tl;dr

Merculet (https://merculet.io/) looks like something created using a random ICO generator (like this one: http://yetanotherico.com), a terrible English translation or a scam. Either way I wouldn’t touch it.

CONCEPT & STRATEGY

Here’s Merculet’s concept: “CHIEF GROWTH OFFICER OF GLOBAL ENTREPRENEUR. Maximize the internet of value by becoming the ultimate solution through implementing user’s attention into enterprise growth”. That’s it. A bunch of smart and trendy words put together in a sentence that doesn’t meant anything. After reading their website and papers I still don’t know what exactly are they trying to achieve, how they want to become the ultimate solution or what’s the technology behind it.

I do know that they want to issue and sell MVP tokens worth 37,000 ETH, or some $18.5M. The website and the whitepapers are very clear about this part. Interestingly, there’s no ambiguity or language barrier here. Everything else: the concept, the strategy, the technology, any specifics are just vague, meaningless sentences full of important sounding words. There’s no project to analyse here.

It’s a situation where: 1) the founders are incapable of communicating their ideas at all, or 2) they don’t really have any good ideas, or 3) it’s a scam.

TEAM

There are 10 people on the core team. None of them has any blockchain technology experience. Most of the guys worked in the same company previously: 魔窗 ttps://www.linkedin.com/company/%E9%AD%94%E7%AA%97/ . There’s no English profile and it doesn’t look very big or successful (only 37 Linked In flowers).

There are 6 advisors listed, including Roger Lim -Founding Partner of NEO Global Capital — (https://www.linkedin.com/in/limroger/). And Roger Lim actually lists Merculet on his Linked In profile. Other high profile people listed as advisors, like Shoucheng Zhang https://www.linkedin.com/in/shoucheng-zhang-ba49a174/ or Bo Shen https://www.linkedin.com/in/boshen1011/ don’t mention any involvement or affiliation with Merculet on their profiles.

COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT

The team is not clear about the market they want to address or the competitive environment. There is no information about the potential market size or any competitors in the whitepaper or on the website.

At the same time, a new, decentralized, token driven advertising business model is something a lot of smart people are working on right now. And there are very good projects out there already, including https://steem.io/ and https://basicattentiontoken.org/. Merculet wants to take advantage of the hype without offering any specifics or even understanding its competitive environment.

TOKEN ECONOMICS

Merculet will create a total of 10B MVP tokens. Only 30% will be offered during the crowd sale. 20% will go to the team, 35% to the foundation (it’s not clear who runs it) and 15% to marketing (it’s not clear about the details). Investors from the US and China are excluded from the public sale.

There is no information available about the nature of the tokens. What’s the function, the underlying technology or the token economics. We can only learn about the following 3 features of the token: “ATTENTION WILL BE REWARDED. GROWTH WILL BE REWARDED. A TOKENIZED NEW FUTURE WILL BE NO BOUNDARY”. (https://merculet.io/#mvp-token). Reading this I can’t help but add in my mind: and All your base are belong to us… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us

PROJECT PRESENCE

The project is active on social media and in communities, focusing strongly on promoting tokens, ICO, bounties etc. The Merculet bounty thread on bitcointalk has 36 pages and growing. Telegram is active, with almost 11k members. Twitter has some impressive 3,700 followers. All the social media is full of the usual sales and marketing activities. At the same time, as mentioned above, there are no documents available that explain any details or specific regarding the business model, technology or token economics. This can’t be found on the website or in the whitepeper (at least in the English version of these. There are also Chinese versions).

Please feel free to post your comments or questions here, get in touch on twitter (https://twitter.com/HiEnergyPeople) or Linked In (https://www.linkedin.com/in/michalbacia/).