Merlin has been extremely popular recently, some people are jealous, and all kinds of rumors are flying around. To be honest, it is no accident that Merlin is so popular today. Behind it is the result of the team's silent hard work and continuous innovation in the Bitcoin ecosystem, as well as the strong support of the community and win-win cooperation with other public chains, not to mention its rock-solid financing and security foundation.
#Merlin #内容挖矿 #btc生态
If you don’t know much about @MerlinLayer2, hurry up and read this article to see how Merlin got to where it is today step by step.
How does the Merlin Chain unite people from all walks of life? There are secrets of growth in it.
On March 10, Jeff, the founder of Merlin Chain, posted an article on Twitter titled "Many people think that Merlin only knows marketing and technology is a shortcoming. This is the biggest misunderstanding about Merlin." He said that Merlin’s marketing capabilities are not as exaggerated as rumored. In fact, many of them are the spontaneous efforts of the community. The so-called mysterious oriental monster is actually driven by the trust and love of the community.
As a hot topic now, BTC L2 is really blooming. In this field, Merlin Chain, with its excellent market performance, is considered the most likely to compete with the Western ETH L2. The TVL reached an astonishing US$3.6 billion within 30 days after the mainnet was launched. At the same time, there are also many curious voices who want to know how this mysterious oriental monster can unite so many people in such a short period of time. Is there really any secret behind it?
BTC/Ordinals: Ecological prosperity created by long-termism
Merlin Chain, as the native BTC Layer2, has 91% of its 3.6 billion USD TVL from Bitcoin native assets. This achievement was not accomplished in just one month, but is the result of the team’s long-term efforts in the Bitcoin ecosystem, from Recursiverse to Bitmap Explorer to BRC420, and finally to Merlin Chain.
The rise of Merlin Chain clearly shows how it brought together the power of the Bitcoin community from the beginning. Here are some tweets from ABCED Co-founder @BMANLead, introducing the mysterious power of Merlin Chain from the East.
A series of time nodes mark how Merlin Chain and its team built this ecosystem step by step. From the first tweet, to the launch of various protocols and tools, to the announcement of various plans and cooperation, every step is full of innovation and forward-looking.
Long-termism creates ecological prosperity, and the birth of Merlin Chain is both an accident and an inevitable one.
BRC-420: From assets to narratives, community-driven organic growth
Another growth strategy of Merlin Chain is the "bottom-up issuance model", with community-driven assets at its core. This means issuing assets fairly, allowing the community to discover and form consensus around these assets, and then empowering these assets through the construction of products and ecosystems. It is undeniable that the Bitcoin community's recognition of Merlin Chain was originally due to the success of several leading assets of BRC-420 - such as the blue box, as well as the outstanding performance of music boxes, blue crystals, dragon balls, etc. after fair distribution. These are all Let the community behind it and the derived product ecology gain firm trust.
Successful assets can evolve into powerful symbols and become the core of community unity. This is not just a victory of technology or product mechanism, but a symbolic power. Just like Bitcoin, there was no direct "empowerment" at the beginning of its birth, but it is still regarded as digital gold because it builds an unbounded global social system and becomes a symbol of resistance to centralization.
Unity public chain: from competition to win-win
Merlin Chain does not refuse to cooperate with powerful partners in the Ethereum system, showing a kind of Eastern wisdom.
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 tokens as rewards. This led to a large amount of funds flowing to Manta, and the reason was simple: compared to Blast's 14-day liquidity lock mechanism in the bull market, Manta provided instant withdrawals and generous token rewards.
This kind of "vampire attack" is a typical phenomenon in the encryption field. It attracts users away from mainstream platforms by providing incentives. It is also a common battle for liquidity in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Merlin, however, chose a path of solidarity and cooperation. Shortly after Manta launched the attack on Blast, Merlin's Seal announced the re-staking of the Manta chain, allowing users to re-stake $STONE pledged in Manta to the Merlin Chain to mine Merlin points.
Why does Merlin Chain go hand in hand with Manta? In addition to the strong team resources, this cooperation is extremely beneficial to both parties. Here is a quote from the analysis of a certain Twitter user, Huluwa:
For Merlin, this means a substantial increase in locked funds (especially the huge amount of ETH previously locked in Manta by large holders), which is extremely beneficial to its valuation.
For Manta, the funds added to the Merlin lock-up still remain on its own chain, which alleviates the pressure of fund loss that may result from the unlocking of Stone in March and helps maintain the stability of its token price.
At the same time, platforms that provide cross-chain services like StakeStone and Meson will also see explosive growth in the number of users.
Users who stake $STONE on Merlin can not only get Merlin’s high-quality tokens, but also StakeStone points.
Therefore, although Merlin Chain also attracted funds from the Manta ecosystem, it achieved a win-win situation for all parties, jointly expanded the ecosystem, increased allies, reduced opponents, and demonstrated a true strategic master.
Quickly build an application ecosystem: focus on leaders in subdivided fields
Although Bitcoin has advantages in terms of funding and community, Ethereum has a more mature team and user base at the application level. For emerging public chains, it is crucial to quickly build a rich application ecosystem. Merlin Chain is not only incubating Bitcoin-native projects, but also quickly reaching cooperation with leading teams with rich experience in EVM. These teams span multiple key traffic areas such as games, DeFi, infrastructure, trading markets and social, including:
The multi-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero supports more than 50 public chains and has received investment from top institutions such as a16z, Animoca Brands, and Sequoia Capital.
The decentralized oracle Pyth provides real-time data from primary data sources for more than 300 DeFi projects, with a monthly transaction volume of more than 60 billion US dollars and a TVL of nearly 5 billion US dollars.
Cobo, a digital asset custody service provider, is led by the industry-renowned founder Shenyu. Cobo provides Merlin Chain with an MPC wallet management solution to ensure the security of cross-chain and locked funds.
MOBOX, the pioneer of blockchain games, is an early investment project of Binance and listed through Binance Launchpool. It is currently one of the game projects with the largest trading volume.
MOBOX will launch its first co-created and co-governed 3D open world game Dragonverse Neo on Merlin Chain, and build game L3 based on BTC L2.
The outstanding DAAS project iZUMi has been deployed on multiple ETH L2s and achieved leading transaction volume results, with its daily transaction volume approaching US$9 million. iZUMi has created an exclusive trading platform MerlinSwap for Merlin Chain.
The emergence of BTC Layer2 aims to solve the bottleneck of Bitcoin network performance. Facing the temporary shortcomings of the Bitcoin application ecosystem, Merlin Chain quickly joined forces with Ethereum's top projects, with the goal of quickly creating a high-quality application ecosystem and active user group. Such cooperation not only opens up new growth channels for the Ethereum project in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but also brings vitality to Merlin Chain, achieving mutual benefit and win-win results.
Driving native innovation: integrating and expanding the Bitcoin ecosystem
What is even more exciting is that a series of native projects named "Merlin" have emerged, marking the activity and innovation of the Bitcoin ecosystem. These projects built on Merlin Chain directly respond to the needs of Bitcoin users and assets, adhere to the principles of fair launch and community priority, and cover the following directions:
Infrastructure projects: such as GeniiData, which provides a dedicated browsing interface for Merlin, and the UniCross inscription tool officially invested by Merlin.
Native projects with close cooperation: such as RWA Inscription Mineral designed based on BTC L2 DEFI, over-collateralized stablecoin BitSmiley, and Surf Protocol, an AMM derivatives trading platform focusing on BTC L2, etc., many of which have received top investments from OKX Venture, ABCDE, etc. .
Community tokens: such as $VOYA, the first fully fair-issued BRC-20 token on Merlin Chain, and Meme Token $HUHU, which existed during the testnet, and gathered early active fans.
Innovative projects: such as Influpia, a SocialFi project that combines fair distribution and friend trading, and Bitmap War, a Bitcoin-native game based on Bitmap.
The original intention of Merlin Chain is to serve native Bitcoin users and explore innovations that develop together with native assets. According to founder Jeff's disclosure on Twitter Space, Merlin Chain will soon launch a developer incentive plan to support developers' construction of Bitcoin with generous rewards. We look forward to the birth of more outstanding and innovative native dApps to lead the integration and integration of the Bitcoin ecosystem. expansion.
Financial Support: The Gathering of Eastern Powers
As a serial entrepreneur, Jeff, the founder of Merlin Chain, has received support from top institutions in the Web2 field, including Sequoia Capital, IDG Capital, BAI Capital (Bertelsmann), 5Y Capital, and Oasis Capital. Therefore, Merlin Chain has gathered support from more than 20 investment institutions, including OKX Venture, ABCED, Forsight Ventures, and ArkStream Capital, and has established strong financial and technical guarantees.
This not only reflects the strong fighting power of Chinese entrepreneurs and investors in the BTC ecosystem, but also demonstrates the unique charm of Merlin Chain as a "mysterious Eastern power".
Safety Committee: Ensure Merlin Ecological Security
With Merlin Chain reaching a staggering $3.6 billion in pledged volume, ensuring the safety of funds has become critical. In the craze of the pledge and re-pledge market, the security of funds is directly related to the life and death of the public chain.
To this end, Merlin Chain joined hands with many security agencies to establish the Merlin Security Council on March 6, including the well-known security company Slowmist, as well as BlockSec, Salus, Secure3, ScaleBit, http://Revoke.Cash, etc. These teams The addition further strengthens the security defense line of Merlin ecology. The committee is committed to funding research, education and technology development, while encouraging more white hat hackers and dApps to join this decentralized organization to jointly maintain the security and stability of the Merlin ecosystem.
Conclusion
Going back to the original question, is there a secret to Merlin’s rapid rise? In fact, founder Jeff has already shared the answer publicly:
“Looking at the entire market, Merlin quickly became popular and sparked widespread discussion after only a few days of launch. This sudden popularity seems incredible, as if there is some mysterious power behind it. But in fact, our team has been working hard on the inscription ecosystem since its early days.
In May and June last year, there were very few truly active development teams in the world, Ordinals assets were almost ignored, and the entire Bitcoin and Ordinals ecosystem was questioned by the outside world. In such an environment, we see the potential of the Ordinals ecosystem, and developers gather together day and night to discuss and imagine new possibilities.
At that time, there were new challenges and innovations every day, and we felt the vitality of the ecosystem and the enthusiasm of developers. Even in the toughest times, we have persisted in developing multiple products. For those who don’t pay much attention to the Bitcoin ecosystem, Merlin’s success may seem sudden; but to us, it is based on a deep accumulation of long-term development of the first layer of Bitcoin. Before the birth of Merlin, we had already established the main community and development foundation in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and deeply understood user needs and community dynamics. Therefore, although our achievements may seem sudden to the outside world, they are actually the result of preparation and hard work. "
