcoin miners. Hoarding lowers transaction fees, which, in turn, pay the fees that secure the network and compensate miners.
To increase transaction fees, you need to have two tokens, according to Dr. K. One can remain the store of value like bitcoin currently is, but the other doesn’t have to be pegged to the dollar. It can be independent of the dollar and still act as a medium of exchange with privacy. People can transact in it to generate fees to create a sustainable economically mined system.
At Quai network what they are building is a global monetary system that’s decentralized on a proof-of-work chain. Dr. K doesn’t want cryptocurrency to be dependent on dollar-based stablecoins. He wants to burn the bridge to fiat. The bridge holding crypto back and forcing it to be reliant on a fiat system that it was built to supersede.
Quai’s “Christmas Fork”
Quai network’s leadership team has been working on a new monetary system for more than eight years. The mix of being based in Texas, being early crypto adopters, and working with the best in the market (Stephen Wolfram joined as an advisor in 2024), mean that Quai is one to watch.
We sat down with Alan Orwick, CEO of Dominant Strategies, which develops the Quai Network. Last week marked a large milestone for the ambitious blockchain company. There had been a “Christmas fork”, which was creating a lot of buzz online.
The Subsidized Open-market Acquisition Protocol or SOAP was released on December 17, 2025. This launch means that Quai Network becomes the first blockchain to be mineable by SHA-256, Scrypt, and KawPoW algorithms simultaneously. Complicated? Not really. Not if you are a miner.
The value of the native $Quai token has performed much like other altcoins this year. It started high but then dropped off as we all experienced a bear market in 2025. However, while other altcoins have struggled in the last week, $Quai has rallied. When SOAP was announced, the token was trading a little above $0.02. It hit highs of $0.025. You may want to keep an eye on it.
The Proof-of-Work Option: $Quai
Over the last week most crypto tokens have dropped in value. But Quai is bucking the trend. Not only that. According to Alan, Quai, as of last Wednesday night, is the most profitable coin to mine for SHA-256, Scrypt and KawPoW algorithms. Users on X have commented how Quai Network ranks 8th across all blockchain in term of chain revenue in last 24H.
SHA-256 is the most popular proof-of-work algorithm which is used to mine bitcoin and bitcoin cash. The Scrypt algorithm is used to mine Litecoin and Dogecoin. The KawPow algorithm is used to mine Ravencoin (RVN), Neoxa (NEOX), Clore (CLORE), and Meowcoin (MEWC), amongst others. Quai has all the major proof-of-work layer 1 blockchains covered with the new launch.
What Quai is doing is tapping into the mining of other networks with “merge mining,” using those tokens as buybacks on the $Quai token.
According to Quai, merge mining is the process of mining multiple blockchains at once. Like the traditional process of mining, computers calculate the outputs of one-way hash functions to find hashes with a certain number of leading zeros (the “difficulty threshold”). In Quai Network, each miner simultaneously mines at least three blockchains at a time.
Merged mining simultaneously solves two large problems within the crypto space: an inability to scale trustlessly, and an inability to bridge blockchains trustlessly.
Quai Network’s SOAP reinvents merged mining by using rewards from parent chains (like Dogecoin, Litecoin) to buy and burn $Quai tokens. This creates continuous buy pressure and enhances security. Rather than paying miners directly in parent tokens, miners still use their hardware for Quai’s KawPow, but the subsidy revenue goes to the protocol, boosting $Quai’s economic stability through market buy-and-burns.
Token burning is the permanent removal of cryptocurrency tokens from circulation.
Tough Times Create Tough Protocols
Quai’s solution is for all bitcoin miners. Not just large ones like Riot Platforms, IREN, MARA, Cipher Mining, Hut 8, and others can benefit. Bitcoin miners of any size can engage with Quai’s new upgrade. Indeed, miners of most proof-of-work blockchains can benefit.
“The best yield in bitcoin is from bitcoin mining,” Alan shared. Tokens like HBAR or XRP, which operate proof-of-stake, do not have a native mechanism to create yield. All the yield they produce is essentially just token emissions, and is something handed out from a foundation versus something that is sustainable long term, he added.
Quai is different. Following the upgrade $Quai mining creates yield, and there is also a buyback process from the merge mining of other tokens that can be used as a subsidy to distribute to stakers.
“We have a native protocol yield from that buyback that is long term sustainable,” Alan explained. “It is able to grow as we have more hash rate in the system.”
When we spoke, Quai had already mined $2,500 of revenue for the buybacks. This number reached over $23,000 by Saturday and continues to rise.
Alan explained how this means that $Quai is becoming one of the most profitable tokens on the market. Supported by numbers not seen since ethereum was hot on the market.
It took ethereum many years to move to Proof-of-Stake, Alan continued. Quai’s upgrade took just over three months and is potentially just as significant.
“Tough times create tough protocols,” Alan concluded.
Bitcoin Doesn’t Care
Recent challenges related to bitcoin miners, the stock value of these companies and their pivot to supporting data centers was the next topic we discussed.
Alan explained how “bitcoin doesn’t care about the stock of a mining company. Bitcoin doesn’t care about what’s happening in the AI space. Bitcoin is going to do its thing.”
Alan added how bitcoin will continue to survive. How the revenue and emissions of bitcoin will be based on the fundamental economic policy of bitcoin. What Quai is doing is a potential opportunity for the leading bitcoin miners.
“If Quai can offer greater profitability, greater network utility from transaction fees, from actual revenue, from usage,” Alan explained. “That is something that long term the bitcoin miners should have their eyes on.
“They are energy brokers. They are the people that source energy, which they will sell to the highest bidder. Right now, we are one of the highest bidders.”
Quai is becoming more visible. The ecosystem is growing, and $Quai is getting traction. What the company is doing is turning mining into something that is structurally good versus structurally typically net negative for the system.
If you haven’t looked at Quai’s Christmas Fork yet, perhaps you can find a few minutes to explore it in between helpings of roast turkey. Alan and Dr. K won’t be taking much time out during the festive season. They will be focusing on how to create a new monetary system. One that is sustainable. One that can help destroy the bridge that links crypto with fiat.
Author: Andy Samu
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