Hey everyone,
Over the past month, Mercatura Labs together with ICP Hub Egypt have been exploring and showcasing a number of experiments and breakthroughs around this topic: ICP smart contracts running Sui-Move contracts
What started purely as research gradually turned into something more concrete. Through discussions with the hub’s technical leads and Mercatura Forum founders-in-residence, it became clear that the underlying technology unlocks several real applications, and that there is real demand for them. Based on this, Mercatura Forum’s Innovation & Art Fund voted to support the creation of what we’re now calling The Menese Protocol. This gives us a proper framework to turn the R&D work into a set of usable products.
The protocol will be established in Dubai, with collaborators across Egypt, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. The current effort involves 12 engineers, working alongside contributors from the wider ecosystem.
The work is led by Mercatura Forum leadership, which includes consultants and managers from Deloitte, a respected regional investment banker, and is directly led by a well-known economist who is also technically hands-on with the Internet Computer.
The project is advised on technical and architectural matters by Timo Hanke (MR Research), who was part of the team that helped build the Internet Computer from its early stages. On partnerships and ecosystem development, the project is advised by Phil McKenzie, General Partner at Goldfinch UK and co-founder of Myco, one of the largest web3 streaming platforms with around 18M users. We’re genuinely fortunate to have both of them contributing their experience and perspective at this stage.
Phased rollout
We’re planning a phased launch split into four stages.
Phase 1 focuses on identity and access. Users from any ecosystem we integrate with will be able to have an address and sign protocol actions from their preferred chain. Each user’s derived ID maps deterministically to corresponding addresses on supported chains. This phase will include integrations with several service providers across those ecosystems, and we’ll be actively listening to feedback on which integrations bring the most value.
Phase 2 introduces sovereign wallets. These are wallets where both the backend and frontend are owned by the user. Users can top up cycles using a credit card and connect to a larger “mothership” dapp that allows interaction with other users, cross-ecosystem DEXs, staking services, and more.
At this stage, we’re aiming for backend-only execution wherever possible. This removes reliance on client-side execution and allows for automated workflows, which becomes important for future integrations with what we call the automation module.
The execution engine itself will also be made available to other dapps in the ecosystem, allowing projects to plug in and send execution commands across chains.
Phase 3 expands into liquidity and distribution. Several ecosystem tokens will receive chain-key status, making it easier for them to access liquidity and reach users in other ecosystems. This will be complemented by a multichain launchpad, where projects can choose which chain to mint on, or opt for a ck-based implementation.
Phase 4 brings everything together with ICP-based liquidity pools coordinating swaps across all connected chains. This is also the phase where the automation module is fully enabled, allowing users to trigger backend actions based on specific protocol or on-chain events.
This is still a rough sketch, but we wanted to share the direction early. We’ll use this thread to post updates as things progress. The goal is to keep this community-led, with ecosystem project participation. More details on how to get involved will be shared after the Phase 1 soft launch.
We’re looking forward to feedback, ideas, and alternative visions.
