Bitcoin L2 Merlin Sees DeFi TVL Surging to Almost $1B

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. During the last two months, 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 10^th largest chain by DeFi TVL, surpassing Polygon and OP.

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