How does Merlin Chain unite all parties? The code of growth
On March 10, Merlin Chain founder Jeff posted on Twitter Many outsiders think that Merlin’s strength is the market and its weakness is product technology. This is the biggest misunderstanding about Merlin.”, and said: Merlin’s marketing capabilities are not as exaggerated as outside rumors, and more come from the spontaneous power of the community. The so-called mysterious monsters of the East are actually driven by the trust and love of the community.
As the current mainstream narrative, BTC L2 can be said to be in full bloom. Among them, Merlin Chain, with its excellent market performance, is often considered the most promising to compete with ETH L2, which represents the power of the West - the mainnet reached an astonishing TVL of 3.6 billion US dollars in 30 days after its launch. 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?
BTC/Ordinals: Long-termism achieves ecological prosperity
As a native BTC Layer 2, Merlin Chain has 91% of its USD 3.6 billion TVL from Bitcoin native 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 teams long-term deep work in the Bitcoin ecosystem, from Recursiverse to Bitmap Explorer to BRC 420, and finally to Merlin Chain.
The rise of Merlin Chain clearly shows how it united the power of the Bitcoin community in the beginning. The following 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, allows creation of SVG splicing; other 2D inscriptions can be referenced recursively to generate new works.
July 17, 2023: Published BRC-420 Protocol, think of Inscriptions as the building blocks of the Ordinals stack.
July 31, 2023: Release of Bitmap-based visual panel Bitmap Explorer, for social, gaming and trading activities.
September 19, 2023: Launch of the BRC-420 market and deployment of the first asset BRC-420, the Blue Box.
November 15, 2023: Announced the Bitmap coin exchange plan, 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: Renamed @BitmapTech; OKX Wallet announced support for BRC-420.
January 19, 2024: Merlin Chain, Bitcoin’s second layer network, officially announced
January 26, 2024: Merlin Chain testnet bridging launched.
February 3, 2024: The blue box price reaches $40,000, becoming the third largest 10k series NFT on the market, behind BAYC and Punks.
February 4, 2024: ABCDE Labs announces lead investment in BitmapTech.
February 5, 2024: Merlin Chain completed IDO on Particle Network and released 1% governance token $MERL.
February 8, 2024: Merlin’s Seal Staking officially goes live for a fair issuance of 20% of $MERL.
February 9, 2024: OKX Venture announces investment in Bitmap Tech.
February 10, 2024: The Merlin Chain IDO event ends, with more than 1 million participating addresses.
February 23, 2024: Merlin Chain’s TVL exceeded $2 billion, surpassing Solana and Blast, ranking fifth among all chains.
Founder Jeff once revealed in an interview that in fact, the team did not think of doing Layer 2 at the beginning. In the process of continuously building products and interacting with developers and users in the community, they discovered that there are too many interactions that can be done on L1. Limited, many ideas cannot be realized, and the Bitmap Tech team happens to have the strongest native foundation among all Bitcoin Layer 2: BRC-420 defines the Metaverse standard and copyright standard for Bitcoin assets, before the birth of Merlin Chain Launched 600+ inscription assets and 1,000+ Bitcoin ecosystem developers; Bitmap.Tech has attracted more than 90% of the traffic of Bitmap, the first-level native asset of Bitcoin, 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 communitys 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.
A successful asset can evolve into a symbol, and symbols have tremendous cohesion. Perhaps the core of community unity is the symbol itself, rather than a certain technology or product mechanism - Bitcoin had no substantial empowerment at the beginning of its birth, but it is still considered digital gold because it builds a borderless global social system and became a symbol of resistance to centralization.
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 “Blast Off to Manta” activity, encouraging users to cross-chain ETH and USDC from Blast to Manta Pacific, and providing $MANTA token rewards. Once the activity was issued, a large amount of funds were transferred from Blast to Manta. The user’s reason was simple: Blast was locked in the bull market for a full 14 days The liquidity mechanism is too unreasonable, but in Manta, you can withdraw money instantly and also provide a large number of token rewards.
This vampire attack is a typical encryption phenomenon, which is to attract users away from competing platforms by providing incentives. It is also a common way for Ethereum to compete for liquidity.
Looking back at the history of encryption, we can list the “vampire attacks” that can be recorded in history: In 2020,SushiSwaplaunched with UniswapSimilar DEX, and uses $SUCHI tokens to reward users who transfer funds from Uniswap to SushiSwap, causing Uniswap liquidity to plummet; in 2022, NFT trading platform LooksRareTowards OpenSeaUsers airdrop $LOOKS tokens and provide better annualized APR; one month after the LooksRare attack, another late star X2Y2A vampire attack was also launched on OpenSea. Although the process was somewhat bumpy, X2Y2s users still increased 8 times in seven days.
Merlin, however, found another path to unity. Less than a week after Manta launched his attack on Blast, on March 12, Merlins Seal announcedEnable re-staking of the Manta chain, users can pledge the $STONE pledged in Manta to 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. (The following analysis is taken from Twitter usersA circle of gourd dolls）
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 the unlocking of Stone in March and helps stabilize the currency price.
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.
Therefore, although Merlin Chain also absorbed funds from the Manta ecosystem, it achieved multi-win at the same time. Everyone worked together to make the plate bigger, with many friends and few enemies. This is the game of the master.
Gathering and subdividing track leaders: quickly establishing an application ecosystem
Bitcoins 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 incubating Bitcoin-native projects, Merlin Chain 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:
Multi-chain interoperability protocolLayerZero, supports more than 50 public chains, and has received financing from top institutions such as a16z, Animoca Brands, and Sequoia Capital.
Decentralized OraclePyth, providing 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 transaction volume of more than 60 billion US dollars, and a TVL of nearly 5 billion US dollars.
Digital asset custody service providerCobo, the founder Shenyu is well known in the industry. Cobo provides MPC wallet solutions for Merlin Chain - Cobo MPC is co-managed to ensure that all cross-chain/locked funds in Merlin Chain remain safe.
Chain game leaderMOBOX, the veteran OG team, one of the earliest projects invested by Binance, was listed through Binance Launchpool, and is still one of the game projects with the largest trading volume. MOBOX is about to launch the first co-creation and co-governance 3D open world game on Merlin ChainDragonverse Neo, and build a game L3 based on BTC L2.
Excellent DAAS projectiZUMi, has been deployed on multiple ETH L2s and achieved top transaction volume results, and currently has a single-day on-chain transaction volume of nearly 9M US dollars. iZUMi has created an exclusive trading market for Merlin ChainMerlinSwap.
BTC Layer 2 was born to solve the problem of limited performance of the Bitcoin network, but it has to face the fact that the Bitcoin application ecosystem is temporarily lacking. Rome was not built in a day. Merlin Chain unites the leading projects of Ethereum and aims to In order to quickly establish a high-quality application ecosystem and highly active users, 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 have achieved a win-win situation for all.
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 the 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 around the Merlin chain itself: for example, a native inscription data platform that provides Merlin with an exclusive viewing pageGeniiData, an inscription tool officially invested by MerlinUniCrosswait.
Native projects closely linked to Merlin: such as the RWA inscription designed with BTC L2 DEFIMineral, BTC’s native over-collateralized stablecoinBitSmiley, AMM derivatives trading protocol focusing on BTC L2Surf Protocolwait. Among them, there are many star projects that have received top financing from OKX Venture, ABCDE, etc.
Community coins launched from Merlin: For example, $VOYA, the first BRC-20 token launched completely fairly on Merlin Chain, exceeded 42 million US dollars in transaction volume within seven days, and the number of wallets held exceeded NVDA, SORA and JUP on Solana; and Meme Token that existed during the Merlin testnet period$HUHU, gathering the first batch of active fans in the image of the wizard cat.
Innovative projects: such as the SocialFi project that combines Fair Launch and friend buying and sellingInflupia, a Bitcoin native game based on BitmapBitmap Warwait.
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 and has received awards from Web2.Red Shirt Capital,IDG Capital,BAI Capital (Bertelsmann),Wuyuan Capital,Oasis CapitalFinancing from top institutions. Therefore, it is no surprise that Merlin Chain has gathered more than 20 investment institutions:OKX Venture, ABCED, Forsight VenturesandArkStream CapitalLead the investment and lay the foundation for the imagination of leading exchanges; includingviaBTCThe top mining pools included are backed by strong financial support, bringing security 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 Merlin Security Council, including the famous slow fog Slowmist, The Founder Yu Xian published in 22 yearsBlockchain Dark Forest Self-Rescue Manual》 is widely circulated in the circle, and BlockSec, Salus, Secure 3 , ScaleBit, Revoke.Cashand many well-known security teams, the committee will be used to fund research, education and technology development, and encourage more white hats and dApps to join this decentralized organization to protect Merlins subsequent ecological development and construction.
Conclusion
Finally, returning to the original question, is there a so-called growth code for Merlin’s rapid rise? In fact, founder Jeff had alreadyPublic SpaceThe answer will be made public:
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.
But what I want to say is that our team has actually existed in the inscription ecology since the earliest and coldest time. In May and June of last year, there were probably no more than 10 regular developer teams in this ecosystem around the world, Ordinals assets were almost zero, and the entire Bitcoin ecosystem and Ordinals were ridiculed by the outside world... Under those circumstances, We found that Ordinals has 5 to 10 Twitter Spaces every night, including English and Chinese, where a group of developers gather together to keep warm and think of new things. In fact, the pressure to learn at that time was much greater than it is now. New protocols, new standards, and new innovations appeared every day. I could feel the vitality of the entire ecosystem. Everyones belief and investment in this matter was very high. This made me feel the purity of an industry in its early days, as well as the dedication and belief of the users and developers surrounding this ecosystem. So we kept building inside during the coldest time, making no money or charging money, and made seven or eight products, and now we are here.
For people who don’t pay that much attention to the Bitcoin ecology, they may think it’s a new phenomenon and 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 Bitmap and BRC-420, the second and third largest communities in the Bitcoin ecosystem. The core development was also done by ourselves. We understand what these users are playing and what assets they have. , and their own commitment to the community. On this basis, Merlins results were actually predictable. Of course, for the outside world, this may be a quick thing; but for us, this matter is also inevitable by chance.
