AN ARCHIVED DIGITAL CURRENCY PROJECT.
Merit aimed to be the world’s friendliest digital currency, making it effortless to pay friends, buy goods, and manage your wealth. Merit is no longer actively supported or maintained.
Merit in 45 Seconds
Merit was created to be different. Click the video below to see a brief overview of how.
Watch video
Merit believed that digital currency should stand on the pillars of simplicity, safety, and community.
Feature comparison
Merit was the world's first digital currency to have: an invite-only ecosystem, growth mining, decentralized vaults, sending as easy as an SMS. See how we stacked up.
Feature
Bitcoin
Ethereum
Merit
Ripple
Litecoin
Iota
Invite-Only
Promotes a healthy community by requiring each new user be invited and screened by an existing user.
Growth Mining
Rewarding those who grow the community through a mining reward.
Decentralized Vaults
A blockchain-based vault that enables users to protect their assets through whitlelists, rate-limits, and additional forms of authentication.
Cancellable Transactions
The ability for the sender of a transaction to cancel it after it has been sent, but before it has been accepted.
Send via Email, SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.
The ability to send a URL with money in it via any written form of digital communication.
Mineable without a Computer
Ability to earn mining rewards without having a personal computer or specialized/advancing mining hardware.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
COMMUNITY
This wasn’t the Deep Web. Merit was a community of real people like you. The more people you invited, the more useful, safe, and reliable the network became.
SAFETY
The Merit Guardian protocol provided something no other currency does - decentralized account recovery. There was no third party that can lock you out of Merit. And with Vaults, a hacker couldn't even use your Merit if they compromise your account. With these features, digital currency had never been safer.
Sending or sharing Merit was as easy as sending an SMS. With MeritMoney, you simply selected a contact from your phone, chose and amount, and tapped send! With Merit aliases, you could simply type an alias such as @meritlover instead a complex 34-character key.
WHAT WE BUILT
GROWTH MINING
Merit's revolutionary approach to mining rewarded both securing and growing the network. Stewards of the network earned growth rewards in every block alongside security miners. The more you shared Merit, the more likely you were to earn growth mining rewards.
- Because Merit was an invite-only network, no one could join without having been referred by another member. The Merit protocol kept track of the referral tree, and selected top ambassadors to participate in the mining reward in each block.
- Mine Merit without a computer. Growth mining meant you didn’t need a data of center to mine our currency. You could earn it just by referring others.
VAULTING
Merit vaults were the missing savings account in the digital currency world. Fully decentralized, these vaults empowered users to protect their digital currency without sacrificing any of their independence.
AN EXTRA LAYER OF PROTECTION
With a separate spending and reset keys, vaults provided the convenience of day-to-day use with the deeper protection of lock-and-key security.
PEACE-OF-MIND THROUGH RECOVERY
Unlike other digital currencies, losing the password to your vault was no problem on Merit. Your vault could be recovered in a totally decentralized way through the use of trusted guardians.
WHITELIST TRANSFERS
Vaults could only send funds to the wallets you choose. So, even if your vault was ever compromised, your Merit was still safe.
FUTURE-PROOF
Merit vaults empowered you to generate multiple keys for friends and family, which ensured your loved ones had access to your Merit after you are gone.
MeritMoney
Merit's MeritMoney protocol allowed sending as easily as SMS or Email. With a link that was as good as money, MeritMoney could be sent to anyone, wether or not they used Merit yet.
SEND MERIT TO ANYONE
With Merit, you could send money to anyone, whether they already had Merit or not. The powerful MeritMoney feature securely stored their Merit in escow on the blockchain until they claimed it.
PASSWORD PROTECTION
You could password protect the Merit that you sent to friends or family. This meant that even if your email or text messages got hacked, a thief couldn't intercept your Merit transaction.
PENDING TRANSACTIONS
Since money was held in escrow until recipients claimed it, you could cancel pending transactions or place an automatic timeout on them that would return unclaimed Merit to you.
Roadmap
Genesis
First public release of Merit, including core features such as PoG, Growth Rewards, and MeritMoney.
Daedalus
Adding Powerful stewardship dynamics to the invitation protocol. Minable invites. Enhancing both security and controlling the rate of growth.
Kingdom
Mobile (iOS and Android) and Web Wallets. Desktop-to-mobile device synchronization. FastSync for the blockchain.
Wildfire
Re-designed Desktop UI. Globally-distributed lightwallet infrastructure. Open-source LightWallet-Stack.
Equus
Launch of the Merit Market, with BTC escrow. Open-source mining pool. One-click GPU and CPU Miner.
Proletariat
Open-source and community-driven.
Shut down
Shutting Down the Merit Foundation.
