The world's first cat-backed cryptocurrency, secured by a spreadsheet
only one man understands. Welcome to the future.
* Not financial advice. Not any kind of advice. Merk is not liable for anything. Ever.
Why Merkidium
Sure, there's Bitcoin. There's Ethereum. There's thousands of others. But none of them were made for cats.
While other blockchains rely on inefficient distributed ledgers and costly consensus mechanisms, Merkidium leverages a proprietary Microsoft Excel document — password protected, cloud-synced to Merk's Dropbox — as the single source of truth for all coin balances.
* Dropbox free tier. 2GB max. We're working on it.
Every major transaction above 1,000,000 MERK must receive a paw of approval from at least one of Merk's cats. Cheddar and Biscuit serve as the official Merkidium Validation Committee. They have never rejected a transaction, mostly because they don't care.
* Cheddar is the CFO. Biscuit is Chairman. Neither can be reached for comment.
Unlike outdated "proof of work" or "proof of stake" models, Merkidium uses a revolutionary Proof of Desire protocol. Simply want some coins. Merk will add them to the spreadsheet when he feels like it. No mining rigs required.
* Processing time: when Merk gets around to it. ETA unknown.
The spreadsheet password has never been shared with anyone. Not investors. Not the SEC. Not Merk's mom. The encryption is bank-grade, specifically the Excel password feature which we're told is very secure actually.
* The password is probably just "cats123" but we legally cannot confirm.
Excel supports up to 1,048,576 rows per sheet. Merk has confirmed this is "more than enough." In the event of overflow, a second tab will be created, labeled "Sheet2" or possibly "the real coins." This architecture is unmatched in the industry.
* We have spoken to zero engineers about this.
The Merkidium community Discord has 23 members, three of whom are bots, two of whom are Merk's accounts, and one of whom is Merk's neighbor who joined by accident and hasn't left because he keeps forgetting the server exists.
* Governance votes held monthly. Merk's vote counts as 10,000.
Coin Acquisition
Simply enter the number of Merkidium coins you'd like to have. Your request will be transmitted to Merk. Merk will then decide whether to open the spreadsheet. No guarantees. No refunds. No spreadsheet access for you.
By clicking WISH you agree that the resulting coins are entirely theoretical, that Merk may or may not add them to the spreadsheet, and that you will not ask Merk about this more than twice per week.
The Origin
It was a Tuesday. Merk was doing two things he loved simultaneously: cataloguing his physical coin collection and watching his cats, Cheddar and Biscuit, knock items off the counter.
As Cheddar batted a 1908 Barber Quarter to the floor, something clicked. "What if currency was as unpredictable as a cat?" Merk thought. What if it was fuzzy? What if nobody really knew exactly how much of it existed?
This was, he would later describe in a 47-slide PowerPoint nobody asked for, "the founding epiphany of a new financial era." Within a week, he had opened Excel, created two columns — NAME and COINS — and started adding friends.
He added himself first. With ten billion coins. "Founders tokens," he told anyone who would listen. No one asked any follow-up questions.
The cats were named Co-Founders. Cheddar holds the role of Chief Feline Officer. Biscuit is listed on the team page as "Spiritual Advisor & Head of Vibes."
Cheddar
CFO
Biscuit
Spiritual Advisor
The entire thesis, visualized
The Creator
// identity: [classified]
Nobody knows Merk's real name. Nobody knows what city he lives in. What we do know is that he types very fast, owns two cats, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of coin minting techniques from 1850–1940.
Before Merkidium, Merk spent years as a backend engineer at an unspecified company that he will only describe as "fine, I guess." He became disillusioned with traditional finance ("the spreadsheets there had too many people looking at them") and resolved to build something entirely his own.
"I wanted to build a currency where the trust wasn't in the technology or the institution. It was in me. Personally. A human man. With a spreadsheet."
— Merk, in an unpublished Medium post, 2022
Merk has never appeared on video. He has done exactly one podcast interview, during which he only spoke in metaphors about cats and then left early because Cheddar had knocked his water bottle into his keyboard. The episode has 11,000 plays.
His GitHub has 847 commits to the Merkidium repository. The repository is private. Followers of his Twitter (now X) account describe his posting style as "cryptic," "concerning," and "occasionally just pictures of Biscuit."
When asked where he sees Merkidium in five years, Merk reportedly stared at the ceiling for a long time and then said: "Bigger spreadsheet, probably."
The Ledger
All Merkidium balances exist solely in Merk's spreadsheet. Only Merk can see it. This is a feature, not a bug.