Bitcoin ecosystem Merlin Monday Space update. Yesterday @MerlinLayer2 boss @BitmapTech participated in @OrdRevolution’s Merlin Monday live broadcast as usual. It was mainly a summary of the recent market and MERL as GAS. You can take a look.
1. Views on the Bitcoin Ecosystem
Yeah, I just finished talking to a pretty big podcaster in the Ethereum ecosystem, I think they're a pretty big podcaster in the Ethereum ecosystem. So even after more than eight months of Merlin, after all of this Bitcoin layer 2, Bitcoin DeFi, when you talk to them about this, you still find that these people are not very familiar with the Bitcoin ecosystem. They certainly know that there are some things happening on the Bitcoin side, they know some of the inscriptions, the inscriptions are hot, they've heard of some BRC-20 or Bitcoin DeFi, but they just don't know much. Now if you talk to them about Solana or Uniswap, they know a lot, but Bitcoin is still, how should I put it, below my expectations.
So I think that's something we have to face and something we have to change. We can't just be a bunch of people who were here last year having a house party. To be honest, all the people who were here last year, I think more than half of them have left, the people we talked to on Twitter, the people we talked to here, a lot of them have left. So if we're losing people all the time and not having a lot of new people joining, that's not a good sign. So that's how I feel and that's what Merlin is trying to do, to bring more people in.
I would say about layer 2, people always have too high expectations in the short term. They see something and say, oh, this is going to be huge, this is going to change the ecosystem. Two weeks later they say, oh, this is bullshit. In the same way, people have too low expectations and too little hope in the long term. Because people say Inscription is dead, people say all layer 2s are dead. Six months ago, people were saying, oh, no one knows what that is. And then they got to 3 billion, 4 billion market cap, it must be easy to attract all this DeFi, it must be easy to bring Uniswap to a new chain. Six months later, you look at them, some of the projects I know are no longer in operation, some of the projects have gradually become venture capital chains. People know about them, but people are not active on them.
So I would say, that's how I feel about layer 2 right now. People don't talk about it anymore. It's hard for us too because we can't drive the whole momentum alone. I mean, we're trying, but yeah, I have to say, right now is the hardest time, but you know, when you're going through that, it probably means, you know, something's coming.
2. How to attract more users into the Bitcoin ecosystem
That's why, starting three months ago, we started looking at Telegram. I think we've talked a lot about this topic, but I don't get tired of talking about it because people still don't see the potential behind it. I think the biggest story in crypto, the biggest narrative, will always be mass adoption. Four years ago, we were thinking about bringing a billion users to crypto, and we failed. We failed, I estimate about 10 to 20 million users, probably a few million active users. But this time people are not talking about it anymore.
People talk about memes, and I think that's great. People talk about memes, but we need something to move the whole industry forward. That's why when I see products like Moonshot, Polymarket, and even like Pump fun, I see the potential behind them because these products actually bring in younger users, new users who are fresh out of college, trying to make a living on the internet, and don't want to be in a corporate job 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I think that's something we should think about.
When you look at the number of users on these DeFi on Telegram, they have 200 million users, 100 million users, and people think they're bots. To be honest, a lot of them are bots, but there are also millions of active users. When you look at the percentage of users who actually spend money on the chain, I think it's about 1% now. But what if that percentage goes up to 10%? You're going to have over 10 million users who will pay fiat currency on the chain. That will be 10 times larger than the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.
These are not, how do I put it, these are not poor people from third world countries. These are people who can be active. Last time we had GameFi, Metaverse, Axie Infinity, it was because Southeast Asians were playing games, Chinese were playing skins. We saw a boom in all these GameFis and NFTs. A lot of people from Hong Kong, China, they are buying domains, they are buying cypherpunks. These people are new, most of these people have never heard of Bitcoin or Ethereum before, or have never used Bitcoin or Ethereum before. So I think this is an opportunity that we have to seize. We have to bring these people in.
Honestly, it's hard to use Bitcoin or to use Merlin. Users are learning, some of them have never used Bitcoin before, they hate it. And users coming from layer 1 of Bitcoin, they've never used layer 2 before, they have a lot of questions. I also got a question today from one of our own investors. He has a domain name, and he asked me how can I get this Bitcoin back, can I still bridge it back? I said, yes, of course you can bridge it back, just like take your Bitcoin, you know, spend it on me, buy a card. Of course you can bridge it back.
So, you know, there's a huge gap between all these users. That's why, our first applet is a trading bot. You just use the bot on Telegram and tell it to mine, to borrow, to buy, to sell, to buy bmap tokens, to do all these things. You don't need to think about wallets or anything else.
So I think we have to build all these built-in tools for users to lower the barrier to entry and make it easier to use. That's why we also use MERL for gas fees, because it's more efficient and easier for users to buy MERL from a centralized exchange, send it to their wallet. It only takes one minute, two minutes. It's much easier than requiring users to use UniSat, have a Bitcoin wallet, get Bitcoin from a centralized exchange, and then bridge it to Merlin, which takes about two hours.
So all of the things we're trying to do is lower the barrier to entry and make it easier for people to use all of these on-chain products. And then it comes to, you know, how, I mean, I shared some designs with you yesterday, and I think, you know, a lot of them are not very innovative, but we need to let users try them out, not just put them on a slide.
3. Telegram Mini Program
I was so excited, man, you know, when I check out all these new apps, new features, I always ask myself, can an eight or nine-year-old kid do this? You know, it's so easy for everybody. I was so excited, man, it's so easy to use. It looks like, you know, something a young college kid would sell to his friends. It's not like something on Tech Screener or TradingView that's so hard to use that looks like Wall Street. I hate those products. So, yeah, I'm going to make sure they look like Snapchat or Tinder or TikTok.
4. Schedule for next week’s Merlin Monday
One more thing is, next Monday, I think we need to reschedule it, I don't want to cancel it because next Monday, I just checked my calendar and I'm flying from Dubai to Singapore, and it's exactly that time. So I'll be on the plane, but we can move it to Tuesday morning, or whatever time you think is best.
