Public chains have always been the most popular. Recently, Merlin has become so popular 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 in TVL 30 days after it was launched. 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 dashboard for social, gaming, and trading activities

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

November 15, 2023: The Bitmap coin exchange plan is 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 rises 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 price 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 the team did not think of creating Layer2 at the beginning. It was in the process of continuously building products and interacting with developers and users in the community that they found that the interactions that can be done on L1 are too limited and many ideas cannot be realized. The Bitmap Tech team happens to be among all Bitcoin Layer2s, using the strongest native foundation: BRC-420 defines the metaverse standard and copyright standard for Bitcoin assets, and launched 600+ inscription assets and 1000+ Bitcoin ecosystem developers before the birth of Merlin Chain; Bitmap.Tech has captured more than 90% of the traffic of Bitmap, a native asset of Bitcoin Layer 1, and has 33,500+ independent addresses, making it 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, 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 crypto phenomenon, which is to attract users from top 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 can 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 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, as well as 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.

Cobo, a digital asset custody service provider, is well-known for its founder Shenyu. Cobo provides Merlin Chain with an MPC wallet solution - Cobo MPC co-custodian, ensuring that all funds locked in Merlin Chain cross-chain/locked are kept 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 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’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: For example, RWA Inscription Mineral, which adopts BTC L2 DEFI design, BTC native overcollateralized stablecoin BitSmiley, AMM derivatives trading protocol Surf 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 and friend buying and selling, Bitmap War, a Bitcoin-native game based on Bitmap, etc.

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

Now that Merlin Chain has reached such exaggerated pledge data as 3.6 billion US dollars, how to ensure the safety of funds? The staking and re-staking track is in full swing, and fund security is a matter of life and death for the public chain. On March 6, Merlin Chain joined forces with a number of security companies to establish the Merlin Security Council, including the famous Slowmist. The "Blockchain Dark Forest Self-Rescue Manual" published by founder Yu Xian in 2022 has been widely circulated in the circle, and BlockSec, Salus, Secure3, ScaleBit, Revoke.Cash and many other well-known security teams, the committee is used to fund research, education and technology development, and encourages more white hats and dApps to join this decentralized organization to contribute to Merlin’s subsequent ecological development. and construction escort.

Conclusion

Finally, let’s go back to the question at the beginning. Is there a so-called growth code for Merlin’s rapid rise? In fact, founder Jeff has already made the answer public in his 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.