A letter to the Merculet Community
By Ivan Jiang (CEO of Merculet)
Preface
Since my graduation in 2003, I have been a part of the development of information technology, the internet and mobile internet. Though, as seasoned as I am, it has never crossed my mind that there could be something as innovative and disruptive as Blockchain. Blockchain is a magical combination of math, cryptography, computer science and economics. It contains various principles from natural science, applied science and even humanities as a whole. Yet, we must not forget, the most important part of the Blockchain formula is the Community or each and every one of us. I am very impressed to see how different people from different countries establish belief via the idea of Token, and effectively collaborate in a truly distributed way within the community. Community is such an effective network that its culture speaks volume for the spirit of sharing and collaboration. We believe a vigorous community is crucial to the success of any Blockchain project. Therefore, I choose to write my first open letter to the Merculet community, a group of people who believe in the future of Merculet. And writing a letter is also an effective way to reach consensus within the community.
Facing a brand-new Blockchain world, Merculet is still in the infant stage, and will stand the test from many aspects including the community operations. While assembling a team of believers, it is our duty to communicate to the entire community on where we are today and what we have planned for the future. Merculet aims to deliver ultimate user value and provide fresh user experience to billions of users, and this ambitious vision cannot be achieved without your dedicated support.
Origin of Merculet
In the past three years, we have devoted ourselves to provide growth solution for mobile applications. We have built two renowned products, which have been used by more than 2,700 applications.
1. Deeplink: A link navigates you to the content. It revolutionizes mobile user experience and make the user experience on App as seamless as Web.
2. B2B Content Distribution: A content distribution product for App. It can achieve a better user experience, more effective commercialization through massive licensed content, intelligent algorithm and feeds advertising engine.
Although we have built a stable and matured business with registered sound financing and revenue growth over the past few years, we must not overlook an inevitable trend — in the post-internet era, critical resources are more and more dominated by internet giants, and entrepreneurs invested heavily in marketing and channels, but they end up with unwanted users and sluggish growth. As a result, these start-ups are desperate to find a new growth engine.
With the popularization of Blockchain technology, more and more token ecosystems are being proven. It brings possibility of a new growth trajectory supported by a combination of personalized user experience, code-based trustworthy collaboration and a token driven win-win scenario. We see the future from our in-depth industry research. By leveraging Blockchain technology, we see a future that makes a new productive relation possible, a shared product R&D model between user and enterprise achievable, and value transfer among enterprise alliance feasible. The sweet spot lies in if all parties adapt the same growth methodology, everyone will find his/her own blue ocean.
Blockchain unveils an imminent value-based internet era — a diversified and flourishing world!
Merculet continues the original goal — to be the partner of enterprise’ growth and entrepreneurs’ success. And this time, we will do differently:
1. we aim to serve companies from a global perspective
2. we are fully committed to opening up a new era
Anything is possible by implementing Blockchain technology, token mechanism and community consensus together!
Mission
Merculet is poised to be the chief growth officer for global entrepreneurs. It provides a turn-key solution for clients to embrace token-based operation without knowing too much details about Blockchain technology. You don’t need to learn any complicated Blockchain programming, all you need is a few lines of configuration code, and you will instantly gain the ability to operate your business in a tokenized manner. It will also seamlessly integrate your business into the token-based ecosystem, a place value can flow.
Merculet is built based on attention economy, transform the business and users from the traditional internet to the Blockchain enabled value-based internet, and open up a flourishing connected world.
Merculet Product User Experience
I am very pleased to tell you, our product management team is busy releasing a Demo video and an introductory document, which will explain how easy it is for a tokenized operation using Merculet platform, how convenient it is to be connected to a new ecosystem. Simply put, register and open an account on Merculet website, follow the instructions and complete the configuration with just a few clicks, then download the SDK and complete your API tracking point, then you will be all set. Although the configuration is very easy, it might still take you sometime to figure out your business logic and operational rules. Don’t worry, Merculet will always be there for you.
Merculet vs. BAT
I have been asked many times — Are they the same ‘attention’? What is the different between Merculet and BAT? Well, attention is a critical aspect for both Merculet and BAT, however, the way of utilizing attention is very different, hence product and operation model are very different too.
In a nutshell -
BAT: make advertising better
Merculet: launch a new era of internet
BAT has an excellent team that I personally respect very much. I believe there should be rooms for potential collaboration. However, BAT focuses on online advertising, where the fundamental problems in the post-internet era are (1) majority of traffic goes to dominating companies like Google or Facebook; (2) in the mobile internet time, importance of browser has faded a lot. BAT hopes to integrate Blockchain with their BRAVE browser and challenge the traditional online advertising, this concept is valid and BAT team’s background fits well, however as mentioned above, the effectiveness still remains as a question mark.
On the contrary, Merculet has a very different perspective. We believe instead of asking everybody using BRAVE browser, it will be much ‘democratic’ if we can give the ‘rights’ back to each enterprise and every individual by connecting them to a standard protocol. As such, a new internet era will be formed, internet traffic will be re-allocated, commercialize content and traffic, including advertising, can be achievable.
Merculet’s Partner
Merculet has many existing and potential partners A question being raised is that why don’t we announce our partnership often within the community? I think it is necessary to explain the rationale behind it.
1. First of all, Merculet team operates with a Prudence Principle. ‘Actions speak louder than words’. This is the rule that we inherited from our years of experience on enterprise software development. It is always Merculet’s top priority to deliver the best-in-class products and services and we will carry out this practice forward.
2. In our landscape design, we expect every partner can come onboard to our platform and establish a trust based & value driven relationship. This will also require a complete business and value exchange plan in place. We won’t promote a plan just for the plan itself. Also, some of our partnerships are very creative. Confidentiality is also a consideration and we want to make sure we won’t disclose it improperly until we fully implement and execute the plan.
3. We want to be honest and transparent. In the token world, a user who has Merculet token could be the investor of Merculet too. We want our users and investors to be able to learn our project’s progression in a timely manner and obtain the most accurate information. We don’t want to mislead our users with any inaccurate or exaggerated marketing message.
On the other side, Merculet team is continuously improving. We are fully aware that community plays a pivotal role in any Blockchain project. Rest assured that we will be very open and active to the community voice, and find out a best way of communication, improve our transparency while maintaining our core operating principle.
Since we are discussing partnership, please allow me to briefly introduce the relationship between customer asset and the chain, and how they work together. Any Merculet customer can operate their business in a tokenized manner. By default, UAT will be circulated in a consortium Blockchain, which cannot be traded in exchange directly. However, if a customer decides to map their asset to a public Blockchain and be traded in an exchange, Merculet will provide a multi-tier chain architecture to support that mapping and transfer. As we foresee that enterprise customer might care more about how to best utilize token and maximize token system’s potential, a multi-tier Blockchain architecture can help them to focus on the business and excel, and yet remain the option of transfer assets between different Blockchain tiers.
Variety of Flavors
You won’t be able to appreciate the beauty of Blockchain world until you step out into it. This is a parallel universe with many new perspectives. There is no borders or boundaries, trust is established by math, and rules are maintained by computer programs. Everyone has his own belief, value, favor, and they all strive for it. There are a variety of people and organizations in the Blockchain world, and you will find they often argue or fight for their group in the community. The diversification brings the creativeness to the community, and Merculet respects everyone’s opinion, committed to work with all of you for a new internet era.
Merculet’s Network Effects
I was attending an event hosted by Draper University on Apr 9th. In the conversation with Tim, he mentioned any token or token system eventually need to address the Network Effect well. Particularly, how enterprises participate and how users enjoy the value. These are the key factors to the success of the ecosystem. I am very proud that Merculet have a three-step plan in place.
Step 1: Transform the existing mobile internet user and enterprise to a new ecosystem backed by Blockchain technology. This can be achieved by providing customer a turn-key solution to quickly deploy, launch and operate in a tokenized way. This will enable inner-circulation of value within certain enterprise and inter-circulation of value among enterprises
Step 2: Built a set of application platforms for new ecosystem, including but not limited by content platform, data platform, entertainment platform etc. With token being the ‘Gas’ of the system, everything is possible.
Step 3: Continuous evolution. Collaborate with all partners and users in a decentralized and autonomous way, define the new business rule and landscape. Ultimate success of Merculet is that all parties can participate in the ecosystem freely, the distributed business system operates autonomously and Merculet will no longer be needed at some point.
Merculet Technical Brief
There is a guy who is much better than me in articulating the technical aspects well, including system architecture, development progress, open source schedule and future plan. For those who are interested, please refer to the post by our CTO — Shen Jun Zhang.
UAT & MVP, Eco-system Operating Logic
This is a big topic and we need to and will talk about this in a separate letter. In fact, there is already a comprehensive technical article about UAT and MVP, we will revise it a little bit and publish to the community soon.
About the Future
Blockchain creates an amazing new world, your own imagination is the limit! Although it will take years to mature, exciting changes are happening around us every day. Merculet welcomes everyone who has a firm belief on Blockchain and a full respect of user value to joining us. Let’s team up to create the ultimate value for our clients and users by leveraging Blockchain, the most revolutionary technology.
Please contact us: contact@merculet.io
Ivan, on UA891
