Merlin Chain: The Innovative Path of the Bitcoin Ecosystem

The innovation of the Bitcoin network has always received much attention. Over the past year, many projects have prospered in the Bitcoin ecosystem, attempting to address the limitations of the native network in areas such as data availability and smart contracts. Merlin Chain, as one of them, has adopted a unique "integration iteration" strategy to continuously improve its technical framework.

The development trajectory of Merlin Chain is quite interesting. It originated from a pure sidechain architecture, built on a certain service, using a Validium structure. This structure stores transaction data off-chain, only publishing validity proofs on L1, but L1 cannot verify the accuracy of L2 data. The original data is stored in a local database and managed by a data availability committee.

However, this architecture has a trust bottleneck, making it difficult to apply on a large scale. To address this, Merlin has undertaken a two-pronged improvement:

First, Merlin and its partners improved the verification of L2 data on the Bitcoin mainnet through the Native cross-chain bridge. They built a verifiable Proof virtual machine based on the ZK framework, combined with cross-chain bridge updates for L2 asset transfers and state changes. The entire process synchronizes L2 and mainnet states through a ZK intermediary network, ultimately achieving trustworthy interaction relying on mainnet asset time locks and challenge mechanisms.

Secondly, Merlin is committed to building verifiable data availability capabilities. They deploy full nodes off-chain to synchronize the full state data and change state data proofs of BTC, and achieve state verification and final confirmation through light nodes deployed on the BTC mainnet, improving the transparency and verifiability issues of off-chain data storage.

The ultimate goal of Merlin Chain is to become a Bitcoin ZK-Rollup network. This network is composed of multiple components and aims to achieve a balanced development in terms of decentralization, transparency, and verifiability through a decentralized oracle network indexed by a certain protocol. Ultimately, it aims to become an EVM-compatible Bitcoin Layer 2 network.

This development path reflects the innovative potential of the Bitcoin ecosystem and demonstrates how to overcome the limitations of the native network through technological integration, bringing more possibilities for Bitcoin.