In the world of cryptocurrency, there always seems to be new programs, features, coins, and mining systems. It is hard to keep up with the growing world of DeFi systems. When you throw the metaverse into it all, you can go down a rabbit hole that could take days to get out of, and you may still not know much more than you went in knowing.
Hopefully, we can break down a bit of the confusion for you. This time, we will be talking about Merit Circle, their part in the metaverse, and what they offer that makes them stand out from other cryptocurrency platforms.
Merit Circle is a fairly new cryptocurrency system that offers a lot of unique features. Instead of mining cryptocurrency on a beefy computer that takes a lot of money and space to build, you can now earn crypto just by playing games on your phone or laptop.
So keep reading to learn more about this growing cryptocurrency system, and why it might be a good idea to jump on it soon.
What Is Merit Circle?
Merit Circle is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that is focused on play-to-earn (P2E) systems. It was launched in November 2021 on the Binance Launchpool. In fact, it was the 27th project done on the Binance blockchain.
Their goal is to bridge the gap between gamers, education, and DAO contributors.
They allow BNB and BUSD to farm MC. It is part of the metaverse. It is currently a sort of online world that is experienced via avatars. It allows you to connect with people all over the world that are on the same servers. There is complete freedom in these online worlds. The metaverse is an online ‘universe’. Facebook has recently moved to become a part of the metaverse structure.
On Merit Circle, users can play games to earn cryptocurrency. They also offer scholarships and educational opportunities.
Out of every in-game asset, the company takes 30% of the profits. The gamers earn the other 70%. They are working hard to make the system able to hold the growing number of people joining the system as well as introduce new games by partnering with new companies and games.
Each month, more new gamers are joining, with close to 1,000 coming in every month as of this moment. The total number of players is nearing 4,000.
The games aren’t just standard video games either. While there are first-person shooters, third-person shooters, RPGs, MMORPGs, and such, there are also other ways to earn money. More recently, they have added esports, online gambling, and even move-as-you-earn rewards that monitor your exercise and steps and give you money based on how much exercise you do.
What Is The Merit Circle Token?
The Merit Circle ($MC) native token is simply called Merit Circle, Circle of Merit, or Merit Circle coin (MC). Currently, there are 42,592,000 MC coins in circulation, with a total of 1,000,000,000 MC total.
$MC Tokenomics
The DAO Treasury will keep 15%, 20% will be given to team members/advisors, 29.4% will be used as incentives, 14.1% is for early investors, and 7.5% is allocated to public distribution.
- Community Incentives — No cliff period, 36 months vesting — tokens can only be allocated based on approved governance proposals
- Team & Advisors — 12 months cliff period followed by 42 months vesting
- DAO Treasury — No cliff period, 36 months vesting — tokens can only be allocated based on approved governance proposals
- Early Investors — 6 months cliff period followed by 36 months vesting
- Liquidity Rewards — 12 months cliff period after claiming (refer to information below)
- Public Distribution — No vesting
- Retroactive Rewards — 10% distribution after TGE, remaining part 18 months vesting
Merit Coin has ranged anywhere between $1.87 and $45.24 in the last year.
Merit Circle Staking
A substantial amount of $MC tokens was set aside for rewards for staking. Long-term stakers are awarded by adding a time-weighted element for calculating rewards.
All token holders (except locked tokens) are able to stake the tokens within two different vaults:
- MC → Single-sided staking pool. This pool receives 20% of the liquidity mining rewards
- MC/ETH LP → Liquidity position of 50% MC and 50% ETH. This pool receives 80% of the liquidity mining rewards
How Does Merit Circle Work?
Merit Circle offers a variety of ways to earn money and educate yourself. For example, they provide in-game assets to players. They also grant rewards to the best players in each game. Metagames are also hosted on top of existing games for those in the community.
There is a large community of like-minded people that enjoy playing games and earning money. Educational content and classes are also hosted to allow gamers to improve their performance.
On top of the above features, 1,500 scholars are also present on the platform.
Many platforms allow you to buy MC using fiat currency. However, you can also exchange it for other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum.
How To Use Merit Circle
As with every other cryptocurrency, you must first get a wallet and buy Merit Circle. After that, you can use their platform to stake your pool. By staking your cryptocurrency, it offers another way to produce an income. It is like a savings account in traditional centralized financing.
You can also use games on their platform to earn money. Currently, they have two operations, which are Axie Infinity and Vulcan Forged. Several games are part of each operation but are combined into two categories for ease. However, they already have plans for future operations such as Big Time, Cyball, Fancy Birds, Genopets, Hash Rush, Illuvium, Nyan Heroes, Sipher, and UFO Gaming.
As you play games and earn achievements, you can earn Merit Circle coins that can be traded for money or other cryptocurrencies. You can also earn money by boosting the community.
They also have NFTs that can be collected and evolved by users up to three times.
Once you own Merit Circle coins, you are a part of the community. This means you can cast your vote, suggest changes, and be a part of the governance.
They have their own wallet as most platforms do. However, their wallet is a little different. This is important because it allows you to access your digital wallet from any device. Most of the time, with private keys, if you lose the key, then you lose any access to your money.
With most systems that require a beefy computer, this isn’t usually that bad of a situation, as you are likely not going to lose your rig that has to be stationary in your home. If something happens to the computer, you can also often recover the hard drive. However, when these wallets can be accessed on your phone, you often risk losing your funding.
Thankfully, Merit Circle has a unique system allowing you to access your money and recover lost keys, as well as preventing your key from being stolen if someone takes your phone or laptop.
Overall, it is a great system to earn rewards while being fairly passive in the cryptocurrency world.
What Makes Merit Circle Special?
Not only does Merit Circle provide income for those who just want to play games, but they also help to support small games and help them grow. They help provide the funding, and get games up off the ground while also allowing their community to earn income by playing these games.
Merit Circle does take 30% of profits that people earn, but they put this money back in to help finance new games. This means that the more people that play games and earn MC coins, the more games they can fund.
We don’t know if that is why they have ‘circle’ in their name, but it is a nice connection. By having more people join the community and play games, people can make more money. The more money their customers make, the more funding Merit Circle gets to support new games. This in turn gives Merit Circle the ability to provide more games for their community, which makes it more available for new community members and earnings.
When first launched, there were only 12 errors that were easily, and immediately, fixed. However, Merit Circle also hosted a ‘bug bounty’ that allowed for their community members to find and report any errors that were present for them, to make sure the system ran smoothly for everyone.
Also, instead of Proof of Work, or Proof of Stake, Merit Circle introduced Proof of Growth (POG) along with Proof of Work. This means that to mine for more currency, you don’t need a beefy computer. They do this thanks to something known as Cuckoo Cycle.
Thanks to Cuckoo Cycle, anything that can connect to the internet can mine. This means a smartphone, tablet, CPU, GPU, or anything else. It is bound by memory bandwidth which needs less power and produces less heat. This development is what allowed for regular computers and even phones and tablets to run the system and play games.
Unlike most other wallets, Merit allows you to back up and secure your wallets so that if you lose your phone or computer, you can still access your private keys. This is due to a 10-word mnemonic-based recovery. They even have a QR code that you can scan to access your wallet. This is a great system as it allows you to still maintain control of your key, even if your device is stolen.
Pros and Cons
Merit Circle is still pretty new so there aren’t many pros and cons available at the moment. However, they have some pretty unique features that definitely could be an improvement and allow them to stand out against other competitors.
Pros
- Quick to fix any errors on their platform
- On-chain governance via Tally
- Can buy with fiat currencies
- Fairly new system, with the pay to earn design
- Earn stake as soon as you buy tokens to vote and have your voice be heard
- Working to build the metaverse
- Can recover wallet easily
Cons
- Not a lot of options currently to make money
- They take 30% of all money you make
- Still new, no platform as of yet
Team, Investors, and Partners
Team
Merit Circle is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which means that anyone who wants to be a part of the platform can join and become a seed contributor. However, they do still have a central team and are looking to expand so they can do more with their platform.
Marco van den Heuvel is the CEO of Merit Circle. He led his team, consisting of Tommy (the CFO) and Mark (the COO) to create the project in 2020. They were building the project under a company known as Flow Ventures.
Later, after the project was started, a collaboration with Dept Agency allowed them to add another member to the team. His name is Omar Ramirez and he is a Product Owner on the platform.
Investors
Merit Circle has 9 investors, which has funded a combined total of $4.6 million in two separate funding rounds. These rounds occurred on the 7th and 12th of October 2021. These investors were:
- Yield Guild Games
- CitizenX Crypto Ventures
- OP Crypto
- Dialectic Capital
- Digital Finance Group
- DeFiance Capital
- Maven 11 Capital
- Bitscale Capital
- Oxbull
Partners
In late 2021 and early 2022, Merit Circle has worked hard to partner with several big games and companies.
- Planet Mojo (novel gaming Metaverse)
- Fight of the Ages (MOBA Metaverse project)
- Drunk Robots (RPG)
- Blockstars (music management)
- Azuro (decentralized betting protocol)
- WonderHero (mobile RPG)
- Heroes of Mavia (multiplayer strategy game)
- Arcade (blockchain-gaming infrastructure)
- Tiny Colony (metaverse)
- Summoners Arena (idle RPG)
- Rainmaker Games (gaming platform)
- Sidus Heroes (WebGL, MMORPG)
- PathDAO (community)
- BlockchainSpace (play-to-earn gaming guild)
- MixMob (NFT racer)
- Syn City (mafia metaverse)
- Genopets (move-to-earn)
- CyBall (fantasy football)
- Nyan Heroes (third-person shooter)
- Vulcan Forged (NFT gaming studio)
- UFO Gaming (traditional games)
- Sipher (open world)
- Yield Guild Games (play-to-earn company)
- Fancy Birds (metaverse)
Since its start-up, Merit Circle has been working hard to partner and collaborate with many different companies to provide the best play-to-earn experience possible. These partnerships are only expected to grow in the next few months as new companies, metaverses, and games become available.
Conclusion
Merit Circle is still a fairly new program in the metaverse. They want to work hard to expand the metaverse and their own platform to bring a wide variety of games and earning systems to their community members.
We are still waiting to see how they grow and perform, but their goals seem promising. They have introduced new wallet systems, proof of growth systems, and even allow you to access their games on computers and phones that aren’t designed specifically for mining cryptocurrency.
If they can grow and expand as much as they want to, then they may be a new face in the metaverse and a new way to earn cryptocurrency. They also offer education and scholarships for those that are interested.
Wallet overview
Full list of wallet addresses the DAO currently utilizes:
Ethereum
- 0x7e9e4c0876B2102F33A1d82117Cc
73B7FddD0032 - 0x73F7261cF493105202F8dcbB11C1
26a65703dA55 - 0xC4218226A5406Aa721EAEBc2D9dA
9564AEdd7777 - 0x0Dd535b4e9f3545413c5FE9F275d
09A2555C750b - 0x3cB580c041Cce953adfc2148e5BE
6c1c893CCa9E - 0x56475a4a8D00b6F7b01E0879CBbb
a609707aef6b - 0x97173277FED329ee844BAfa44D77
19ad372a7150 - 0xB5A0cbB4fC7294642216Cd7AFbc3
525B24316cbc - 0x4f6d9907fBc54feDeA9296860d36
E14ccC348F7A - 0xdE741b4FAb764Ff019C9ee5a3D97
2EFE5e1c1B96
Binance smart chain
Solana
Ronin
John S. Logan has been working with cryptocurrency for nearly as long as it has been available on the market. With a professional background in the finance industry, he believes that blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, and decentralized finance play an important role in the future of the world.