NewYork, United States, January 31, 2024, Chainwire
This week, the highly anticipated Bitcoin L2 solution Merlin Chain went live on its testnet, while the mainnet is also expected to be launched within a month.
Bitcoin’s Network Congestion Dilemma and Scaling Solutions
The evolution of Ordinals over the past year has brought attention back to the Bitcoin ecosystem after a long period. While it has increased the excitement of the bitcoin ecosystem, it has also increased the depletion of network resources. The ever-increasing transaction fees, coupled with the rising price of Bitcoin itself, have caused further network congestion and discouraged new users from becoming interested in Bitcoin.
(Bitcoin daily average transaction fees $: YCharts)
It was recognized that the idea of developing an EVM-compatible L2 network would deliver first results due to the simplicity of the implementation path.
Merlin Chain is also one of the EVM-compatible L2 chains developed by Bitmap Tech (formerly Recursiverse), the team that built BRC-420 protocols and Bitmap.game, and is highly appreciated by the community for its successes team in the past.
BRC-420
The BRC-420 protocol supports the combination/recursion of any file format to form a more complex inscription. Whether it is a character image, a game script, a virtual machine or an AI model, it can become an asset for Bitcoin.
Its main asset, the Blue Box, has risen from an entry price of $0.15 to an ATH floor price of $26,000, and other assets such as Mineral and This Song About NFTs are among the most actively traded assets on the OKX market. It now has over 1000 developers and over 600 collections and is performing extremely well even during the bear market where the price only goes up and never goes down.
Bitmap.Game
Bitmap.Game is a fully on-chain, fully decentralized, honestly launched metaverse project. It is based on the Digital Matter Theory that underpins Bitcoin, and is open source so it can be run or verified by any client, reflecting the concept of ‘client agnosticism’ in fully onchain games.
During this time, Bitmap’s market cap has increased from $3 million to an ATH of $290 million. With over 30,000 holders, Bitmap has surpassed Sandbox as the metaverse asset with the highest number of holders on all blockchains.
Unlocking Bitcoin’s potential through innovative magic
Merlin Chain believes that L2 of Bitcoin should not just be about transferring money cheaply, or just being able to have the DApps, but about further innovating to unlock Bitcoin’s potential through its own assets, users and protocols .
For example, since Bitmap is a completely decentralized asset, how can you create games based on it so that Bitmap users can enter different meta-universes at a low cost; or for the DeFi protocols based on BRC-420: how to empower NFT and FT in two directions; and for minting inscriptions, how to mint L1 assets at L2 in a more cost-effective and flexible way. Only these ‘Bitcoin-native’ innovations can continue to strengthen the ecosystem, rather than replicating the way Ethereum works.
So far, Merlin Chain has built a powerful DApp ecosystem, addressed liquidity issues effectively, and has plans for further expansion.
Leverage ZK-Rollup for efficient and secure scaling
The diverse ecosystem and assets also bring higher throughput requirements and some security risks. To solve this problem, Merlin Chain implemented ZK-Rollup, which can compress a large number of transaction receipts into a simple checksum 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 Oracle decentralized network to the taproot on Bitcoin L1, which is available to the entire network to ensure transparency and security.
The Oracle decentralized network nodes will have to stake $BTC to prevent inappropriate activity. Users can initiate challenges to the ZK-Rollup based on compressed data, ZK status roots, and ZK Proof. Successful challenges result in a rollback to the last verified state and the loss of the locked $BTC from the Oracle node, ensuring the security and reliability of the system.
By integrating these technologies, Merlin Chain has demonstrated its superior technical capabilities and is on track to build an efficient, secure and native Bitcoin L2 solution.
Native integration – Merlin Chain’s Bitcoin-centric approach
Compared to other Bitcoin L2s currently being attempted, one of the key features of Merlin Chain is that it is “Bitcoin Native”.
Merlin Chain has been a strong believer in Bitcoin for years and is deeply committed to the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem and seeks to bring more users and assets to Bitcoin through their work, rather than serving other ecosystems in the name of Bitcoin. As such, Merlin Chain places great value on the native bitcoin nature of its ecosystem’s projects and users.
Merlin Chain supports bitcoin-native wallets. Powered by the Particle Network’s account abstraction, users can use their bitcoin wallet 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.
Additionally, Merlin Chain supports most major protocols on Bitcoin L1, including but not limited to BRC-20, Bitmap, BRC-420, Atomicals, SRC20, and Pipe. All registrations on L1 are automatically whitelisted by Merlin Chain, allowing users to trade on it safely and affordably.
In line with its commitment to ‘Bitcoin Native’, Merlin Chain plans to adopt BRC-20 as its governance token. This makes much more sense than other Bitcoin L2s that currently use Ethereum standard tokens as governance tokens. The token will be released via a fair launch, with the exception of a small portion that will be distributed to VCs and the team, which will have a 48-month release period that will not start within two years, which the team and investors demonstrate’ trust in Merlin Chain.
Bridging the Gap – Simplifying Bitcoin Adoption and Driving Growth
Another difficult problem for the builders of the Bitcoin ecosystem is the lack of new users and new money coming in. While the Ordinals’ business has continued to burn, the number of active addresses has not seen significant growth. It’s just the same group of people involved in different projects. A very fundamental reason for this is the complexity of Bitcoin. In addition to the need to download a Bitcoin wallet, signing up is also not that easy to understand, and users will have to spend at least two blocks of their time for signing up, as well as three blocks of their time for confirmation, which is complicated and is complicated. time consuming.
(Daily active Bitcoin address: Glassnode)
Merlin Chain will solve this problem. Currently, Merlin Chain is connected to 40 Ethereum chains, so for users unfamiliar with Bitcoin, they can use their trusted wallets, such as MetaMask, and their trusted assets, such as stablecoins, $ETH, $BNB, etc. to communicate on Merlin Chain. Users don’t need to know the principles behind Bitcoin, or even what BRC-20 and Atomicals are, before they can experience Bitcoin in the original way they’re familiar with.
For this purpose, Merlin Chain will integrate the first multi-chain inscription DApp, which will allow users to inscribe assets on other layers, including Bitcoin L1, on Merlin Chain. It only takes one block to wait for. At the same time, a launch pad will also be available on Merlin Chain, with a mechanism that allows each 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.
Users can stay tuned for the upcoming mainnet launch – Bitcoin’s future is about to unfold with Merlin Chain at the helm.
About Merlin Chain
Merlin Chain is a Bitcoin Layer2 that integrates the ZK-Rollup network, the decentralized oracle network and on-chain BTC tamper-resistant modules. Merlin Chain is committed to strengthening Bitcoin’s proprietary assets, protocols, and products at Layer1 through its Layer2 network, to make Bitcoin fun again. Merlin Chain is a subsidiary of Bitmap Tech, a leading OG team with a total market cap of over $500 million. The BRC-420 “Blue Box” collection under Bitmap Tech has become one of the most popular items on Ordinals.
Users can start following Merlin Chain’s Tweet for more updates.
Contact
Jeff
Merlin necklace
bitmap@bitmap.tech