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.
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.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
General
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
No. Meros uses a pool resistant mining algorithm to encourage further decentralization.
Development
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.
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.
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.