Melonade Thursdays are where we un-mute the Melon Protocol Telegram channel for 24 hours to provide a casual environment for our community members to converse with the Avantgarde Finance (former Melonport team) about all things Melon. Avantgarde Finance recently became the second team to receive funding in vested MLN from the Melon Council DAO in exchange for fulfilling the lead developer role on Melon and implementing the newly proposed three year roadmap.

Transcript: Thursday 1st November, 2019

Mona El Isa: Hi @channel! We are back for Melonade Thursdays and the @avantgardefinance team are here to handle any questions or discussions for the next 24 hours. You’ll note we’ve changed the day as some of you requested. Happy to try and find a consensus on that… The chat is now open for 24 hours :)

Nick: Hey, so as a UK citizen are there any legal requirements that I should be aware of before I set up a fund that others can invest in. Is there an authority that I need to notify and is there a module that would be able to take care of this for me …or perhaps under development?

Nick: Obviously a module would not be able to do the reporting, but it would perhaps be able to generate reports tailored to your jurisdiction…

Mona El Isa: Hi Nick , so actually we are not too far off from reporting in the sense that a lot of the data is gathered from the blockchain and captured in the monitoring tool already. I think over time, this will essentially evolve into a reporting tool. The monitoring tool gives the basis to generate a report and prove fund actions with transaction hashes etc

Regarding the regulatory side of things, it’s harder to comment. We helped co-found the Multichain Asset Managers Association in 2017 which tries to help members with regulatory matters specifically regarding on-chain asset management. The Executive Director @hjhettich might even be in this chat room here if you want to get some more info from him

Mona El Isa: @channel a big announcement in the Melon ecosystem is that Avantgarde Finance is adding to its 9 person team and looking for Javascript developers and a Head of UX/UI… if you’d like to know more about the posts, please contact us at hiring@avantgarde.finance. We are looking for exceptional people who are passionate about DeFi and on-chain asset management to join the team to make it a reality… and have some fun along the way!

Anonymous 1 (via Slido): The roadmap sounds great but quite dev driven. Are there any long-term marketing efforts planned :)? If not, how would you foresee acceleration of adoption?

Mona El Isa: We do have a “growth hacker” in mind to increase adoption a little later down the line and have interviewed a couple of candidates for that. We’ve also identified a few ideas for how to grow usage which we’ll announce next year when we’ve rolled out a more stable front end. I think one of the biggest use-cases early days will be managers building on-chain track records and gaining recognition for their talent which will inevitably open up big opportunities for them. I’m really excited to see this manifest and to encourage it. But we’re seeing interest from early web3 native use-cases too.

Anonymous 2 (via Slido): Have you considered allocating a portion of the yearly inflation to a staking and rewards model, similar perhaps to what SNX recently implemented with success?

Mona El Isa: We haven’t considered this. I would be happy to do a deep dive into SNX tokenomics and see if something like that would make sense in the case for MLN. However, its important to remember that different projects and people building use cases on top of MLN can build in their own “use-case” for Melon at an application layer. Its not only us (the Melon Council) that decides that

Anonymous 3 (via Slido): What has the Melon Council’s experience been so far in operating the first truly decentralised protocol operated by a DAO?

Jenna Zenk: The Melon Council DAO is responsible for the maintenance and future developments of the protocol (it doesn’t operate it per se).

I think it is an exciting endeavour, as we’re experimenting with new governance model and fascinating cutting edge tech such as Melon, but also other DeFi protocols, and also aragonOS for our decision making.

Fabian Gompf our Chairman (from Parity Technologies) wrote a great piece about how it is going, how we are organized etc.

Anonymous 4 (via Slido): Will the MLN token be on more exchanges?

Anonymous 5 (via Slido): Do you plan to add non-erc20 tokens/coins such as Bitcoin, cardano etc. as assets and how will it work?

Jenna Zenk: For now, Melon is built on Ethereum and can only support erc20 tokens. It is already possible to have *exposure* to things like BTC through WBTC for example. In parallel, we are closely following the developments around blockchain interoperability. Once we’ll have bridges between different chains, we will certainly aim at adding as many asset as possible.

i Soft: Can one hope for an advertising company?

Mona El Isa: hi there, not at the moment. I think the preference is to grow awareness through community efforts (the token mechanics incentivise this too)

AgAiNsTdFoOkINgGrAiN: Is the team planning to get listed on other exchanges??

Mona El Isa: its not part of our roadmap and I think our priority is to drive users on the network. being listed on exchange won’t make token more liquid sustainably. usage will

Ana PRR: Hi Team, trying to remember here, Melonport is suppose to interact with Polkadot for multi asset crosschain funds? This is still the plan? Is there an up to date road map? Or recent update, interview, presentation??

Mona El Isa: Hi Ana PRR. At one point when Melonport was working on its 2 year roadmap, it announced that it would research interoperability with Polkadot (this was actually out of scope with the 2 year roadmap). A little later, we put the research on hold because we feel it was too early in the interoperability game to commit to any one solution. However, if you check out our newly proposed three year roadmap, its definitely on there to revisit.

Ana PRR: Thank you for sharing the insight/link!

Mona El Isa: 👌👌

Edwin: What exactly is the purpose of the Kyber reserve, will it help to boost the liquidity on exchanges? Right now it is fairly hard to buy any sizeable amount of MLN off exchanges. Also, where does the main community discussion on Melon take place? Is there a discord or another Telegram channel that remains open during the week? I haven’t been able to find links on the website or reddit.

Mona El Isa: Running a reserve will enable the council to add new assets to the melon asset universe (because they need to be traded on kyber)

Regarding sizeable amount of MLN, there is v good OTC flow with Woorton (and sometimes Kraken). I also saw that someone suggested moving forward with an OTC channel on the community-led Melon protocol discord yesterday so may be worth keeping an eye out for.

Regarding the main community discussions — this channel is open once a week for 24 hours. if you can’t make the time slot you can leave questions on Slido and we usually publish the transcript afterwards. There is also a good community led channel on Discord which me and other team members have recently joined and will help maintain. Also v active on reddit, twitter

@Ueblu: Since there doesn’t seem to be a solution I wanted to ask you my question from discord: ‘Do you guys see a chance that the mtc forks mkr and bring a mtc governed mcDai or would this too hard to pull of / impossible?’

@Ueblu: I got a love for MKR and hold them for a long time. On the other hand I see the problem with their governance and thought it would be worth it to try their code with another governance approach.

Jenna Zenk: Technically it’s not hard to fork MKR (or any other open protocol really), but we feel like we already have a lot on our plates with the Melon mission and would like to stay focused on that :) We do agree though that their governance model has issues and anyone is free to fork their protocol or any other one and layer a new governance model on top of it — that’s the beauty of it all being permission-less and open source

Mona El Isa: Thanks for all the input @channel, we’ll be back same time next week and we’ll send through a Slido link for questions in case you can’t make it but want to leave your questions for next time!