Apps are finally on Bitcoin!?

In this issue we talk about Merlin Chain - the highest TVL BTC L2

Gm Degens

Bitcoin has historically been a little boring. In fact, its actually excellent for what it does. It has 2 functions:

1. A store of value

2. A transfer of value

Bitcoin does this so incredibly well, the issue however, is that Bitcoin doesn’t really do too much more. There are no smart contracts, there are no apps.

That has however changed with the recent advancement of Bitcoin L2’s. Today we’ll talk about one, Merlin chain which is currently the number 1 TVL Bitcoin chain today.

But what actually is Merlin chain?

Merlin is a Zero Knowledge L2 using the Polygon stack and uses Celestia for data availability. Merlin Chain will support most of the major token standards on Bitcoin L1, including, but not limited to, BRC-20, Bitmap, BRC-420, Atomicals, SRC20, and Pipe. Ultimately, this creates a chain that enables the building of applications where users can interact and use Bitcoin assets.

Merlin currently ranks at number 7 with over $1b in TVL and growing. Most of this TVL is coming from Solv Protocol, a native yield protocol that use various strategies to generate yield.

Users can seamlessly move from Bitcoin L1 to L2 due to the integration of Particle network.

This is what it looks like on the bridge interface for users.

The main questions users will have, what can you do on Merlin?

Once funds are bridged in, you can use a variety of apps from LSTs, Money Markets and DEXes. Some of these have grown significantly to hundreds of millions in TVL. Perhaps some of this demand is due to users airdrop farming the tokenless individual applications but regardless the TVL is impressive to see.
I would like to see some more native apps come on board but it looks like newer apps are coming every week at the moment.

It will be interesting to see where the state of Bitcoin L2s go, so far, its good to see there are actual apps users can use. It is however early days.

Let me know your thoughts!