Your first purchase

Explore before signing in

Open Mercenta. Shop → Catalogue shows connected product listings. Choose View details for region, delivery type, options, availability and an indicative total. No JSON knowledge is required.

Real-product checkout and delivery are not enabled yet. Catalogue prices retain USD and are not USDC payment quotes. Browsing and selecting an option never spends money.

Shop → Test purchase is a separate Arc Testnet rehearsal using simulated goods. Those transactions do not deliver redeemable codes. Wallet sign-in is not payment authorization.

For optional setup, choose Plan my budget on Home or Quick setup in the workspace options. Choose your purpose, edit an example monthly plan, then preview the next step. A guest draft is not saved and does not move funds.

1. Connect and sign in

Use Connect Wallet in the top-right and sign the login message. Authentication is not payment authorization. Never paste keys, seed phrases or API credentials into the agent or journal.

2. Plan a budget

Open Account → Budget. Enter a monthly total, per-order cap and daily cap. Allocate 100% across purchases/restock, reserve, profit goal and tax reserve. Templates are editable examples, not financial or tax advice.

Save your plan after wallet sign-in. Amounts use exact six-decimal accounting. The backend checks per-order, daily and calendar-month UTC spending caps inside the same transaction as each new prepaid Shop debit, including agent/API purchases. Replaying the same completed order never charges again. A changed plan in another tab produces a revision conflict instead of silently overwriting it.

Scope: these caps do not cover Gateway payments, external wallet transfers, manual journal entries or Profit First contract allocations. Percentages do not reserve, lock or transfer money.

3. Top up the account

Open Account → Balance → Top up USDC → create a deposit intent → send the requested test USDC from the signed-in Arc Testnet wallet → wait for confirmations → verify the transaction. Keep test USDC for gas. Submission alone is not credit.

Your wallet balance, Mercenta prepaid account and Gateway balance are separate. Cross-chain funding, fiat onramp and withdrawals are not enabled in this release.

4. Understand the purchase path

The Catalogue now offers a test checkout on the selected listing. Choose a region, option and quantity (1–10), then select Get test checkout quote after wallet sign-in. The server checks the catalogue snapshot and returns a five-minute quote at 1.000000 test USDC per unit, independent of the real USD price. Creating a quote does not debit funds or reserve stock.

Review the exact test debit and explicitly acknowledge that delivery is non-redeemable. Confirm the test purchase. The atomic account debit and encrypted delivery are saved together. You receive MCT-TEST- artifacts, not actual digital-product keys; no real provider invoice, order or top-up is created.

Shop → Purchases → View test delivery retrieves the saved artifacts. If the response is interrupted, retry the same request; the same completed order never charges again. Check Purchases before creating another order. A new confirmation request cannot consume the same quote twice.

To rehearse, open Shop → Test purchase. Select a simulated product, check the region and quantity, review the exact test-USDC total and confirm the simulated order after signing in. Real codes are not issued.

A complete real purchase must obtain a fresh retail quote, check your budget and available funds, accept your exact-amount confirmation, submit one durable procurement attempt, track uncertainty without duplicate buying, and securely deliver the result in Purchases. Refund and reconciliation paths must be verified before activation. A connected catalogue alone is not a procurement integration.

5. Track the order

Shop → Purchases shows the order/reference/status. Account → Activity shows the account debit. A submitted payment is not a completed order or settlement. For uncertainty, reconcile the original operation rather than creating a replacement purchase.

6. Keep a financial journal

Assistant → Journal stores manual expenses, declared income and notes separately from the ledger. Text is encrypted at rest on the server and wallet-scoped, not published onchain. This is server-side encryption, not end-to-end encryption. Entries do not change your balance or verify revenue. Avoid recording the same Shop expense as additional spending in your own analysis.

Export your entries to CSV. Do not record credentials or redeemable product codes.

7. Ask for educational guidance

The financial coach has no tools or transaction authority. An explicit checkbox allows your question and numeric aggregates to be sent to the configured AI provider. Note text and wallet address are not included. User-written questions may contain personal information: do not put secrets in them. Outputs are untrusted educational text, not financial, tax or legal advice.

If the model is unavailable, the interface labels a rules-based fallback; it does not claim personalized AI analysis. Assistant Chat is separate: it prepares purchase proposals that require confirmation.

8. Resellers: separate restock from margin

Profit First works on margin after COGS, fees and reserves, not account deposits or manually declared diary income. Sale-linked allocations need verified buyer evidence; contract actions require separate owner signatures. Live Earn and promised APY are not enabled.

Mainnet preparation, not activation

The current release is Arc Testnet only. Launch readiness lists explicit blocking gates. Do not send mainnet funds or assume a toggle changes the network safely. See the repository's submission/MAINNET-READINESS.md for the launch checklist.