How does Merlin Chain unite people from all walks of life? Contains growth password

On March 10, Merlin Chain founder Jeff tweeted "Many Outsiders think that Merlin’s strength is the market and its shortcoming is product technology. This is the biggest misunderstanding about Merlin. They also said: Merlin’s marketing capabilities are not as exaggerated as the rumors say, and are more spontaneous from the community. Power, the so-called mysterious monster of the East, is actually driven by the trust and love of the community.

As the current mainstream narrative, BTC L2 can be described as a hundred flowers blooming. Among them, Merlin Chain, with its excellent market performance, is often considered the most promising and representative of Western power ETH L2 Confrontation - 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 term Doctrine achieves ecological prosperity

Merlin Chain is a native BTC Layer 2. Of its $3.6 billion TVL, 91% comes from Bitcoin’s native assets, including 58% of BTC and 33% of 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.

The rise of Merlin Chain clearly shows how it gathered the power of the Bitcoin community in the beginning. The following is an excerpt from the tweet of ABCED Co-founder @BMANLead " Merlin Chain: The mysterious power from the east》

· June 17, 2023: RSCV publishes its first tweet and launches Recursiverse, allows SVG splicing creation; other 2D inscriptions can be recursively referenced to generate new works.

· July 17, 2023: Release of BRC-420 protocol, treating inscriptions as Modules that build the Ordinals stack.

· July 31, 2023: Released Bitmap based on Bitmap visual panel Explorerfor social, gaming and trading activities.

· September 19, 2023: Launch of BRC-420 market and deployment of first asset BRC-420, the Blue Box.

· November 15, 2023: The Bitmap currency 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 increased to $1,000.

· December 26, 2023: Rebranded to @BitmapTech; OKX Wallet announced support for BRC-420.

· January 19, 2024: Officially announced the Merlin Chain, the second layer of Bitcoin network.

· January 26, 2024: Merlin Chain testnet bridging launched.

· February 3, 2024: Blue Box hits $40,000, making it 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 exceeds $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. It was constantly building products and working with developers and users. During the interaction in the community, I found that the interactions that can be done on L1 are too limited, and many ideas cannot be realized. However, the Bitmap Tech team happens to have the strongest native foundation among all Bitcoin Layer 2: BRC-420 is a Bitcoin asset. Defining Metaverse standards and copyright standards, it launched 600+ inscription assets and 1,000+ Bitcoin ecological developers before the birth of Merlin Chain; Bitmap.Tech attracted more than 90% of the traffic of Bitmap, the first-level native asset of Bitcoin, and has 33,500 + independent addresses, which is the largest Ordinals asset community.

Long-termism achieves ecological prosperity, and the birth of Merlin Chain is both an accident and a necessity.

BRC-420: Assets first, narrative second, growing community from bottom up

Another growth strategy of Merlin Chain is "bottom-up issuance method, community-driven assets, 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 the growth miracle of several leading assets of BRC-420 - the blue box. Needless to say, 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 great 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 was still considered digital gold because it built a borderless global social system and became a symbol of resistance to centralization.

United Public Chain: From Zero-sum Game to Win-win Cooperation

Merlin Chain does not resist cooperation with Ethereum Forming an alliance with powerful teammates, we can also see some shadows of Eastern wisdom.

On March 7, the Ethereum Layer 2 project Manta launched "Blast Off to Manta" activity encourages users to cross-chain ETH and USDC from Blast to Manta Pacific and provides $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 kind of "vampire attack" is a typical encryption phenomenon, which is to attract users away from competing platforms by providing incentives. It is also common in Ethereum. way of competing for liquidity.

Looking back at the history of encryption, we can list the "vampire attacks" that can be recorded in history: In 2020, SushiSwap launched with Uniswap is a DEX similar to Uniswap and uses $SUCHI tokens to reward users who transfer funds from Uniswap to SushiSwap, causing Uniswap liquidity to plummet; in 2022, NFT trading platform LooksRare to OpenSea Users airdrop $LOOKS tokens and provide 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 increased 8 times in seven days.

Merlin, however, found another path to unity. Less than a week after Manta launched its attack on Blast, Merlin’s Seal announced on March 12Enable re-staking of the Manta chain. Users can pledge the $STONE pledged in Manta to the Merlin Chain again to obtain Merlin points for mining.

Why Merlin Chain can 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 user Some Circle Gourd Baby)

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 participated 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 is conducive to stability. Coin 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 more friends and fewer enemies. , this is the game of the master.

Gathering leaders in segmented tracks: quickly establishing an application ecosystem

The advantage of Bitcoin is 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 native Bitcoin projects, Merlin Chain also quickly united the leading team with extensive experience in EVM, covering the traffic positions that public chains compete for such as games, DeFi, infrastructure, trading markets, and social networking, 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 oracle Pyth, with more than 50 Chain provides real-time data from primary data sources, providing 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 provider Cobo, founder God It can be said that fish is unknown to everyone in the pen. 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 gaming leader MOBOX, veteran OG team, Binance One of the earliest investment projects, it 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 game L3 based on BTC L2.

· Excellent DAAS project iZUMi, has worked on multiple ETH L2 Deployed on it, it has achieved the top few 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 Chain MerlinSwap.

BTC Layer2 was born to solve the problem of limited performance of the Bitcoin network, but it had to face the temporary lack of Bitcoin application ecosystem The fact is that Rome was not built in a day. Merlin Chain unites the leading projects of Ethereum 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 development in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Liquidity, they all chose Merlin Chain to start construction, which can be said to have achieved a win-win situation.

Inspiring native innovation: leading Integration and expansion of the Bitcoin ecosystem

What is even more surprising is that a large number of native projects are emerging from the Merlin Chain, just projects with "Merlin" in their names Just countless. 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. It is generally divided into the following categories:

· Infrastructure projects built around the Merlin chain itself: For example, a dedicated viewing page is provided for Merlin Native inscription data platform GeniiData, an inscription tool officially invested by Merlin UniCross and more.

·Native projects closely linked to Merlin: For example, RWA inscription designed with BTC L2 DEFI Mineral, BTC's native over-collateralized stablecoinBitSmiley, AMM derivatives trading protocol focusing on BTC L2Surf Protocol Wait. 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 and fairly on Merlin Chain, exceeded 42 million US dollars in transaction volume within seven days, and the number of wallets it holds exceeds NVDA, SORA and JUP on Solana; and the Meme Token that existed during the Merlin test network $HUHU , gathering the first group of active fans in the image of the wizard cat.

· Innovative projects: For example, the SocialFi project that combines Fair Launch and friend buying and selling Influpia, a native Bitcoin game based on Bitmap Bitmap War a>etc.

The original intention of Merlin Chain was to serve the native users of Bitcoin and 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

Merlin Chain founder Jeff is a serial entrepreneur who received funding from Red Shirt Capital, IDG Capital, BAI Capital (Bertelsmann), Wuyuan Capital, Oasis Financing from top institutions such as 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 leading exchanges; including viaBTC The top mining pools in the industry are backed by strong financial support, bringing security and technical guarantee. 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 Slow Mist Slowmist, published by founder Yu Xian in 2022 《Blockchain Dark Forest Self-Rescue Manual" is 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 encourage More white hats and dApps will join this decentralized organization to protect Merlin’s subsequent ecological development and construction.

Conclusion

Finally, back to the question at the beginning, is there a so-called growth code for Merlin’s rapid rise? In fact, the founder Jeff was early The answer is made public in the public Space:

"From a large market perspective, Merlin has just released a In August, just a few days after it went online, it suddenly swept the entire market, and everyone was talking about it. Maybe it was this suddenness that made everyone feel unreasonable, and they needed to explain that there must be a reason for this rise, and there must be something to say about this ecological fire. . 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 is actually in the Inscription Ecosystem It has existed since the earliest and coldest time. In May and June last year, there were probably no more than 10 regular developer teams in this ecosystem in the world. Ordinals assets were almost zero. The entire Bitcoin ecosystem and Ordinals were under the influence of the outside world. Ridicule... In that case, we found that Ordinals had 5 to 10 Twitter Spaces every night, including English and Chinese, where a group of developers gathered together to keep warm and think of new things. In fact, we were learning at that time The pressure is much greater than now. New protocols, new standards, and new innovations appear every day. I can feel the vitality of the entire ecosystem. Everyone’s belief and investment in this matter is very high. This makes me feel It’s about the purity of an industry in its early days, as well as the dedication and belief of users and developers surrounding this ecosystem. So we kept building in it during the coldest time, without making any money or charging money. We made seven or eight products, and then Until now.

For people who don’t pay much attention to the Bitcoin ecology, they may feel that it is a sudden appearance and do not understand it. For us , although it indeed exceeded 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 largest and The core development of Bitmap and BRC-420, the third largest community, is also done by ourselves. We understand what these users are playing, what assets they have, and their own investment in the community. On this basis, in fact, Merlin's results are also something that can be expected. Of course, for the outside world, this may be a quick thing; but for us, this matter is also inevitable by accident."