The cryptocurrency industry exploded over the past 13 years, ever since the launch of Bitcoin. It touched nearly every industry, with the potential to affect some more than others, but digital coins and their underlying blockchain technology have certainly revolutionized the world as we know it.

However, Bitcoin was never capable — or supposed to — fulfill all the needs of the modern world, even when it comes to finances. It was created as a digital, decentralized payment method, but even when it comes to that, there are some rather obvious limitations weighing it down. For example, Bitcoin can only process a handful of transactions at once, which is nowhere near enough to satisfy the needs of the entire world. 

Next, it requires too much electricity and processing power to even do that. Not to mention that it is extremely slow, so those in a hurry to have their transactions processed tend to offer greater fees, which increases the average fee size, making it expensive, when the entire point is for it to be cheap and affordable.

These and other limitations caused the crypto community to start building new blockchains and coins that would be more efficient, and the crypto industry that we know today has been born. However, even with the new projects — where each generation keeps getting better and better — there is no project that can fit everyone’s needs, be scalable enough, consume acceptable amounts of power, and solve other issues that are plaguing the industry.

For a time, this seemed like an unsolvable obstacle, but the solution is actually quite simple, in theory. If one project can’t fit all needs, then the key is to enable interoperability between many, and create one massive network that will connect all of the most popular and advanced blockchains into a single network — the future of the internet, also known as the Web 3.0.

That is what Merkle Network is trying to achieve.

What is Merkle Network?

Merkle Network emerged relatively recently as a layer-zero protocol that offers oracle services that can enable data and assets to travel across several popular blockchain implementations. Just like Chainlink’s oracles can deliver off-chain data to the blockchain, Merkle’s oracles can share it from one chain to another directly, without the need for intermediaries.

This would allow developers to create dApps, smart contracts, and other products that can work on all of the supported chains, instead of just being isolated on a single blockchain and trapped within its own ecosystem.

So far, the project has already managed to connect Ethereum, BSC, Avalanche, and Polygon chains, with more likely to come in the future.

However, to make all of this possible, the project also required its own digital currency, which is why the team launched its $MERKLE token merely a week ago. The launch followed a steady growth of Merkle Network’s community and an increase in support of the project. This was most evident on their Twitter and Telegram as well as other social media outlets.

$MERKLE launch: What do you need to know?

According to its recent announcement, Merkle Network held a token sale on TrustSwap’s launchpad. The event took place last week, on October 28th, starting at 1 PM UTC. This is when the registration period for participating in the actual FlashLaunch started, and users had 24 hours to go to TrustSwap’s platform and register for the event.

Users also had to get their hands on some TrustSwap (SWAP) tokens, and stake them in order to become eligible. They received 2 drawing tickets for the FlashLaunch for a $250 allocation of $MERKLE for each 4,000 SWAP tokens that they have staked, or if they had a total of 2,500 as their SwapScore, which came from past staking.

The maximum that users could obtain was 20 drawing tickets, for which they had to stake a total of 250,000 or more of SWAP. Naturally, the more tickets the user had, the bigger their odds of getting $MERKLE tokens. However, it should also be noted that there was another way to get your hands on some $MERKLE without having to engage in staking.

24 hours before the event, TrustSwap also auctioned off 5 Merkle Golden Ticket NFTs. Obtaining any one of them entitled the owner to a guaranteed allocation of $500 in $MERKLE tokens during the FlashLaunch. A single user could only redeem a single golden ticket, meaning that trying to obtain more than one did not benefit the user.

However, users could still obtain the golden ticket and participate in the main drawing, which, in theory, allowed them to walk away with a maximum of a $750 allocation.

Merkle Network also launched on AvaXlauncher and TrustPad, holding two successful launches and confirming its role as an infrastructure project that will become the backbone of decentralized applications.

Merkle Network is changing the crypto world

The launch of the $MERKLE token, and the project’s testnet and mainnet after that, will be a big move in the history of crypto. The project has managed to solve the interoperability issue that has been troubling the crypto sector for ages, and it will start creating the internet of the future. Perhaps this project and its partners will end up being the ones who will make Web 3.0 finally arrive, and with it, revolutionize the internet and all services that it will have to offer.