Recently, there have been rumors about Merlin on various platforms. It may be because you have seen the rise of this platform that is dedicated to doing things, but you have not made any gains. This kind of thing is common in the currency circle.
If you don't know Merlin, come and read this article to learn more about how Merlin achieved what he has today.
How does Merlin Chain unite people from all walks of life? Contains growth password
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, BTC L2 is flourishing. Among them, Merlin Chain is often considered to have the best chance to compete with ETH L2, which represents Western power, due to its outstanding market performance. The mainnet 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 all parties in a short period of time? Is there really a growth code behind the unprecedented funds, traffic and topic?
BTC/Ordinals: Long-termism leads to ecological prosperity
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.
The rise of Merlin Chain clearly shows how it initially gathered the power of the Bitcoin community. The following summary is excerpted from ABCED Co-founder @BMANLead’s tweet “Merlin Chain: The Mysterious Power from the East”
June 17, 2023: RSCV publishes its first tweet and launches Recursiverse, allowing SVG mosaic creation; other 2D inscriptions can be recursively referenced to generate new works.
July 17, 2023: Release of the BRC-420 protocol, treating Inscriptions as modules for building the Ordinals stack.
July 31, 2023: Released Bitmap Explorer, a Bitmap-based visual panel for social, gaming, and trading activities.
September 19, 2023: Launched the BRC-420 Marketplace and deployed the first asset BRC-420, the Blue Box.
November 15, 2023: The Bitmap coin exchange plan was 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 rose to $1,000.
December 26, 2023: Rebranded 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: The Blue Box reaches $40,000, becoming the third-largest 10k-series NFT on the market, behind BAYC and Punks.
February 4, 2024: ABCDE Labs announced its lead investment in BitmapTech.
February 5, 2024: Merlin Chain completes IDO on Particle Network and releases 1% governance token $MERL.
February 8, 2024: Merlin’s Seal staking officially goes live, with a fair issuance of 20% of $MERL.
February 9, 2024: OKX Venture announced its investment in Bitmap Tech.
February 10, 2024: The 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 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 have the strongest native foundation among all Bitcoin Layer2s: 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 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.
Successful assets can evolve into a symbol, and symbols have great cohesive power. Perhaps the core of community unity is the symbol itself, rather than a certain technology or product mechanism. Bitcoin did not have any substantial "empowerment" at the beginning of its birth, but it is still considered digital gold because it has built a global social system without boundaries and has become a symbol of resistance to centralization.
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.
Looking back at the history of cryptocurrencies, we can list the “vampire attacks” that have gone down in history: In 2020, SushiSwap launched a DEX similar to Uniswap, and rewarded users who transferred funds from Uniswap to SushiSwap with $SUCHI tokens, causing Uniswap liquidity to plummet; in 2022, the NFT trading platform LooksRare airdropped $LOOKS tokens to OpenSea users and provided a better annualized APR; one month after the LooksRare attack, another latecomer X2Y2 also launched a vampire attack on OpenSea. Although the process was somewhat bumpy, X2Y2’s users still grew 8 times in seven days.
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 with Manta? In addition to the team's own resources, this wave of cooperation is beneficial to both parties. (The following analysis is taken from a Twitter user called Huluwa)
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.
Therefore, although Merlin Chain also absorbed funds from the Manta ecosystem, it achieved a win-win situation at the same time. Everyone worked together to expand the pie, with many friends and few enemies. This is the game 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.
But what I want to say is that our team has been in the Inscription ecosystem since the earliest and coldest time. In May and June last year, there were probably no more than 10 teams of regular developers in this ecosystem in the world, and Ordinals' assets were almost zero. The entire Bitcoin ecosystem and Ordinals were ridiculed by the outside world... In that situation, we found that Ordinals had 5 to 10 Twitter Spaces every night, including English and Chinese, where a group of developers gathered together to imagine new things. In fact, the pressure of learning was much greater than it is now. There were new protocols, new standards, and new innovations every day. I could feel the vitality of the entire ecosystem, and everyone's belief and investment in this matter were very high. This made me feel the purity of an industry in its early days, as well as the dedication and belief of users and developers around this ecosystem. So we insisted on building in it during the coldest time, without making money or charging money, and made seven or eight products, and then to now.
For those who don’t pay much attention to the Bitcoin ecosystem, they may think that it is something that came out of nowhere and thus don’t understand it. For us, although it did exceed our expectations, our long-term development on Bitcoin L1 has accumulated a lot of community ecology and user traffic for us. Before the birth of Merlin, we already had the second and third largest communities in the Bitcoin ecosystem, Bitmap and BRC-420. The core development was also done by ourselves. We understand what these users are playing, what assets they have, and their own commitment to the community. On this basis, the results of Merlin are actually predictable. Of course, for the outside world, this may be a very fast thing; but for us, this matter is also inevitable in some ways.