Interesting concept. I have a LOT of questions. I am going to start with the most pressing ones.
Where do the invite tokens actually come from? It seems like I need an invite token to actually activate my wallet. Though it seems like the key generation was actually done before receiving the token -- at least I got my seed already. Are these tokens coming from the Merit foundation? If so, isn't that a tad centralized?
How long has this project been in development? The roadmap says that the first release was December 2017, but I see 30k commits on Github. When did you actually BEGIN development?
Where do invite tokens come from?
Invite tokens are dynamically created with every block mined. That is, they are created and distributed by the mining algorithm among all active wallets on the network whether that wallet is a miner or not. The Merit Foundation does not control the creation or distribution of invites.
Yes, you can generate keys before the wallet gets unlocked, but you won't be able to transact until the wallet is unlocked by receiving an invite token. An unlocked wallet has valid keys, but no one can send MRT to it, you cannot receive MRT to it, and you cannot receive invite tokens to it either.
When did development begin?
Fall of 2017. They move quickly.