How Mercato works

Four moving parts: a token whose trading fees go to Mercato, a daily subsidy pool, holder tiers, and a router that buys inference at market price.

Money flow

Two kinds of money come in, and both land in one public treasury wallet:

• Trading fees. 1.2% of every $MERCATO trade. They become the next day’s subsidy pool, which only ever pays for discounts.
• Top-ups. ETH or USDG you send from your signed-in wallet. They become your balance in USD, and only your keys spend it.

Every request is billed at what the upstream charged. The pool pays your tier’s share, your balance pays the rest, and the seller is paid at cost.

The loop

1. Someone buys or sells $MERCATO. 1.2% of the trade goes to the treasury as a creator fee.
2. At 00:00 UTC the day closes, and the fees collected become the next day’s pool.
3. During the day, every request is priced at what the upstream charged, with no Mercato margin.
4. The router reads the caller’s tier and the pool’s remaining balance, and covers part of the request from the pool.
5. The caller’s balance pays the rest.

When the pool runs out, requests bill at market price until the next reset. Nothing is ever blocked because of the pool.

The subsidy pool

• Funded in arrears. Today’s pool equals what the treasury earned from yesterday’s trades. Mercato never spends money it has not collected.
• Resets daily. Unspent pool does not roll over, so a quiet day cannot be hidden by a busy week.
• Public. The live pool, what is left and the countdown to reset are on the stats page and in the app.

Holder tiers

Your tier is read from the $MERCATO balance of the wallet that owns your key. See Holder tiers.

The router

• It checks the live market for the requested model and sends the request to the Surplus marketplace with an allow-list of the trusted sellers quoting it, so the cheapest healthy trusted offer serves it.
• If no trusted seller can serve the model, or the marketplace fails before the first token, it falls back to OpenRouter.
• The model you ask for never changes, only where it runs.
• Token counts and cost come from the upstream’s own usage report, so your bill matches the provider’s accounting.

Accounts and settlement

There are no passwords. Your wallet is your account. You sign in by signing a message (no gas, no permissions), top up by sending ETH or USDG to the treasury from the same wallet, and spend is deducted per request after the discount.

What Mercato doesn’t do

• It doesn’t resell anyone’s consumer subscriptions.
• It doesn’t promise a fixed discount: the discount follows trading volume.
• It doesn’t pay yield, buy back or burn. Every fee the token earns pays for inference.