Everyone knows something very 🔥 lately, because Merlin has been so popular recently 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.
Let’s find out why Merlin is now the leader of Bitcoin L2 layer!
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 @BitmapTech; OKX Wallet announces 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 brings ecological prosperity. The birth of Merlin Chain is both accidental and inevitable.
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, fair issuance of assets, the discovery of assets by the community, and the establishment of 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.
Solidarity 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, the Ethereum Layer 2 project Manta launched the “Blast Off to Manta” event to encourage users to cross-chain ETH and USDC from Blast to Manta Pacific and provide $MANTA token rewards. As soon as the event was launched, a large amount of funds were transferred from Blast to Manta. The user's reason was simple: Blast's mechanism of locking liquidity for a full 14 days in the bull market was too unreasonable, while in Manta, withdrawals could be made instantly and a large number of token rewards were provided.
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, locked funds will increase dramatically (previously, large investors locked huge amounts of ETH in Manta), which is beneficial to valuation.
For Manta, the part of TVL that participates in the Merlin lock-up is still on its own chain, which avoids the risk of a sharp decrease in TVL caused by Stone's unlocking in March, which is conducive to stabilizing currency prices.
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, while also receiving StakeStone points.
The layout of Merlin Chain is too big, with many friends and few enemies. This is the game 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.
The founder of Cobo, a digital asset custody service provider, 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 of chain games, is a veteran OG team and one of the earliest projects invested by Binance. It was listed through Binance Launchpool and is still one of the game projects with the largest trading volume. MOBOX is about to launch Dragonverse Neo, the first co-created and co-governed 3D open world game 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 born to solve the problem of limited performance of the Bitcoin network. However, it has to face the fact that the Bitcoin application ecosystem is temporarily lacking. Rome cannot be built in a day. Merlin Chain unites the leading projects of Ethereum and aims to achieve the goal in the short term. Quickly establish a high-quality application ecosystem and highly active users, and 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 have achieved a win-win situation for all.
Inspiring native innovation: leading the integration and expansion of the Bitcoin ecosystem
What’s 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 revolve around Bitcoin-native users and assets, aiming to solve Bitcoin-native problems, and always adopt the principles of fair launch and community priority in product and mechanism design. Generally divided into the following categories:
Infrastructure projects built around the Merlin chain itself: for example, GeniiData, the native inscription data platform that provides Merlin with an exclusive viewing page, UniCross, the inscription tool officially invested by Merlin, etc.
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 in trading volume in seven days, and the number of wallets holding it exceeded NVDA, SORA, and JUP on Solana; and the Meme Token $HUHU, which existed during the Merlin testnet period and gathered the first batch of active fans with the image of a 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.
Merlin Chain was founded with the original intention of serving Bitcoin's native users and strongly supporting the exploration of native innovations with native users and native assets. According to founder Jeff on Twitter Space, Merlin Chain is about to launch a developer incentive plan to strongly support developers to build on Bitcoin through generous rewards, hoping that native dApps with better performance and more innovation will emerge on the chain to lead the integration and expansion of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Let us wait and see.
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: Safeguarding 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 founder Yu Xian published the book "Blockchain Dark Forest Self-Defense" in 2012.