Meros

A novel currency built from the ground up, specifically designed to enable secure payments between anyone, anywhere. Meros provides innovative, cutting edge technology for a truly feasible way to pay for goods and services, focusing only on elements that improve the currency itself.

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Why Meros ?

Bitcoin is not viable for day-to-day payments. Not only does it have limits in how many transactions it can handle, it’s simply not fast enough. While solutions like the Lightning Network exist, second layers provide a fragmented ecosystem and will never have the abilities of a competent first layer.

When it comes to other cryptocurrencies that also acknowledge Bitcoin’s shortcomings, they also aren’t fast enough, don't have the functionality necessary to succeed, or are not sufficiently secure. Meros solves these problems in order to be a truly viable currency. In order to accomplish this goal, Meros was built to be instant, feeless, decentralized, and scalable.

Feeless

Fees make currency inaccessible, even with fees that are as low as 0.05 USD. Even five cents mean a lot to those who survive on just hundreds of dollars a year, especially when fees quickly accumulate. Digital currency must be accessible to everyone, everywhere, anytime.

Decentralized

Central authorities, whether it be a singular monolithic party, a coalition of five, or an elected group of fifteen, do not empower the individual. The individual being able to verify, produce, and approve transactions on their own empowers them.

Scalable

If a cryptocurrency only gets a single transaction per second, it doesn’t matter if it can theoretically handle a thousand. There must be a flexible first layer that allows proper scaling as usage increases, but doesn’t focus on having a high TPS solely to have a high TPS.

Instant

Meros uses a DAG, and transaction confirmations are not affected by any block time.

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Meros is

Meros doesn’t have any monetary fees. Instead, your computer spends a fraction of a second on a math problem to prove your transaction isn’t spam. This enables a global system anyone can access.

Instant

Meros transactions are verified outside of blocks. As soon as you send a transaction, it’s voted on, becoming confirmed within seconds.

Feeless

Meros doesn’t have any monetary fees. Instead, your computer spends a fraction of a second on a math problem to prove your transaction isn’t spam. This enables a global system anyone can access.

Decentralized

Meros isn’t owned by any foundation or corporation, and no party has any special powers. Anyone can start contributing to the network via our CPU-only mining algorithm.

Trustless

You never have to blindly believe someone else. Every transaction is fully audited and verified by your own node.

About Meros

Meros is instant and feeless, with all transactions and verifications happening on our DAG, yet secured via a proof-of-work blockchain. This blockchain is mined to earn voting weight, while also distributing newly minted Meros. Anyone can step up and start producing blocks, thanks to our algorithm which denies ASICs, FPGAs, and GPUs, and has built-in pool resistance to ensure decentralization.

Merit Caching

Merit Caching is what sets Meros apart from all other cryptocurrencies. It’s a completely original consensus mechanism developed to match proper security with instant transactions. By mining a blockchain, miners earn Merit, a tokenized form of their contribution to the network’s security. This Merit isn’t transferable, and isn’t convertible to Meros. That said, it can be used to vote on transactions.

By using Merit to vote on transactions, miners are putting their historical security contributions to work in that very moment, without needing to wait for the next block to come around. When a transaction reaches a supermajority of Merit, it’s confirmed. If enough time passes without a supermajority being reached, the transaction with the most Merit behind it is confirmed (notably, in the case of double spends).

Any malicious actor who tries to cheat the system instantly has all their Merit removed. This action is stored on the blockchain, and is completely verifiable. The entire network attests to the issue. To get 61% of Merit, which is the amount needed to trigger the supermajority for both transactions in a double spend if all other votes are perfectly split, the group trying to cheat the system would need to get 61% of blocks for an entire year.

By combining the distribution and classic security of proof of work, with the insurmountable challenge of gaining the majority of stake in a proof-of-stake system, we successfully achieve proper security while offering incredible functionality.

Meros DevelopmentFund

The Meros Development Fund is a decentralized system which empowers Meros to support itself via its community. Anyone can submit a request for funds. Anyone with any amount of Meros is able to vote. There are no requirements on having thousands of dollars of Meros, or having locked your funds for months. Every user is considered worthy by a fair system.

The Meros Development Fund was created due to a strong distaste for premines, even ones which are timelocked, yet an acknowledgement that cryptocurrencies need people working on them to proliferate. This doesn’t mean a company, or even an organized team in the same building. It means people who care about the project and talk with each other. While some quality developers would work on Meros without any expectation in return, which is how Meros has reached its current height, this model is, unfortunately, not sustainable. The Meros Development Fund lets us create a truly decentralized network with the resources it needs to thrive.

ASMR

ASMR stands for Atomic Swaps for Meros. Atomic swaps are nothing new, and they enable secure exchanges between cryptocurrencies, without any middleman, preserving their trustlessness and decentralization. That said, they aren’t currently supported by all coins, for a variety of reasons. ASMR is the first implementation of a new protocol by the Monero community, which adds support for several cryptocurrencies.

While we only initially supported Meros, ASMR has grown to support Monero and Nano. As we designed and built it, we made sure to keep other cryptocurrencies in mind to easily enable this. Now, anyone using ASMR can select which coin they want to swap with at runtime; there’s no need to do anything with the source code.

We built ASMR because we don’t support tribalism. Cryptocurrency is groundbreaking work towards a modern, functional financial system. Every cryptocurrency out there tries to offer exciting functionality but has its own drawbacks, Meros included. We believe in fostering positive relationships with other parties in the space to improve Meros and cryptocurrency as a whole.

Frequently Asked Questions

General

When will Meros’ mainnet be launched?

We have always said we’ll launch when we’re ready, and have been hesistant to give firm dates. We are approaching our final testnet though, and will launch a few weeks after that if all goes well.

Can I participate in a testnet?

We have already launched multiple Developer Testnets, which were open to anyone who can compile their own node. When the software is more user-friendly, we will launch Public Testnets, where anyone can download the node software and partake.

What is Meros’ total supply?

Meros doesn’t have a total supply, just like Monero. There will always be a block reward, yet one which decreases over time before hitting its minimum value. This ensures miners always have proper incentive, and allows distribution of new coins to people joining the network.

Is there a premine?

Meros does not have a premine. While we originally had one planned, we disliked it due to its centralization. We replaced it with the Meros Development Fund, an on-chain system where anyone can request funding and our community can decide together who deserves it. There’s also not any ICO/IEO/sale of any kind.

What is Meros’ total supply?

We don’t plan to have exchanges at launch, namely so people see Meros as a meaningful project, not just a couple of letters on a website. That said, we are in talks with multiple exchanges.

Mining

What mining algorithm does Meros use?

Meros uses RandomX, an algorithm designed to not allow GPUs/FPGAs/ASICs to take over the network. We also have bundled this with pool resistant measures.

What is the block time?

Ten minutes. Since transactions are not confirmed via the blockchain, this has no effect on the time a transaction takes to be verified. Transactions are verified after being voted on, which happens as soon as they’re seen.

What is the block reward?

The block reward fluctuates from block to block, based on the hash rate. If there are more miners, indicating a higher mining profitability, the block reward decreases. If there are less miners, indicating a lower mining profitably, the block reward increases to ensure network security. A negative sigmoid is used to decide the reward per a specific block, which ranges from 50 MR to 1 MR.

Will there be mining pools?

No. Meros uses a pool resistant mining algorithm to encourage further decentralization.

Development

What programming language is Meros written in?

Meros is written in Nim, yet we also have a protocol implementation in Python used to verify the accuracy of our node software. We also wrote ASMR, our multi-currency atomic swap tool, in Rust. We hope to move more of our code over to Rust in the future.

What is the plan for hard forks?

Meros can be improved, and we plan to do so. We won’t hard fork if there isn’t enough of a reason to, but the plan is to do a hard fork every six months. Every commit is reviewed when it’s submitted, and the full difference between the two codebases will also be reviewed before we upgrade. We’ll also thoroughly test new codebases via testnets, which we have already been doing in preparation for mainnet.

How can I contribute?

If you’re a developer, you can check out our GitHub repository and look for issues you feel you can help with. If you’re not, there’s always other ways to help Meros thrive! We’d love to have you join our Discord, and we always appreciate people contributing however they can.