Introduction
Our long-awaited Mercata V2 contest is starting tomorrow, Wednesday 17th September 2025. The contest will start at 5pm Eastern time, during our 9/17 Twitter Spaces, and the winners will be announced on our 24/7 Twitter Spaces exactly a week later.
STRATO Mercata V2 is our completely revamped application, which is due to be released later this year. The contest is using our testnet running the latest pre-release version:
As was the case for the first competition back in July, there is a dual focus on trading and testing, but the scope for testing feedback is more limited this time. We are only looking for reports on critical exploits and for major improvement suggestions. Bridging functionality between Ethereum’s Sepolia testnet and the Mercata testnet has been added and is within scope for exploit testing.
Prizes
There are three main prizes and all competitors will receive a small number of CATA points too:
- Bridge and Trade: The competitor with the highest total combined asset value. The winner must hold a non-zero-balance of every major Mercata asset (USDST, ETHST, WBTCST, GOLDST, SILVST) to qualify and will receive $500 USDC and CATA points
- Worst exploit: The individual who reports the highest‑impact critical exploit that causes loss of funds will receive $1500 USDC and CATA points
- Best suggested improvement: The best suggested improvement which we like the most, and which is implementable will receive $500 USDC and CATA points
Sign up
Sign up now, so you are ready on the starting line as soon as the contest opens!
- Join our Telegram channel
- Create fresh STRATO Mercata testnet and Ethereum Sepolia testnet accounts (anybody with prior balances will be excluded)
- Create a STRATO Mercata mainnet account, if you do not already have one, to receive your CATA points
- Add METH and MUSDC tokens to your Sepolia MetaMask wallet (see below)
- Fill in the Onboarding Form with the name you want to go by, those addresses and (optionally) your social handles
- The Leaderboard will be continuously updated.
Initial assets
Here is the link to the application.
When the competition starts, your accounts on both networks will be credited with some assets on both testnets and you can trade and bug-hunt away until 5pm Eastern on Tuesday 23rd September 2025. Specifically, you will receive:
- 1,000 MUSDC on Sepolia (Mercata USDC) which can be “converted” to USDC on Mercata using “mint on burn”
- 0.5 METH (Mercata ETH) which can be “bridged” into the Mercata network
- 0.01 Sepolia ETH to cover the gas fees for bridging from Sepolia
- 1,000 USDT on Mercata
To report exploits or suggested improvements, log an issue in the Open Source repo, tagging your new issue with either “Exploit” or “Improvement” as appropriate. Out of scope issues will be kindly closed.
How to add these custom Mercata tokens to MetaMask:
Sepolia is the preferred testnet for Ethereum which we will be using during the competition. Sepolia is being used as a proxy for the Ethereum mainnet, which the production Mercata V2 will use. Competitors will be bridging assets from Sepolia into the Mercata testnet.
We are using two custom tokens on Sepolia so competitors will have to add those tokens to their Sepolia wallet. Here we assume MetaMask, but any other Ethereum wallet which supports Sepolia will work just fine too.
- Change your network to Sepolia
- To import tokens, slick the three dots in the top corner of the Tokens tab and select Import Tokens and then add:
- Mercata ETH (METH)
- Address: 0xE46550c8d3c4e5A04Da14a948543D918D69f3dF1
- Token decimal: 18
- Mercata USDC (MUSDC)
- Address: 0x46e96acF148b019da71E41F36239833f550dFeB9
- Token decimal: 18
- Mercata ETH (METH)
The token symbol and decimals should populate automatically.
