1. Introduction

Welcome to the Ryze Up program brought to you by Ryze Labs. Ryze Labs is a bridge connecting the East and West, and we aim to accelerate the development of Web3 in emerging markets and influence the global Web3 landscape. Local Insights, Global Impact, let’s embark on this journey together, Time to Ryze Up.

Ryze Labs has successfully invested in high-growth potential projects such as Polygon, Sui, Solana, LayerZero, and Wintermute.

This episode's host: Joven, Director of Business Development at Ryze Labs, focusing on expanding the fund's influence in the global developer community and providing strategic guidance to the fund's portfolio companies.

Special guest: Jeff, Founder of Bitmap tech, which is dedicated to creating new asset protocols and scaling solutions within the Bitcoin ecosystem, including the asset protocol BRC420, Bitcoin Layer2 Merlin Chain, the metaverse project Bitmap.Game, and the recursive protocol Recursiverse.

2. Attracted by DMT Theory to Build Bitmap Tech

Before founding Bitmap tech, Jeff had been an entrepreneur in the Web2 industry for over a decade. Although he had always been interested in the blockchain industry, he never convinced himself to venture into Web3. After seeing Ordinals and the BTC ecosystem in 2023, he decided to start building the entire Bitcoin ecosystem in May and June 2023, when the market still had biases against inscriptions.

Many people easily confuse the relationship between Bitmap tech and Bitmap. In fact, Bitmap was invented by Blockamoto, and Bitmap tech is a deep builder on Bitmap. At that time, the attraction to build on Bitmap was due to the DMT (Digital Meta theory), where all content is digitally generated, and each block can correspond to an avatar, a song, or a small world, with data stored permanently and unalterably.

Bitmap is the most exciting asset related to this concept, which is why they chose to build on Bitmap.

3. Core Advantages of BRC420

The BRC420 protocol launched by the Bitmap tech team is a theoretically obscure but practically and productively cool type of asset. It has two core advantages: The first advantage is that, compared to NFTs on Ethereum stored on centralized cloud servers like Amazon Cloud or Alibaba Cloud, BRC420 assets can be stored on-chain, enabling content to be immutable and permanently stored.

The second advantage lies in the composability brought by open-source and permanence. All innovations in the world are based on the efforts of predecessors. For example, popular products in games like League of Legends and CS are also based on previous ideas. If all content is inscribed, future creators can reference and innovate based on the content inscribed by their predecessors.

In summary, the core of BRC420 is the modularization of content and the assetization of modules. Content modularization means that gameplay, characters, music, etc., can all be inscribed, such as having 1000 inscriptions that become individual modules. These modules can also be combined to create final content that can be tokenized. When users own this token, they become shareholders of the project, gain access to the content, and become potential builders of the project.

Therefore, the imaginative space for BRC420 is vast; whether in music, games, or various types of things, they can all become modules and then assets, providing significant opportunities for entrepreneurs and developers.

4. Pandora, BRC420, and the Duality of Graph Coins

Regarding the recently popular Pandora's ERC404 and the duality of graph coins, Jeff stated that the concept of graph coin duality was first proposed by the Bitmap tech team. After its proposal, many projects began to do similar things. However, the essential difference between BRC420 and projects like Pandora is that standards like ERC404 focus more on the financial dimension, approaching from a financial perspective to increase the liquidity of coins and graphs. In contrast, Bitmap tech prefers to approach from a utility perspective, for example, Bitmap can serve as land in the metaverse, and having land can create space, etc. First focusing on utility, then meeting the derivative financial demands is a natural process.

The essence of the blue box previously launched by Bitmap tech is that any asset protocol needs a first token, just like when Domo launched BRC20, it introduced the Ordi token. Rather than letting the market randomly issue the first token, it is better for the development protocol team to issue the first token themselves, hence the introduction of the token called BRC420, commonly referred to as the blue box.

Moreover, since the early supporters and hardcore backers of the project have strong thinking abilities and influence, they have also helped the project gain traction. After the project gained traction and prices rose, these community OGs naturally began to contribute more to the project, including explaining and disseminating concepts.

After the launch of the BRC420 protocol, over 1000 projects were born from it, leading to unexpected innovations like Blue Crystal and Music Box.

5. The Success of the Merlin Chain Community Comes from Openness and Transparency

The initial intention to create Merlin Chain stemmed from the realization that many demands related to the metaverse, autonomous worlds, and finance could not be realized on Bitcoin Layer1, making Bitcoin scaling necessary.

Currently, most technical solutions on Bitcoin Layer2 are quite similar. The reason Merlin has not publicly shared its technical solutions is that, due to the chain's popularity, the team's time and energy have been focused on solving congestion on the chain and providing a better user experience. Most Layer2 projects emphasize technology because their mainnet has not yet launched.

The core reason for the success of the Merlin community lies in openness and transparency. In all public interviews and Twitter spaces, they express their most genuine thoughts, such as why they identify as Layer2, having noticed that many technically similar but weaker teams also claim to be Layer2. This attitude of openness and transparency has garnered recognition from the community.

Secondly, to avoid marketing fees affecting the community's fairness, the project chose to have zero marketing expenses, with many individuals on YouTube, podcasts, and Twitter promoting it voluntarily, creating an atmosphere of belief and spiritual totem.

Thirdly, compared to some projects that sought to capitalize on the Bitcoin ecosystem's popularity and only later began building, community members are more willing to accept teams like Merlin that have been building since the early days of the ecosystem to reap the rewards.

Many Western users who engage with inscriptions prefer Merlin because the Bitcoin chips have been distributed for many years, while inscriptions have only just begun. Merlin's empowerment of inscriptions has attracted many Western users. Additionally, the demand for Bitcoin yield is a necessity for many Bitcoin holders. Merlin Chain can effectively meet both needs, which is one reason for its explosive popularity.

6. The Core is to Serve the Project's Target Users Well

Regarding the future competition of Bitcoin Layer2, Jeff believes the core is to focus on doing their own thing well and serving their target users effectively. There will be many potential builders in the ecosystem working together.

Currently, Merlin has three funds: one is a liquidity fund that provides liquidity for the entire ecosystem and application secondary markets. The second is an ecosystem fund for project investments; the third is the Merlin token, with a portion reserved for builders and early development teams.

Currently, the Bitmap tech team is working on recursive protocols, BRC420, and Merlin, driven more by market demands. On one hand, they do not want to abandon previous users and products; on the other hand, they hope to address larger needs and technical challenges, so they will do their utmost to face and solve these challenges.

7. Conclusion

In the future, we hope to see more and better developers join, as Merlin has already attracted a large number of retail investors and assets. How to better utilize these assets? How to better serve users is a close focus of the team.

The Bitcoin ecosystem is still in a very early stage, and we hope that all developers, investors, and the ecosystem will not rush for quick success but rather pay more attention to how to lay a solid foundation early on and how to grow robustly, working together to build a better Bitcoin ecosystem.