While Bitcoin surged past $120 k this week, the wider Bitcoin-eco narrative has slipped out of the spotlight. Yet builders are still shipping. Merlin, one of the earliest BTCFi pioneers, invited Odaily for a wide-ranging chat with founder Jeff.

Odaily: Early 2024 was rough—people accused Merlin of faking TVL, copying Ethereum L2s, and using unsafe custody. Why dive in so early?

Jeff: Timing. Ordinals and Runes were exploding; holders wanted yield on native BTC, not just price exposure. We built what the market demanded. Today Babylon, Solv and others use the same pragmatic custody-plus-bridge stack we battle-tested back then.

Odaily: How do you see the current BTCFi landscape?

Jeff: Product designs have converged. The real chokepoint is yield: rates have compressed and whale-sized BTC can’t be absorbed sustainably. Everyone is now hunting for new yield sources and greater capacity.

Odaily: Airdrops are over—how do you keep users?

Jeff: Airdrops are caffeine, not nutrition. Long-term holders care about stable, safe yield. Our new 50-BTC vault sold out in 27 minutes because we source yield from:

1. Multi-chain liquidity provision (e.g., Sui LPs + subsidies)

2. Cross-token arbitrage using BTC as collateral

3. AVS validation rewards from new protocols

4. User-directed DeFi farming wrapped in a single-click, risk-managed vault

Odaily: Will MicroStrategy-style firms ever stake their BTC?

Jeff: They’ll participate, but off-chain: custodians, wrapped BTC, regulated yield products. Merlin’s focus is retail: Hold → Earn → Invest.

With chain-abstraction + AI, a user can keep only BTC and still ape into a Solana meme coin, flip it, and end up with more BTC—all in <1 second, all settled back to the BTC wallet.

Odaily: You just shipped v0.3 of Merlin Wizard. What does it solve?

Jeff: Two pain points:

1. Decision fatigue—aggregated on-chain/off-chain data for ETH, Solana, Base, BSC

2. Execution friction—natural-language orders (“Buy TRUMP at $0.12, sell at $0.20”) executed across chains; user keeps final signing authority

Cost: A few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month—covered by chain revenue.

v1.0 launches early August: chat with Wizard and spend native BTC for any trade.

Odaily: What’s next after BTCFi and AI?

Jeff: Real-World Assets. First week of August we’ll tokenize collectibles, anime IPs, and physical goods directly on Bitcoin. Users stay long BTC and punt on high-beta RWAs—speculation without leaving the BTC denominator.

Odaily: Attention on Bitcoin-eco has cooled. Any regrets?

Jeff: Objectively, yes. 80 % of last year’s Bitcoin-eco projects are gone. But surviving the down-cycle is the job. Solana rebuilt after FTX; we’ll do the same.
Team stayed intact (30+ people, mostly Web2 DNA) and we’re comfortable grinding in silence.

Odaily: MERL on Binance Alpha—did you pay a “tribute”?

Jeff: If “tribute” means user airdrops, yes; if it means under-the-table fees, no. We absorbed the $3–4 M sell-pressure fine. Listings on Binance Alpha and Kraken were six-month compliance marathons—no shortcuts.

Odaily: Meme, AI, RWA—are you just chasing every hype?

Jeff: A chain must incubate what devs want. We can’t block them. But no project wins by hype alone. Ordinals took off only after teams kept building through the graveyard period. Same with AI now.

Odaily: Biggest stress moment?

Jeff: Token launch—20 % airdrop, price expectations, 24/7 anxiety.
What keeps us going? Belief that Bitcoin-eco is a multi-decade game and we’ve already built the moats no new entrant can replicate today.

Jeff’s closing thought:
“This cycle is hell-mode. Short-term plays are tempting, but we need more builders. Web3 isn’t built by tourists—it’s built by residents.”