The gaming guild is gaining popularity; what are the highlights of Merit Circle launched by Binance?
By providing the necessary assets for the game and training, we aim to lower the barriers for players who want to enter the metaverse and earn income.Organizer: Nianqing, Chain Catcher
Recently, Binance announced the listing of the Merit Circle token MC. For most people, this name may sound a bit unfamiliar, but as a newcomer in the gaming trend, Merit Circle is generally worth paying attention to.
Merit Circle is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that aims to lower the entry barrier for players wanting to enter the metaverse and earn income by providing the necessary assets for gaming and training. It is somewhat similar to the recently popular Yield Guild Games, as both focus on investing in "play-to-earn" games and sponsoring gamers, but the structure of their DAO organizations differs.
This article will give you a quick overview of Merit Circle from the perspectives of investment situation, founding team, DAO organizational model, investment landscape, and roadmap.
1. Merit Circle Timeline
Merit Circle evolved from the Axie 420 scholarship program, which was initially launched in July 2021. The original vision of the Axie 420 scholarship program was to enable users from low-income countries to afford to play Axie Infinity.
In early August, after reaching a certain scale, Merit Circle was officially established through Flow Ventures incubation. Less than half a month later, it raised $1.25 million, which was directly converted into hundreds of scholarship opportunities.
In September of this year, Marco van den Heuvel, the founder of the Axie 420 scholarship program, officially rebranded the project as Merit Circle, while deciding to expand its focus from Axie Infinity to more popular games, cryptocurrencies, and investments to explore more potential opportunities in the metaverse.
On October 8, Merit Circle announced the completion of a $4.5 million seed round financing, with participation from DeFiance Capital, Mechanism Capital, Spartan Group, DCG, Maven11, OP Crypto, Dialectic, CitizenX, Yield Guild Games, and Bitscale Capital. Angel investors included Coingecko co-founder Bobby Ong, Axie co-founder Jihoz, and Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik, among others.
Compared to other gaming guild projects, Merit Circle's lineup of investors is particularly strong. Since July, nearly 20 similar projects have announced their financing situations, but among these cases, Merit Circle has achieved the largest known announced financing amount.
The most notable event occurred on November 6, when Merit Circle announced the completion of $105.6 million in financing through the Balancer Labs Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (Balancer LBP) on the Copper platform. This financing also broke the LBP fundraising record, with over 4,500 participants.
Balancer LBP is a blockchain-specific fundraising model that uses a descending price auction, which is relatively fair compared to whitelist models. The previous NFT game project Illuvium was also issued using this model, allowing anyone to freely buy and sell tokens without interference from bots and scripts. After the BLBP ends, the tokens will be immediately tradable without significant sell-offs.
On November 24, Merit Circle announced a partnership with OP Crypto, founded by former Huobi executives, to actively enter the Asia-Pacific market, focusing on the rapidly expanding play-to-earn gaming market and gaming guilds in China, and is building WeChat and Weibo communities.
Its roadmap for Q4 2021 to 2022 is as follows:
2. Merit Circle Operating Model
In terms of the current Merit Circle's Axie Infinity strategy and operating model, players who want to participate in the Axie Infinity game first apply to Merit Circle through Discord. After a small interview by the Merit Circle DAO manager, these players are grouped into a team, and they are provided with game training and tutorial guidance. Various tools are also used to track player activities to optimize their performance.
Regarding profit sharing, Merit Circle rewards players with 70% of total revenue in the form of SLP every two weeks, while the Merit Circle DAO treasury receives the remaining 30%. In comparison, YGG also distributes 70% of profits to players, but an additional 10% goes to YGG (which will be reinvested later), and 20% is allocated to community managers. Additionally, Merit Circle will further reward players with MC tokens, and top players have the opportunity to become DAO managers and receive extra rewards.
Moreover, Merit Circle DAO is discussing preferred locations for land gameplay after it launches in Axie Infinity, which is currently in the preparation stage.
3. DAO Structure
Merit Circle DAO consists of a main DAO that manages many sub-DAOs, each representing a game. Each sub-DAO can deploy its own strategies, including maximizing strategy returns and purchasing NFT collectibles.
Below is an example of a scholarship model.
Merit Circle Scholarship model funding flow example
In the initial setup, the asset allocation ratio in each sub-DAO treasury is:
- Production NFTs (70%): NFTs that can be used in the game. This portion of NFTs can be rented out to other players according to the scholarship model and may also include virtual land (land plot);
- Value NFTs (20%): Purchased assets used to supplement the treasury or resell at a markup later;
- ETH and stablecoins (10%): Used to purchase the above two types of NFTs or develop new gaming strategies.
YGG follows the guilds on guilds approach, while MC follows the SuperGuilds approach. This way, $MC token holders can access all sub-guilds under the Merit Circle main brand, as they are directly integrated into the ecosystem. Additionally, Merit Circle's adoption rate is significantly higher than YGG, at 30%. This means that the DAO's profit margin has increased threefold. Furthermore, SuperGuilds can ensure higher standards and faster efficiency.
4. Team Introduction
Merit Circle has not disclosed much information about its founding team on official platforms, but according to publicly available information on LinkedIn, the Merit Circle team is very young, with the currently disclosed 12 members mainly from the Netherlands and the Philippines. The core members, including the CEO, CFO, and COO, are from the Netherlands, while most business personnel and community operators are from the Philippines. At the end of September, as the project expanded into Africa, members from Ghana were added to the team.
Its founder, Marco Van den Heuvel (Twitter @TMod_Marco ⟠ 420.ETH), is a cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiast who graduated in 2019 from Arnhem Business School in the Netherlands with a degree in International Business and Marketing. In March 2020, he founded CMMC Start, a project focused on community operations and marketing management for blockchain startups, and has also participated in projects like Quant Network, Lisk, and Presearch.
With Merit Circle's plans to open the Asia-Pacific market, more members from the region will join in the future, with China being one of its key areas.
5. Investment Landscape
In addition to Axie, the officially announced partnerships for Play to Earn games also include Big Time, Star Atlas, Illuvium, Hash Rash, Nyan Heroes, Sipher, UFO Gaming, and others. On December 1, Merit Circle also partnered with Genopets, the world's first "move to earn" mobile game, to provide game education and funding support for students wanting to join the metaverse gaming ecosystem.
The specific investment situation is as follows:
- CyBall (blockchain-based fantasy football): Acquisition of its NFT assets and a combination of CYB tokens.
- Nyan Heroes (third-person shooter on Solana): Investment in the seed round of Nyan Heroes and a commitment to purchase $25,000 worth of in-game NFTs.
- Vulcan Forged (NFT game studio): Acquisition of 100 plots and $500,000 worth of PYR tokens.
- UFO Gaming (decentralized gaming platform): Acquisition of land plots and UFO tokens worth a total of $140,000.
- Sipher (NFT gaming project on Ethereum): Acquisition of Sipher NFTs and game characters worth a total of $100,000.
- Fancy Bird (gaming ecosystem): Investment in the seed round of Fancy Bird, obtaining 250 genesis NFTs with unique Merit Circle features.
- Participated in leading the seed round for the metaverse gaming guild PathDAO.
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