PANews reported on July 21 that Merlin Chain announced the new Merlin 2.0, proposing the development direction of "Reinvent Bitcoin: Hold, Earn, Invest", and is committed to expanding Bitcoin from a "value store" to a "profitable and deployable core asset". Merlin 2.0 focuses on three major directions: BTCFi expansion, chain abstraction technology, and AI applications (such as Merlin Wizard, etc.), further improving the liquidity and practicality of BTC in the multi-chain ecosystem, while lowering the threshold for BTC use, allowing users to participate in various investment opportunities across chains without exchanging other assets, and conveniently realizing BTC holding, income acquisition, and liquidity participation.

As previously reported, since the launch of the mainnet in February 2024, Merlin Chain has promoted the rise of BTCFi and spawned several representative projects including Solv, Bedrock, Avalon, Babylon, etc., with a total of more than $3.8 billion BTC pledged on the chain. Currently, the Merlin-related ecosystem has contributed about $2 billion in BTCFi TVL, accounting for more than 20%.