Shutting Down the Merit Foundation

After months of careful consideration, the members of the Merit Foundation have decided to retire the Merit project and shut down the foundation. This was not a decision that we’ve taken lightly and is a bittersweet ending to an enriching journey that we started back in late 2017.

We set out with the vision to make cryptocurrency more accessible, secure, and usable for people around the world. The network was publicly launched on the 1st of January, 2018, with many world firsts on the blockchain, including:

• An invite-only blockchain to facilitate security, safety, and sharing.
• Using the more energy-efficient and accessible cuckoo-cycle mining algorithm.
• Using address beaconing to make it impossible to burn the currency and also adding user-friendly blockchain addresses.
• Proof-of-growth mining, incentivizing both securing the network and growing it.
• The first notion of a crypto “savings account” via the guardian protocol.
• Unilateral sending through the EasySend protocol, utilizing secure on-blockchain escrow.

By Fall 2018, we had the highest number of commits (atop the original bitcoin codebase) of any open source blockchain in the world! That doesn’t even consider the ecosystem we had built around the core blockchain (lightwallet, devops, broader global infrastructure, etc.)

While we could not be more proud of what we’ve built, we’ve unfortunately not found commercial success and have run out of resources to continue supporting the project. We find that this project is simply too ambitious and big for a small team of volunteers to maintain going forward. As such, the project will no longer be actively supported by the core team. Open source contributions are always welcome here.

We’ll be forever grateful to the community that cheered us on from our early days as a fledgling digital currency. Thank you!

Upward and Onward, The Merit Team