Merlin Chain, the native Bitcoin Layer 2 that integrates the ZK-Rollup network, announced today its funding round from 24 investors to empower its Bitcoin native innovations.
Many key investors participated in the founding round, including OKX Ventures, Foresight Ventures, ABCDE, and Arkstream Capital.
Built by Bitmap Tech, Merlin Chain offers native scaling solutions integrating the ZK-Rollup network, on-chain BTC fraud-proof modules, and a decentralized Oracle network. Merlin Chain is committed to empowering Bitcoin’s native assets, products on Layer1, and protocol. These efforts are aimed at making Bitcoin fun again.
Bitmap Tech is a premier OG team with a market cap of over $500 million. The team has created many products, including the BRC-20 “Blue-Box” collection, which has become one of the hottest ordinal assets in the market. Initially, the asset rose from $0.15 to an all-time high floor price of $34,000, marking the 3rd largest market cap behind NBAYC and CryptoPunks.
Unlike other Bitcoin L2s in the market, Merlin Chain is ‘Bitcoin Native’. The team behind the project believes that the L2 of Bitcoin should be about further innovating to unlock the potential of Bitcoin through native assets in addition to DApps and cheap transaction fees. Reportedly, Merlin Chain plans to add BRC-20 as its governance token to help achieve ‘Bitcoin Native’.
The Bitmap Tech team has dedicated their work towards developing the Bitcoin ecosystem, hoping to bring more users and assets to Bitcoin. Some of their work includes Bitmap.Game, the first metaverse on the Bitmap ecosystem. This product has attracted over 30k users to Bitcoin. Others include the BRC-420 protocol, Recursive Doodinals., Recursive Index, and Recursive BBS.
When fully launched, Merlin Chain will offer support for most major protocols in Bitcoin L1. This will include BRC-20, BRC-420, Bitmap, Atomicals, Pipe, and SRC20. Additionally, all inscriptions on L1 will be automatically whitelisted by Merlin Chain to allow users to execute safe and affordable trades.
Notably, this new funding is aimed at enabling the Merlin Chain team to continue enriching its ecosystem and increase the overall liquidity. So far, Merlin Chain has managed to create a powerful DApp ecosystem and solve liquidity concerns within its space. The funding round will be followed by Merlin China’s mainnet launch set for later this week.