I think that a crypto team needs a minimum of $10m these days to be competitive.
So many ICOs are raising huge amounts of money. Because of this, everyone needs more money in order to compete.
Otherwise, you will be relatively under-funded.
So, I really like that this team has not done an ICO. But I think they need a really large amount of capital to compete. So, I am curious how they will handle this?
Initial founding was done by the CEO, Adil, himself. Merit has a 20% premine (for transparency, don't think it's locked by the chain), so 20m, which the team aims to use carefully and gradually to fund operations according to their whitepaper. The Merit market also implements a 0.75% fee on every transaction, to be used for development of the market itself. Think that's all for self funding of the project.