Merlin Chain, a new Layer 2 network for Bitcoin, has already attracted almost $1 billion in total value locked (TVL) across the 8 dapps that it supports at the moment.
DefiLlama data shows that Merlin’s TVL has surged to a record $980 million on April 23, up from only $15 million at the end of March.
Merlin is a recently launched Bitcoin layer 2 supporting Bitcoin tokens that leverage the Ordinals protocol and the new Runes protocol. The latter went live last week following the halving event.
Ordinals became popular last year after introducing a mechanism to create non-fungible tokens (NFTs) directly on the Bitcoin mainnet. They had the greatest contribution to the revival of the NFT market. Over the last month, Bitcoin NFTs accounted for over 50% of the total NFT trading volume, according to CryptoSlam data.
Following the success of Bitcoin NFTs, Ordinals have been used for a fungible token standard on Bitcoin. It’s called BRC-20, inspired by Ethereum’s ERC-20.
Merlin plans to bring scalability and efficiency to tokens built on protocols like BRC-20 or BRC-420, which is used for metaverse NFTs. It uses zero-knowledge (zk) rollups to settle transactions off-chain for better efficiency, similar to what Polygon does to Ethereum.
Merlin Secures Over $2B for Token Launch
On April 19, Merlin launched its governance token on BRC-20. To support the fair launch of MERL, the protocol held the so-called Merlin’s Seal event, calling for crypto investors to stake Bitcoin and other tokens to earn M-points, which determined the distribution of MERL.
DefiLlama data shows that Merlin’s Seal secured over $2 billion. Bitcoin accounts for over 80% of the staked crypto assets, which include BRC-20 tokens like STONE, SATS, ORDI, and RATS.
Merlin has already become the 10th largest chain by DeFi TVL, surpassing Polygon and OP.
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