About

Merit Circle DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) developing a Web3 gaming ecosystem using blockchain technology. As a DAO, the organization is influenced by community members that have the power to vote and make decisions regarding the direction of the project. Governance is accomplished offchain through informal community discussions on the forum and then voting via Snapshot.

History

The Axie 420 Scholarship was launched in July 2021 by Marco van den Heuvel to provide 'scholarships' to individuals from developing countries to play Axie Infinity. In exchange for covering the relatively high entry costs (by lending in-game assets), the Axie 420 Scholarship shared profits with 'scholars'. After raising $1.5 million and gaining traction (funding 250+ scholarships), the Axie 420 Scholarship team began to publicly discuss a rebranding, change in structure, and expansion beyond Axie Infinity. Merit Circle, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) launched on September 1, 2021, folding in the Axie 420 Scholarship program as a subDAO while focusing on expanding offerings beyond Axie Infinity into the wider Play-to-Earn ecosystem. Over the following months Merit Circle closed a $4.5 million seed round with notable backers including DeFiance Capital, Mechanism Capital, Digital Currency Group, Jeff Zirlin AKA "Jihoz" (Axie), and Kieran Warwick (Illuvium), and announced a number of partnerships with Play-to-Earn projects such as Yield Guild Games, Star Atlas, UFO Gaming, and Vulcan Forged. The Merit Circle governance token ($MC) had its public sale through a Balancer Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (BLBP) on Copperlaunch starting on November 2, 2021, over a 72 hour period the DAO's treasury sold roughly 41 million MC tokens at an average price of $2.58 to raise $105,576,956 from 3,900 participants, making it the largest treasury in the play-to-earn industry when counting non-native tokens. Merit Circle (MC) was also listed on Binance (12/02/2021) and on Binance Launchpool shortly thereafter (12/03/2021), allowing users to stake BNB, BUSD or MC to farm MC tokens over 60 days. Merit Circle also has both flexible and variable duration staking pools in its staking portal, pools offer time-weighted rewards to MC token holders.

In late October 2021 Merit Circle announced a second scholarship program (beyond Axie Infinity) with Vulcan Forged, creating a new, second subDAO to hold 100 land plots in the VulcanVerse and $PYR tokens with a combined value of $500,000 at the time. Vulcan Forged's Cedalion Program allows Merit Circle to rent out its land in the VulcanVerse to other players while earning a rental fee and $LAVA in staking income for doing so. Merit Circle announced a number of other partnerships in the P2E space, with a similar structure, consisting of both financial investments and imminent scholarship support. In November Merit Circle started working with Dept Agency, a digital agency that has a diverse clientele including Adidas, General Electric, and Algorand, to build a full-service platform for onboarding flow, to house basic data and include other features to streamline workflows for DAO managers and gamers. In December 2022 the Merit Circle DAO team began to publicly discuss adding another arm to its operations, developing products in-house, shortly thereafter (01/2022) Merit Circle announced the imminent launch (02/2022) of an internal project, a world-building game called Edenhorde. Another notable event was the first DAO hire/employee; Shashwat Ashiya was hired as Head of Governance through Merit Circle Improvement Proposal 9 (MIP-9) and a subsequent vote, and is the first Merit Circle employee to be paid directly from the DAO and its treasury, as opposed to Merit Circle LTD and its treasury (seed capital).