We all know that Bitcoin inscriptions began to flourish in May and June last year. At that time, the market was full of BRC-20 and BTC NFT voices. With the continuous development of the ecosystem, a more important problem has emerged: when engraving the more popular BTC NFT or BRC-20 token, there are many on-chain transactions and the miner fees to be paid are very high. Secondly, the 4M limit per block hinders the emergence of high-definition NFTs. The market has become tired of the overwhelming pixel-style NFTs, and then a new protocol has emerged - the BRC721 protocol, which attempts to introduce third-party storage to solve the problem of high-definition large images. At that time, the team of the protocol was developing very slowly, and could only use another new wallet that no one had heard of, and the website and image opening speed were slow and took too long.
On June 12, Raph, the new maintainer of Ordinals, merged the "Recursive Inscription #2167" proposed by Casey, the creator of Ordinals, into the code of Ordinals on Github. Later, Leonidas, the co-founder of ord.io, introduced the relevant content of recursive inscription in his tweet. It is very expensive for the creator of NFT to engrave 10,000 JPEG files for a collection alone. Using the recursive inscription protocol, some features can be engraved in a centralized manner, and the variables of the features can be requested through the code, and then the overall picture can be displayed programmatically. In this way, the gas fee can be greatly reduced, and high-definition images can be engraved instead of pixel-style NFTs everywhere. The code does not take up more storage space, allowing the inscription to break through the 4MB limit of the Bitcoin block size for display.
On June 17, @Rcsv_doodinals released the website http://RCSV.io, where users can create with SVG elements and use the technology of recursive inscriptions to generate new works. At that time, everyone could create art on it, and the comment area was full of various synthetic pictures. On July 15, the recursive forum Recursive BBS was released, which can record text on the chain. Subsequently, the new protocol BRC-420 was released, and the brand name was changed to Recursiverse, aiming to create a recursive universe.
On July 31, a Bitmap Explorer product was released. It is a Bitmap-based visual interface where users can socialize, play games, and other activities. It is the concept of the Bitcoin metaverse. After that, the discussion about inscriptions in the market became less and less, and people no longer paid more attention to projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem. The project team launched the BRC-420 market in September and deployed the first asset with the same name as the protocol, BRC-420, which is what we often call the blue box. BRC-420 was then recommended by @L1Fxyz .
On November 15, 2023, the Bitmap token swap was announced. Each Bitmap can be exchanged for 1,000 $WMAP, which caused the Bitmap price to start to rise. The BTC ecosystem also began to recover in the market, and the blue box of BRC-420 rose to $1,000 in just a few days. During the second wave of inscriptions, the blue box exceeded $10,000 on December 18. On December 26, the brand was upgraded to Bitmap Tech again, and both Bitget and OKX wallets supported access to BRC-420. The founder believes that the new product model under the new narrative is very important, which can be seen in many products on BRC-420. Mineral combines DeFi and computing power, and some of Bitmap's on-chain games are using the BRC-420 protocol to issue assets.
On January 19, 2024, Merlin Chain, the second layer of Bitcoin, was officially announced. According to the founder Jeff, their Bitcoin team has always been doing things that have not appeared in other ecosystems. Any new ecosystem needs to have its own narrative. In the past few months, users have been constantly buying new products, and it is difficult to have new assets and new narratives. Liquidity and leverage are also constantly weakening. Therefore, he wants to do Layer 2 to complete things that cannot be achieved on the first layer. Compared with other Layer 2 solutions, Merlin Chain is more focused on Bitcoin native users and assets, and is committed to serving Bitcoin assets, such as ORDI, SATS, RATS, etc. Unlike other Bitcoin Layer 2 solutions, it focuses on letting Bitcoin assets and communities use it first; at the same time, it has innovated in technology and built its own cross-chain bridge. In addition, it has built ZK Rollup technology to further compress the volume of ZK proofs and build a DA Layer that inherits Bitcoin security.
January 26, 2024: Launched Merlin Chain testnet bridge, January 27: izumi launched Merlin Chain testnet swap @MerlinSwap . Received investment from @ABCDELabs and @OKX_Ventures in February.
In February 2024, Merlin Chain launched Launchpad on the Ally platform, releasing 1% of the governance tokens $MERL (21 million); Merlin's Seal, by staking BTC/ETH/USDT/Ordinals/Atomicals and other assets, divides 20% of Merlin tokens, and the token release ratio is 20% (420 million). In less than a month, TVL quickly exceeded 3 billion US dollars. The cooperative project parties include MPC wallet service provider Cobo, staking service providers Meson and Stakestone, Layer2 ZKFair, and Bitcoin's veteran data service platform GeniiData, multi-chain DeFi data comprehensive platform Deflama and other excellent projects.
On February 21, the first fair launch inscription $VOYA was released, and both pledged users and early supporters could receive it. In the following days, the price rose dramatically. At the same time, the collection of Merlin Chain governance tokens $MERL will be opened in March, when users can redeem $MERL tokens with accumulated M points. The subsequent issuance and asset unlocking will be postponed until before the Bitcoin halving. $MERL has been listed on multiple exchanges, including OKX, Hashkey Global, Bybit, Bitget, Gate, etc., with a token circulation of 245.7M MERL, accounting for 11.70% of the total circulation.
MerlinSwap, a project under its ecosystem, is a decentralized exchange designed to support the Merlin chain ecosystem. It uses discrete liquidity AMM. Discrete liquidity automated market makers (DL-AMM) allow liquidity providers to focus on specific price points and price ranges with large trading volumes, ensuring that users can get low slippage and more accurate prices when swapping tokens.
Another project, MerlinStarter, is the most important launch platform built on the Merlin chain ecosystem, supporting all Bitcoin second-layer projects. MerlinStarter promotes fair issuance on Merlin Chain. Other features include introducing multi-chain tokens to Merlin Chain, issuing Merlin Chain native tokens to other chains, and supporting the issuance of BRC-20, BRC-420, ERC-20 and ERC-404 assets.
Recently, the unlocking time of the pledged assets has become longer, and the Merlin coins obtained in exchange are not as high as expected. The price of the pledged assets has also fallen a lot during this period. At the same time, we also recommend that you can choose to pledge the assets you believe in and want to hold for a long time. For short-term assets, try not to pledge for a long time, which is also to protect the value of your assets. As for the future and future plans of Merlin, let us continue to pay attention.
