Merlin has been so popular recently that some people are jealous! It is no accident that Merlin has grown to where it is today. Behind Merlin's success is the team's long-term silent cultivation and continuous innovation in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the strong support of the community, win-win cooperation with other public chains rather than competition, and a good financing and security foundation.
If you don’t know Merlin, come and read this concise and comprehensive article to understand how Merlin achieved its current success.
How does Merlin Chain unite all parties? The code of growth
On March 10, Jeff, the founder of Merlin Chain, tweeted, "Many people outside the industry think that Merlin's strength is the market and its weakness is product technology. This is the biggest misunderstanding of Merlin." He also said: Merlin's marketing capabilities are not as exaggerated as rumored by the outside world. It is more of a spontaneous force from the community. The so-called mysterious oriental monster is actually driven by the trust and love of the community.
As the current mainstream narrative, Merlin Chain, a rising star of BTC L2, has an outstanding market performance and is often considered to be the most promising to compete with ETH L2, which represents Western power. The main network has reached an astonishing TVL of 3.6 billion US dollars in 30 days after its launch. At the same time, curious voices continue to emerge, why can the mysterious oriental monster unite various forces in a short period of time, and is there really a growth code behind the unprecedented funds, traffic and topic?
Merlin Chain, as the native BTC Layer2, has 91% of its TVL of $3.6 billion from Bitcoin native assets, including 58% of BTC and 33% of Ordinals assets, surpassing Solana and Blast. This milestone is not just due to this short month, but the team's long-term deep cultivation 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 BRC-420 asset, 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 to @BitmapTech; OKX Wallet announced support for BRC-420
January 19, 2024: Official announcement of Bitcoin’s second layer network Merlin Chain
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 completes IDO on Particle Network and releases 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 about 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 attracted 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 brings ecological prosperity. The birth of Merlin Chain is both accidental and inevitable.
BRC-420: Assets first, then narratives, growing communities from the bottom up
Another growth strategy of Merlin Chain is "bottom-up issuance, community-driven assets, and a new narrative from assets to projects", that is, fair issuance of assets, discovery of assets by the community, building community consensus around assets, and empowering assets through product and ecological construction. It is undeniable that the Bitcoin community's recognition of Merlin Chain initially came from several leading assets of BRC-420 - the growth miracle of the blue box is needless to say. The subsequent music box, blue crystal, and dragon ball all have very impressive market performance after adopting a bottom-up fair launch. Therefore, 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 is not opposed to forming an alliance with powerful teammates in the Ether system, and some shadows of Eastern wisdom can also be seen from 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 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.
However, Merlin has taken another path of solidarity. Less than a week after Manta launched its attack on Blast, on March 12, Merlin’s Seal announced the opening of Manta chain re-staking, allowing users to re-stake $STONE staked on Manta to Merlin Chain and 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, locked funds will increase 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, which provide intermediary services, will also see a moment of mass user adoption.
Users who stake $STONE will also receive Merlin’s premium tokens, while also receiving StakeStone points.
Merlin Chain is too big, with many friends and few enemies. This is the situation of masters.
Gathering leaders in subdivided tracks: Rapidly establishing an application ecosystem
Bitcoin's advantage lies in funding and community, but Ethereum obviously has a larger 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 incubating Bitcoin native projects, Merlin Chain has also quickly united the leading team with rich experience in EVM, covering games, DeFi, infrastructure, trading markets, social networking and other public chain traffic positions that must be fought for, 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 real-time data from primary data sources for more than 50 chains, accurate, transparent and reliable price information for more than 300 DeFi protocols, with a monthly trading volume of more than US$60 billion and a TVL of nearly US$5 billion.
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 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 has achieved top trading volume results. Currently, it has a daily on-chain trading volume of nearly 9M USD. iZUMi has created a dedicated 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.
Encouraging 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: 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 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
Merlin Chain founder Jeff is a serial entrepreneur who has received financing from top institutions such as Sequoia Capital, IDG Capital, BAI Capital (Bertelsmann), 5Y Capital, and Oasis Capital in Web2. 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 top exchanges; the top mining pools including viaBTC are backed by strong financial support, bringing security and technical guarantees. Merlin Chain's financing lineup can be the strongest gathering of Chinese entrepreneurs and Chinese investors under the trend of BTC ecology. It is no wonder that Merlin Chain is always compared with Blast and is called "the mysterious oriental 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 "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, 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 market, Merlin has just been released for a month and has been online for just a few days when it suddenly swept the entire market and everyone was talking about it. Maybe it was this suddenness that made everyone feel it was unreasonable and needed to be explained. There must be a reason for this rise, and there must be a reason for this ecological fire. If I don’t know why it suddenly became popular, then there must be this mysterious force behind it.
Merlin's rapid rise is not groundless, 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 days of the ecosystem and persisted in building it during the coldest times, accumulating community ecology and user traffic. Therefore, Merlin's success did not come out of the blue, but was the inevitable result of the team's long-term efforts and experience accumulation.