This will be the first of my “Spotlight” posts, each focussing on a specific coin. Please leave feedback on anything else you would like to see in such posts.

I thought I would start off with something a bit risky:

The coin in the spotlight is Merca Coin.

Vital Statistics

• TICKER: MERCA
• MAXIMUM SUPPLY: 400 000
• CURRENT PRICE: approximately 0.001 – 0.0005 BTC at time of writing (large spread)
• VOLUME: Extremely low – you can often count the 24-hour trades on one hand
• COINMARKETCAP POSITION: Not on coinmarketcap
• DOES BIT BRAIN HOLD IT?: Yes
• WILL BIT BRAIN BUY MORE?: Probably
• BIT BRAIN RISK ASSESSMENT: High
• BIT BRAIN REWARD ASSESSMENT: Potentially very high

Synopsis

Merca is the official coin of the Mercatox exchange.

To explain Merca, I must explain a little bit about Mercatox.

The following excerpts have been extracted directly from the Mercatox site “about” section https://mercatox.com/aboutmerca.

MERCATOX is universal commerce platform, which is combining different types and kinds of digital money. Our platform is the only one in today’s digital money world and will combine wide range of opportunities and resources such as: automated trading, pay centre (service), Peer-to-Peer exchange based on “smart contracts” and many more.

MERCA owners, which are in fact platform co-owners, will get benefits from all of the existing and elaborated functions of the platform.

MERCA holders will receive dividends in accordance with their existing platform percent stake.

As soon it overcomes the break-even point, the date of first dividends pay out will be announced. We are doing our best to make this happen as soon as possible.

Mercatox is an exchange, and I’ll be the first to say that it is not a very good one. The interface can be slow and buggy. I often have to click “Buy” or “Sell” several times, reinputting my amounts each time. Then say I am trying to buy e.g. 1.0000357 MERCA for 0.009 BTC; I often have the situation where my transaction is rejected due to “insufficient funds” – some sort of rounding error to do with transaction fees I think. I then have to change my purchase amount to e.g. 1.0000100 MERCA for the transaction to work.

Having said this, I find the Mercatox interface to be improving slowly and it is certainly a lot less buggy and slow than the likes of EtherDelta or COSS, I won’t even use those exchanges any more. The Mercatox fees are also competitive.

From https://mercatox.com/fees

There are numerous complaints about Mercatox on various forums, mostly to do with transactions taking a few days or poor customer support. By their own admission, Mercatox have struggled with customer support. There is at least one post in their news section about it. They also clearly have much to learn about good customer service, the way that they attempt to resolve some situations is laughable. It can also be seen that their English grammar is often below par.

From https://mercatox.com/wallet

All of this causes the normal slew of “scam!”, “don’t use Mercatox!”, “They stole my money!” type posts around the internet. As always you must make up your own minds, but my evaluation of Mercatox is as follows:

• they are a genuine company and are not trying to scam anyone,
• they still have much to learn in the business world,
• they are growing rapidly and should develop accordingly.

Now back to the MERCA Coin.

From https://mercatox.com/aboutmerca

MERCA

MERCA can broadly be compared to the KuCoin coin. It has almost the same idea. It is a dividend paying coin, based on the amount of trading done on the platform. Unlike KuCoin, the exchange has not nearly shot up so quickly in popularity, but it is growing, fast. Mercatox also has a referral program and a loyalty program. I am writing this today, because I believe that Mercatox is approaching a tipping point. After that point, it may well start to take off. Remember that there are only 400 000 MERCA and they are selling for around $10 each right now!

Exceptionally low trade volume still. 20 March 2018. From https://mercatox.com/exchange/merca/BTC

I made a lot of money by buying KuCoins between $0.50 and $0.80. They went up to about $20 and I sold mine at around $15. That was all in a very short space of time. As soon as KuCoin (the exchange) became popular, the coin greatly increased in value. I am hoping that the same will soon happen for Mercatox. It is my belief that once they pay their first dividends (if ever), MERCA will suddenly become very popular. Volume is incredibly low right now, almost unbelievably so. Now I will show you how they have grown. You can draw your own conclusions about approaching a potential tipping point.

From https://mercatox.com/news/mercatox-300000

Mercatox growth

• November 2016. Crowdsale started.
• January 2017. 1000 users. (https://mercatox.com/news/0ver-1000-users)
• March 2017. 5000 users. (https://mercatox.com/news/5000-users)
• June 2017. 10 000 users. (https://mercatox.com/news/10000-users)
• August 2017. 20 000 users. (https://mercatox.com/news/20-users)
• November 2017. 50 000 users. (https://mercatox.com/news/50000-users)
• March 2017. 300 000 users. (https://mercatox.com/news/mercatox-300000)

In graph form that looks like this:

And THAT is why I’m posting this!

Important note: according to https://mercatox.com/aboutmerca : (Sorry Americans)

If you are an American citizen, you may not participate in the project and are no longer eligible to receive Merca token.

Conclusion

MERCA is a dividend paying coin of the Mercatox exchange. It has not started paying dividends yet, but might greatly increase in value once/if dividends start. I consider this to be a high risk investment with potentially high reward. MERCA does not appear on coinmarketcap, but Mercatox exchange does https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/mercatox/ .

You can see that they trade a wide variety of coins, including most of the popular ones. I hope and believe that Mercatox will grow rapidly and develop its infrastructure accordingly. I fully expect further teething problems associated with rapid growth, but I suppose that that’s a good thing!

Note that I mentioned that I do hold MERCA myself. I tell you this in the interests of transparency. This is not just a common shill, I would never do that. Whenever I present a coin I will tell you whether I have bought it/want to buy it etc, so that you can see where my interests lie and that I don’t get accused of shilling coins further down the line.

Having said that, if you have enjoyed this post and you are willing to take the risk, I ask that you please use my Mercatox referral code if you are signing up for the first time
https://mercatox.com/?referrer=252560

Hope to see you all in the Mercatox chat, and hopefully we can get some dividends out of this!

Yours in crypto,
Bit Brain

DISCLAIMER:

I am not a financial advisor nor am I a professional trader/investor. This is not financial advice, investment advice or trading advice. Unless otherwise stated, all my posts are my opinion and nothing more. Crypto is highly volatile and you can easily lose everything in crypto. You invest at your own risk! Information I post may be erroneous or construed as being misleading. I will not be held responsible for anything which is incorrect, missing, out-of-date or fabricated. Any information you use is done so at your own risk. Always Do Your Own Research (DYOR) and realise that you and you alone are responsible for your crypto portfolio and whatever happens to it.