The STate of Melon

An overview from the Melon team, covering everything from key developments and future plans to new ecosystem players and projects. We’ll also have reflections from the Melon Council about their plans and priorities for the Melon Protocol in 2020 and beyond.

Decentralised Exchanges

An update on the latest trends in the DEX space as well as a look at recent progress made in enhancing on-chain liquidity. This remains one of the key issues for on-chain asset management and DeFi more broadly. We’ll be giving the floor to people who are developing practical approaches to this ongoing challenge.

The Never Ending (Asset) Universe

Since M-1 we’ve seen a dramatic growth in the investable universe of ERC-20 tokens. Some of the latest innovations in this space include non fungible tokens, synthetic products, derivatives etc. This has opened up significant opportunities for investors on-chain. Could this herald the beginning of big institutional investors getting involved and the maturation of crypto markets?

Security

In comparison to the traditional fund industry, on-chain asset management promises to be much cheaper, more transparent, safer and more efficient. However, it does introduce new risks around the security of smart-contracts. This session will explore risk mitigation, looking at best practices and auditing techniques as well as the most interesting trends in smart-contract insurance.

Leveraging the Melon infrastructure

The Melon Protocol was always intended to provide the underlying infrastructure for asset management 3.0. We’re delighted to now see a number of organisations building on top of this tech stack to create new applications and products. Here we’ll be meeting the teams, individuals and projects developing the most novel use cases by leveraging the Melon infrastructure.

on-chain Lending

Until recently, if you wanted to hold large, liquid crypto assets (like ETH), there wasn’t much you could do to enhance your returns through income-based methods. Instead, you had no choice but to endure market volatility. With the rise of lending protocols, anyone can deposit their long term holdings into smart-contracts and earn an interest as income for lending it out. The loans are backed with collateral which make for attractive capital preservation techniques in a fund when you don’t have a strong view, and potential ‘borrowing’ opportunities when you do, and want to leverage the fund’s assets to maximise performance. We’ll be exploring the opportunities and risks presented by these new developments, as well as the risk management methods available when leveraging the Melon Protocol.

Legal and regulatory issues

Here, with input from MAMA, we will bring to life a case study of one of the first on-chain investment vehicles to go live in a fully regulated capacity. We’ll show you how it was done, what problems we encountered and how we’re working to further improve on these solutions. We’ll also be hosting a workshop for builders on Melon to work through any legal and regulatory hurdles they may be facing with relevant experts.

On-chain data and information markets

Whether you’re extracting data from the chain, or crowdsourcing knowledge from information markets, there is plenty of data available on the decentralised web. In this session, we’ll be taking a look at web3 based tools which could enhance managers’ potential for alpha based performance, as well as drastically improve funds’ transparency for investors.