Mercata V2 Contest Kickoff: Bridge, Trade, Triumph
Our long-awaited Mercata V2 contest started at 5pm ET on Wednesday 17th September 2025. The winners will be announced on our 24th September 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.
Here are instructions to get started:
Transcript
We suggest that you start at the Bob introduction.
Contents
Small talk. Waiting for attendees
[0:18] Victor: Okay, can anyone confirm that they can see us on YouTube? Thank you, Michael. Can everyone confirm that they can see us on YouTube and Spaces?
Michael, can you confirm you can hear us on YouTube?
[1:28] Bob: You broke up for me quite a lot there, Victor, when you were speaking.
[1:33] Victor: Okay. Okay. So, Jaime, can you post this on our Twitter, the YouTube, and we’ll get started shortly.
[2:47] Victor: Hey, MK, welcome. Glad you could join us. We’re just going to wait a few more minutes and get everyone in.
[4:48] Victor: So, okay, we’re just waiting a few more minutes for people to kind of start coming in. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. And we are super excited to announce this contest.
[5:43] Bob: Welcome, Yves.
[5:55] Bob: Stefan
[6:15] Bob: Do you want to give it maybe until 10 past, Victor, three minutes?
[6:21] Victor: Sure.
[6:24] Bob: Nice round number.
[6:42] Bob: So, on one of our Spaces not too long ago, where we were interviewing Texture, he berated us for talking about the weather when he joined. You remember that? We were talking about the turns of the season and when Fall was starting and so on.
[7:01] Victor: I do not remember that, but…
[7:04] Bob: And he said we were old for talking about the weather.
[7:09] Victor: Well, we are old, but, you know, I guess…
[7:16] Bob: We’re experienced. We’re not old.
[7:25] Victor: Should we troll them by talking about the weather now or not? Yeah.
[7:31] Bob: Hey, Shiva Tarzan, welcome.
[7:43] Victor: So, just for everyone’s information, and since we’re not going to talk about the weather, this is our first simulcast. It’s happening on YouTube Live and Twitter Spaces. There was some behind the scenes wiring up of all this. And if anyone has poor audio or anything, please let us know and we’ll try and rectify it next time.
[8:07] Bob: So, yeah, we’re using Streamyard, which seems to be sort of the best answer there is, but not great either. Also, X do not make it easy to escape their walled garden. They really want you to do everything on Spaces.
There isn’t even functionality for downloading the audio afterwards natively. They do not want you to escape. However, we found lots of dodgy browser extensions that allow you to do that. So, that and command line tools. Just point out with Shiba, prize winning Shiba Tarzan in contest number one. And back for more in this second contest.
[9:00] Victor: Yes. And Justin, welcome.
[9:07] Bob: Okay. So, yeah, maybe we start. So, yeah.
Bob introduction
[9:12] Bob: Okay. Hi, everyone. Good to have you here.
I’m Bob Summerwill. I’m the Head of Ecosystem at STRATO Mercata. Victor, who’s with us here, is the Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder.
Mercata V2 is the new iteration of our application, of our network, which has been a major focus for us this year. We spent the vast majority of this year rebuilding a completely new application experience. The current production main net is more of a sort of eBay-ish kind of setup, really coming out of an earlier period where we were having a marketplace of collectibles, tokenized whiskey barrels, and other things which were more NFT-like.
The focus for V2 is really about high quality, hard assets, specifically gold and silver.
Victor takes over
[10:33] Victor: Hey, Bob. We’re getting some feedback that your audio is coming in choppy for some reason, but mine seems to be okay. So, why don’t I take it over from what you said?
[10:45] Victor: So, as Bob was saying, V2 is really an iteration of what we were doing before. We were kind of offering a lot of different RWAs before, and V2 is our way to kind of really focus on the ability to bring real-world assets and lend and borrow on those assets. So, one of the things that we’re going to be testing in this iteration of the contest is really how it interacts with the external world, including things like bridging out and bridging in these different assets.
[11:20] Victor: And it’s really interesting because one of the things I think that stands out in our positioning in terms of the RWA spaces, most RWA projects seem to really be trying to focus on getting degens to buy RWAs. We’re focused on people who already have RWAs, things like gold, silver, US dollars, and bring that into the crypto ecosystem and the DeFi ecosystem. So, that’s really what we want to kind of test in terms of this overall contest.
[11:52] Victor: Now, what you’re seeing on your screen right now is an overview of the new V2 application. It’s been basically the focus of our efforts throughout this year, and there have been significant changes to it, which I’ll show in one second, from the earlier iteration of our contest in July. So, thank you for everyone that provided feedback, and that was immensely useful.
Prizes
[12:23] Victor: We took as much of that feedback as we could to bring you this new version of the contest. Now, in this version of the contest, there are still going to be three prizes as there were before, but they’re for slightly different things.
[12:38] Victor: So we will have a prize for the best trading award. So whoever has the total net balance of total number of assets and based on all of their activities. So, that will be a prize, and we’ve doubled the prizes. So, that would be $500 USDC plus CATA points.
[13:01] Victor: And then we will have, instead of just offering the bug prizes, we have a recommended improvement prize. So, for technical people who are not that into trading, please provide us your recommendations on improvements. That prize is also $500 USDC plus CATA points.
[13:20] Victor: And then we have an exploit prize. So, if anyone finds an exploit that could possibly steal funds from the system, we are offering $1500 for that prize and CATA points as well. So, that’s what we’re offering for this one.
Bridging assets
[13:38] Victor: The way the process works is slightly different. So, I just want to kind of walk everyone through that a little bit. So, for the trading prize, what we are doing is we are first providing you assets that will be on Sepolia and you’ll have to bridge those assets in.
[13:56] Victor: So, if you look here, I’m going to show you how you do that. You go to the deposits page and we’re providing two contest specific assets. One we call mETH for Mercata ETH and you bring that in by bridging.
[14:12] Victor: So, you use the Sepolia and you can bridge it in on the Mercata network. Now, when you see this and when you bridge it and connect it to your wallet, you’ll see two confirmations.
[14:26] Victor: And from, you know, say your external wallet, I personally use MetaMask. So, if it’s on your MetaMask wallet, you’ll see two confirmations. One to verify that the funds are available to send and then the second to actually bridge in the transaction.
[14:40] Victor: And then after that, it will be converted into ETHST. So, it will be bridged, wrapped on the system and then be converted into ETHST where you can start to trade with it.
[14:52] Victor: The second way to bring in is the convert tab. So, what the convert tab is, it brings in stable coins like ultimately our version of a stable coin for the contest is called mUSDC that we will provide to every contest participant. And when you bring it in, it automatically converts into USDST.
[15:18] Victor: So, those are how you kind of start bringing assets into your account. And then from there, you can start trading. So, you can borrow against those assets by offering them as collateral. And once you, you can see here that I can supply collateral with my ETHST and then I can borrow against it.
[15:40] Victor: I can swap those out for other assets. And one thing that’s really important is that everyone for the contest will have to own at least one of the major assets. So, you will have to have USDST, WBTCST, ETHST, GOLDST and SILVST. You will have to have one of each of those assets to be eligible for the trading prize.
(Bob: To be clear, you need any non-zero amount of each to qualify, not 1+ units of each)
[16:08] Victor: And then you can also participate in the pools as well. So, you can either provide liquidity to the pools or, and also liquidate people whose positions that are coming under risk. So, that’s how this contest will work.
Special events
[16:24] Victor: And one other thing we want to mention is that to kind of give a good simulation of real life, throughout the contest on the Telegram channel, we will announce special events that will happen that will impact various things on the contest and the prices of assets on the contest. So, we will announce sort of sudden airdrops where the first couple of people that respond will get additional tokens. We will announce sudden price shifts and we will announce also, you know, other things that, you know, some positions might be liquidatable on the contest.
[17:08] Victor: So, basically, all of those things are going to come at random times throughout the day. So, stay on your toes. Make sure you sign up to the channel, contest channel on Telegram channel, which is called Mercata V2 Contest 9/17 to 9/23.
[17:27] Victor: And then watch out for those because they could come at any time. So, with that, I think that’s a, you know, high level overview of the contest. Bob, not sure if your audio is working better, but maybe you can chip in here and just test it out.
[17:45] Bob: Yeah, I’ll try. Just let me say a little bit and maybe somebody can confirm if that audio is choppy or not still. Yeah, have a look maybe, Jamie or Michael.
[18:01] Victor: Okay. Unfortunately, it sounds like your audio is still a little bit choppy today. We will work out the audio issues for later.
But, yes, we’ll get you some wired headphones, Bob. I think, you know, I think it is a technology problem right now.
Wrap up
So, we look forward, the contest will run until the following Tuesday at 5pm. So, everyone, we look forward to seeing you participate in the contest. We look forward to seeing any of your comments. And please provide whatever feedback that you have on the Telegram feed.
Your feedback so far has been immensely helpful. And I think this is going to really make STRATO Mercata into an amazing product. So, thank you very much.
And with that, happy hunting, everyone. Take care.
[19:16] Bob: Has the stream stopped?