Merlin has been so popular lately that some people are jealous and can't sit still! It is no accident that Merlin has grown to this day. Behind Merlin’s success is the team’s long-term hard work and continuous innovation in the Bitcoin ecosystem, strong support from the community, win-win cooperation with other public chains rather than competition, and good financing and security. Base.

If you don’t know Merlin, read this concise and comprehensive article to learn more about how Merlin achieved what he has achieved today.

How does Merlin Chain unite people from all walks of life? Contains growth password

On March 10, Jeff, the founder of Merlin Chain, posted on Twitter, "Many outsiders think that Merlin's strength is the market and its shortcoming is product technology. This is the biggest misunderstanding about Merlin." He also said: Merlin's marketing capabilities are not as good as those of the outside world. The rumors are so exaggerated, but they come more from the spontaneous power of the community. The so-called mysterious monsters from the East are actually driven by the trust and love of the community.

As the current mainstream narrative, the outstanding market performance of Merlin Chain, the rising star of BTC L2, is often considered to be the most promising to compete with ETH L2, which represents the power of the West - the mainnet reached an astonishing US$3.6 billion TVL in 30 days after its launch. At the same time, curious voices are also emerging. Why can the mysterious Eastern monster unite people from all walks of life in a short period of time? Is there really a growth code behind the unprecedented funds, traffic and topic?

As a native BTC Layer 2, Merlin Chain has 91% of its USD 3.6 billion TVL from native Bitcoin assets, including 58% BTC and 33% Ordinals assets, surpassing Solana and Blast. This milestone is not just due to this short period of one month, but to the team's long-term deep work in the Bitcoin ecosystem, from Recursiverse to Bitmap Explorer to BRC420, and finally to Merlin Chain.

July 17, 2023: Release of BRC-420 protocol

July 31, 2023: Released Bitmap Explorer, a Bitmap-based visual panel for social, gaming and trading activities

September 19, 2023: The first asset of BRC-420, the blue box, was launched.

November 15, 2023: Bitmap coin exchange plan announced, 1 Bitmap can be exchanged for 1,000 $WMAP, doubling the price of Bitmap; at the same time, the price of the blue box increases to $1,000

December 26, 2023: Renamed to @BitmapTech; OKX Wallet announced support for BRC-420

January 19, 2024: Officially announced the Merlin Chain, the second layer of Bitcoin network

January 26, 2024: Merlin Chain testnet bridge launched

February 3, 2024: Blue Box reaches $40,000, becoming the third largest 10k series NFT on the market, behind BAYC and Punks

February 5, 2024: Merlin Chain completed IDO on Particle Network and issued 1% governance token $MERL

February 9, 2024: OKX Venture announces investment in Bitmap Tech

February 10, 2024: Merlin Chain IDO activity ends, with more than 1 million participating addresses

February 23, 2024: Merlin Chain’s TVL exceeds $2 billion, surpassing Solana and Blast, ranking fifth among all chains

Founder Jeff once revealed in an interview that in fact, the team did not think of doing Layer 2 at the beginning. In the process of continuously building products and interacting with developers and users in the community, they discovered that the interactions that could be done on L1 were too limited. , many ideas cannot be realized, and the Bitmap Tech team happens to use the strongest native foundation in all Bitcoin Layer 2: BRC-420 defines the Metaverse standard and copyright standard for Bitcoin assets, which was launched before the birth of Merlin Chain 600+ inscription assets and 1,000+ Bitcoin ecosystem developers; Bitmap.Tech captures more than 90% of the traffic of Bitmap, the first-level native asset of Bitcoin, and has 33,500+ independent addresses. It is the largest Ordinals asset community.

Long-termism achieves ecological prosperity, and the birth of Merlin Chain is both an accident and an inevitability.

BRC-420: Assets first, narrative second, community growing from the bottom up

Another growth strategy of Merlin Chain is "bottom-up issuance method, community-driven assets, and a new narrative from assets to projects", that is, issuing assets fairly, discovering assets by the community, and building community consensus around the assets. Then empower assets through product and ecological construction. It is undeniable that the Bitcoin community's recognition of Merlin Chain originated from several leading assets of BRC-420 - Needless to say, the growth miracle of the blue box, the subsequent music box, blue crystal, and dragon ball, in After adopting a bottom-up fair launch, the market performance has been very impressive, so we have firm confidence in the community behind it and the derived product ecology.

Unity public chain: from zero-sum game to win-win cooperation

Merlin Chain does not resist forming alliances with powerful teammates in the Ether system, and some shadows of Eastern wisdom can also be seen in it.

On March 7, Ethereum Layer2 project Manta launched the "Blast Off to Manta" campaign, encouraging users to cross-chain ETH and USDC from Blast to Manta Pacific and providing $MANTA token rewards. Once the campaign was launched, a large amount of funds were transferred from Blast to Manta. The reason for the users was simple: Blast's mechanism of locking liquidity for a full 14 days in the bull market was too unreasonable, while Manta could withdraw funds instantly and also provided a large number of token rewards.

This “vampire attack” is a typical encryption phenomenon, which is to attract users away from competing platforms by providing incentives. It is also a common way for Ethereum to compete for liquidity.

Merlin, however, found another path to unity. Less than a week after Manta launched the attack on Blast, on March 12, Merlin’s Seal announced the re-pledge of the Manta chain. Users can pledge the $STONE pledged in Manta to the Merlin Chain again to obtain Merlin points for mining.

Why does the Merlin Chain unite Manta? In addition to the team’s own resources, this wave of cooperation is beneficial to both parties.

For Merlin, the locked-up funds will expand dramatically (previously, large investors locked huge amounts of ETH in Manta), which is beneficial to valuation.

For Manta, the TVL that participates in Merlin’s lock-up is still on its own chain, which avoids the risk of a sharp drop in TVL caused by Stone’s unlocking in March and is conducive to stabilizing the currency price.

Cross-chain bridges such as StakeStone and Meson that provide intermediate services will also usher in a moment of adoption by a large number of users.

Users who stake $STONE will also receive Merlin’s premium tokens, as well as StakeStone points.

Merlin Chain is too big, with many friends and few enemies. This is the situation of masters.

Gathering and subdividing track leaders: quickly establishing an application ecosystem

Bitcoin's advantages lie in capital and community, but Ethereum obviously has a larger and more mature team, users and ecosystem at the application layer. As an emerging public chain, it is particularly important to quickly establish an application ecosystem. While Merlin Chain is incubating native Bitcoin projects, it has also quickly united leading teams with extensive experience in EVM, covering gaming, DeFi, infrastructure, trading markets, social networking and other public chains that must compete for traffic positions, including:

The multi-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero supports more than 50 public chains and has received financing from top institutions such as a16z, Animoca Brands, and Sequoia Capital.

The decentralized oracle Pyth provides more than 50 chains with real-time data from primary data sources, provides accurate, transparent and reliable price information for more than 300 DeFi protocols, with a monthly transaction volume of more than 60 billion US dollars, and nearly $5 billion TVL.

Digital asset custody service provider Cobo, founder Shenyu is well-known in the industry. Cobo provides MPC wallet solutions for Merlin Chain - Cobo MPC is co-managed to ensure that all cross-chain/locked funds in Merlin Chain remain safe.

MOBOX, the leader in blockchain games, is an old OG team and one of the earliest projects invested by Binance. It was listed through Binance Launchpool and is still one of the most traded game projects. MOBOX is about to launch the first co-created and co-governed 3D open world game Dragonverse Neo on Merlin Chain, and build a game L3 based on BTC L2.

The excellent DAAS project iZUMi has been deployed on multiple ETH L2s and achieved top transaction volume results. Currently, it has close to 9M US dollars in on-chain transaction volume in a single day. iZUMi has created an exclusive trading market MerlinSwap for Merlin Chain.

BTC Layer2 was created to solve the problem of limited performance of the Bitcoin network, but we have to face the fact that the Bitcoin application ecosystem is temporarily scarce. Rome was not built in a day. Merlin Chain unites Ethereum's leading projects and aims to quickly establish a high-quality application ecosystem and highly active users in the short term. Ethereum projects can also gain new growth and liquidity in the Bitcoin ecosystem. They all chose Merlin Chain to start construction, which can be said to be a win-win situation.

Inspiring native innovation: leading the integration and expansion of the Bitcoin ecosystem

What is even more surprising is that a large number of native projects are emerging from Merlin Chain, and there are countless projects with "Merlin" in their names. These projects are centered around Bitcoin's native users and assets, aiming to solve Bitcoin's native problems, and always adopt the principles of fair launch and community priority in product and mechanism design. They are generally divided into the following categories:

Projects that build infrastructure around Merlin Chain itself: for example, GeniiData, a native inscription data platform that provides Merlin with an exclusive viewing page, and UniCross, an inscription tool officially invested by Merlin.

Native projects closely linked to Merlin: such as RWA Mineral designed with BTC L2 DEFI, BTC's native over-collateralized stablecoin BitSmiley, Surf Protocol, an AMM derivatives trading protocol focusing on BTC L2, etc. Among them, there are many star projects that have received top financing from OKX Venture, ABCDE, etc.

Community coins launched from Merlin: For example, $VOYA, the first BRC-20 token launched completely fairly on Merlin Chain, exceeded 42 million US dollars in transaction volume within seven days, and the number of wallets held exceeded NVDA, SORA and JUP on Solana; and Meme Token $HUHU, which existed during the Merlin testnet period, gathered the first batch of active fans in the image of the wizard cat.

Innovative projects: For example, Influpia, a SocialFi project that combines Fair Launch with friend buying and selling, and Bitmap War, a Bitcoin native game based on Bitmap.

The original intention of Merlin Chain was to serve the native users of Bitcoin and to strongly support exploring native innovations with native users and native assets. According to founder Jeff on Twitter Space, Merlin Chain will soon launch a developer incentive plan to strongly support developers to build on Bitcoin through generous rewards. It is hoped that native dApps with better performance and more innovation on the chain will emerge to Let us wait and see to lead the integration and expansion of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Financing lineup: the strongest gathering of Eastern forces

Jeff, the founder of Merlin Chain, is a serial entrepreneur. Web2 has received financing from top institutions such as Red Shirt Capital, IDG Capital, BAI Capital (Bertelsmann), Wuyuan Capital, and Oasis Capital. Therefore, it is no surprise that Merlin Chain has gathered more than 20 investment institutions: OKX Venture, ABCED, Forsight Ventures and ArkStream Capital led the investment, laying the foundation for the imagination of the leading exchange; leading mining pools including viaBTC are backed by strong financial support to bring safety and technical support. Merlin Chain’s financing lineup can be the strongest gathering of Chinese entrepreneurs and Chinese investors under the general trend of the BTC ecosystem. It is not surprising that Merlin Chain is always compared with Blast and is called the “mysterious Eastern power” ".

Safety Committee: Protecting the Merlin Ecosystem

How to ensure the security of funds when Merlin Chain has reached such an exaggerated pledge data of 3.6 billion US dollars? The pledge and re-pledge track is in full swing, and the security of funds is related to the survival of the public chain. On March 6, Merlin Chain jointly established the Merlin Security Council with several security companies, including the famous Slowmist. The "Blockchain Dark Forest Self-Help Manual" published by founder Yu Xian in 22 years is widely circulated in the circle, as well as BlockSec, Salus, Secure3, ScaleBit, Revoke.Cash and other well-known security teams. The committee is used to fund research, education and technology development, and encourage more white hats and dApps to join this decentralized organization to escort the subsequent ecological development and construction of Merlin.

Conclusion

Finally, returning to the original question, is there a so-called growth code for Merlin’s rapid rise? In fact, founder Jeff made the answer public as early as in the public Space:

"From the perspective of the general market, Merlin has just been released for a month. Just a few days after it was launched, it suddenly swept the entire market and everyone was talking about it. Maybe it is this suddenness that makes everyone feel unreasonable and needs to explain this rise. There must be a reason, this ecological fire must have something to say. If I don’t know why it suddenly became popular, then there must be this mysterious power behind it.

Merlin’s rapid rise is not unfounded, but is based on the team’s long-term efforts and accumulation in the Bitcoin ecosystem. They invested a lot of energy in the early stages of the ecosystem and persisted in building it during the coldest times, accumulating community ecology and user traffic. Therefore, Merlin's success does not appear suddenly, but is the inevitable result of the team's long-term efforts and experience accumulation.