Company: DDC
Filing Date: 2025-07-22
Form Type: F-3
Source: 0001213900-25-066342
Chunk: 17

Company: DDC Enterprise Ltd
Filing Date: 2025-07-22
Form: F-3
Chunk 17
---
 the Bitcoin protocol, collectively maintained by a peer-to-peer network of decentralized
user nodes. This network hosts a public transaction ledger, known as the Bitcoin blockchain, on which bitcoin holdings and all validated
transactions that have ever taken place on the Bitcoin network are recorded. Balances of bitcoin are stored in individual “wallet”
functions, which associate network public addresses with one or more “private keys” that control the transfer of bitcoin.
The Bitcoin blockchain can be updated without any single entity owning or operating the network.

The Bitcoin protocol limits the total number of
bitcoins that can be generated over time to 21 million. As of July 15, 2025, approximately 19.9 million bitcoins have been generated.
New bitcoins are created and allocated by the Bitcoin protocol through a “mining” process that rewards users that validate
transactions in the Bitcoin blockchain. Validated transactions are added in “blocks” approximately every 10 minutes. The mining
process serves to validate transactions and secure the Bitcoin network. Mining is a competitive and costly operation that requires a large
amount of computational power to solve complex mathematical algorithms. This expenditure of computing power is known as “proof of
work.”

To incentivize miners to incur the costs of mining
bitcoin, the Bitcoin protocol rewards miners that successfully validate a block of transactions with newly generated bitcoin. The current
reward for miners that successfully validate a block of transactions is 3.125 bitcoin per mined block. The mining reward is reduced by
half, which is referred to as a bitcoin halving, after every 210,000 blocks are mined. This has historically occurred approximately every
four years. The most recent bitcoin halving occurred in April 2024, and the next bitcoin halving is expected to occur sometime in 2028.

Bitcoin is an open-source network that has no central
authority, so no one person can unilaterally make changes to the software that runs the network. However, there is a core group of developers
that maintains the code for the Bitcoin protocol, and they can propose changes to the source code and release periodic updates and other
changes. Unlike most software that has a central entity that can push updates to users, bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network in which individual
network participants, called nodes, decide whether to upgrade the software and accept the new changes. As a practical matter, a modification
becomes part of the Bitcoin protocol only if the proposed changes are accepted by participants collectively having more than 50% of the
processing power, known as hash