This week, the much-anticipated Bitcoin L2 solution Merlin Chain went live on its testnet, and its mainnet is said to be launching within two weeks as well.
Bitcoin's network congestion dilemma and scaling solutions
The evolution of Ordinals over the past year has brought the attention back to the Bitcoin ecosystem. While enhancing the excitement of the bitcoin ecosystem, it has also increased the exhaustion of network resources. The community and investors have been concerned about Bitcoin's scaling solutions.
Merlin Chain is one of the BTC L2s, being developed by Bitmap Tech (formerly Recursiverse) , the team that built BRC-420 protocols and Bitmap.game, and is highly valued by the community due to the team's past successes.
- BRC-420
- The BRC-420 protocol supports the combination/recursion of any file format to form a more complex inscription.
- It now has 1000+ developers and 600+ collections, and has been an excellent performer even during the bear market, the price only going up and never falling. Its core asset, the Blue Box, has risen from an inscription cost of $0.15 to an ATH floor price of $26,000.
- Bitmap.game
- Bitmap.game is a fully on-chain, fully decentralized, fair-launch metaverse project.
- Its marketcap has risen from $3 million to a ATH floor price of $290 million. With more than 30,000 holders, Bitmap has surpassed the Sandbox as the metaverse asset with the highest number of holders across all blockchains.
Merlin Chain's Bitcoin-centric approach
Compared to other Bitcoin L2s that are making attempts at the moment, one of the key features of Merlin Chain is that it is "Bitcoin Native". They believe that L2 of Bitcoin should not just be about transferring money inexpensively, or just about being able to have the DApps, but should be about further innovating to unlock the potential of Bitcoin through its native assets, users and protocols. Only "Bitcoin-native" innovations can continue to empower the ecosystem, rather than replicating the way Ethereum works.
Merlin Chain supports bitcoin-native wallets. Empowered by the Particle Network's account abstraction, users can use their bitcoin wallets to seamlessly switch between L1 and L2 . Users can also experience $BTC swaps with other tokens, such as stablecoins, at any time without having to switch to an EVM wallet.
So far, Merlin Chain has built a powerful DApp ecosystem, the liquidity concerns have been effectively addressed, and is planning for further expansion.
In addition, Merlin Chain will support most of the major protocols on Bitcoin L1, including, but not limited to, BRC-20, Bitmap, BRC-420, Atomicals, SRC20, and Pipe. All inscriptions on L1 will be automatically whitelisted by Merlin Chain, allowing users to safely and affordably trade on it.
In line with its pursuit of "Bitcoin Native", Merlin Chain plans to adopt BRC-20 as its governance token. This makes a lot more sense than other Bitcoin L2s that are currently using Ethereum standard tokens as governance tokens.
Leveraging ZK-Rollup for efficient and secure scaling
The diverse ecosystem and assets also imply higher throughput requirements and some safety risks. To solve this problem, Merlin Chain has adopted ZK-Rollup which enables the compression of a large number of transaction proofs into a simple check-sum to improve transaction efficiency and scalability.
The sequencer nodes on Merlin Chain are responsible for collecting and batching transactions, generating compressed transaction data, ZK state roots, and proofs via zkEVM. The compressed transaction data and ZK Proofs are then uploaded via the decentralized Oracle network to the taproot on Bitcoin L1, which is available to the entire network to ensure transparency and security.
The decentralized Oracle network nodes will be required to stake $BTC to prevent improper activities. Users can initiate challenges to the ZK-Rollup based on compressed data, ZK state roots, and ZK Proof. Successful challenges result in a rollback to the last verified state, and the forfeiture of the Oracle node's locked $BTC, ensuring the system's security and trustworthiness.
Through the integration of these technologies, Merlin Chain has shown its superior technical capabilities and is on track to build an efficient, secure, and native Bitcoin L2 solution.
Bridging the gap - Simplifying Bitcoin adoption and fuel growth
While the Ordinals things have continued to be on fire, the number of active address has not seen significant growth. A very fundamental reason for this is the complexity of Bitcoin. As well as the need to download a Bitcoin wallet, inscribing is also not very easy to understand, and users will need to spend at least two blocks of their time inscribing, as well as three blocks of their time for confirmation, which is complicated and time-consuming.
Merlin Chain will solve this problem. Currently, Merlin Chain has been connected to 40 Ethereum chains, so for those users who are not familiar with Bitcoin, they can use their familiar wallets, such as MetaMask, and their familiar assets, such as stablecoins, $ETH, $BNB, etc. to interact on Merlin Chain. They don't need to know the principles behind Bitcoin, or even what BRC-20 and Atomicals are, before they can experience Bitcoin in its native manner in their familiar way.
For this purpose, Merlin Chain is going to integrate the first multi-chain inscription DApp, which will allow users to inscribe assets on other layers, including Bitcoin L1, on Merlin Chain. It will only take one block to wait for. At the same time, a launchpad will also be available on Merlin Chain, with a mechanism that allows every inscription launched on it to be valued at 100,000 FDV, allowing more users to easily purchase assets such as the BRC-20/ BRC-420/ Atomicals/ Runes at a very low price. Additionally, as part of its commitment to decentralization, Merlin Chain is going to release most of its governance tokens to the community, which is expected to be on the moon following up on the team's previous achievements.
Users can stay tuned for the upcoming mainnet launch – the future of Bitcoin is about to unfold with Merlin Chain at the helm.
Users can start following Merlin Chain's Twitter for more updates.
Contact
Jeff
Merlin Chain