A systematic review by Messari on Merlin's transition from Bitcoin sidechains to Bitcoin ZK layer2 solutions, summarized with personal insights:
1) Looking back, the birth of Merlin Chain seems to follow the trend of the times, with each step being unexpected. With a strong community foundation supported by BRC-20, BRC-420, Blue Box, Bitmap Game, etc., Merlin Chain has chosen a continuously "integrating and iterating" technical route. In fact, there is no other way.
This is because the native Bitcoin network has fundamental "programmability" flaws in terms of data availability (DA) and the Turing completeness of smart contracts (SC), leading to a plethora of innovative projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem over the past year that have yet to deliver fully.
RGB++ (Nervos), BitVM (BitLayer), zkVM (ZKM), AVM (Atomicals Protocol), DA (B² Network, Nubit) — Merlin Chain's approach is to draw on the strengths of various projects to continuously enrich and improve its technical framework.
2) According to Messari's report, the initial Merlin Chain was purely a sidechain architecture, built by Lumoz based on Polygon's CDK RaaS service, equivalent to a Validium architecture chain. This means that the chain's transaction data is completely stored off-chain, only publishing validity proofs to L1, and the L1 mainnet cannot verify the accuracy of L2 data. Moreover, the original data of this Validium architecture is stored in a local database, with a Data Availability Committee (DAC) responsible for data acquisition, sorting, and verification.
Clearly, this requires the "trust" of the chain itself as a prerequisite, making it difficult to scale up. In the Ethereum layer2 system, Validium was replaced by Rollup for this very reason.
To address this fundamental shortcoming, Merlin has iterated and strengthened in two ways:
Collaborating with BTCOS to improve the Native cross-chain bridge and address the verifiability of L2 data against the Bitcoin mainnet. BitcoinOS has built a verifiable Proof virtual machine - BitSNARK based on the ZK framework, combined with the Grail Bridge cross-chain bridge to update L2 asset transfers and state changes. The entire process uses a ZK intermediary network to synchronize the state between L2 and the mainnet, ultimately achieving trusted interaction through mainnet asset time locks and the BitVM challenge mechanism.
Partnering with Nubit to build verifiable data availability (DA) capabilities. The general logic is to deploy full nodes off-chain to synchronize the entire state data of BTC and proof of state changes, and to achieve state verification and finality confirmation through lightweight nodes deployed on the BTC mainnet. This improves the opacity and unverifiability issues present in previous off-chain DAS, thereby enhancing the necessary DA capabilities (currently under development).
Ultimately, the goal of Merlin Chain is to become a Bitcoin ZK-Rollup network, composed of components such as Node, zkProver, Database, etc., and to create a decentralized oracle network indexed similarly to the Ordinals protocol, making it a balanced EVM-Compatible Bitcoin layer2 in terms of decentralization (permissionless node distribution), transparency (public data accessibility), and verifiability (mainnet can verify L2 data states with a challenger mechanism in place).
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