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: Friday 25th October, 2019

Jenna Zenk: Hey @channel ! Welcome to Melonade Friday (now Melonade Thursday)🍉! The chat is open for questions and conversations around Melon for the next 24 hours. The Avantgarde Finance team and I will be answering questions throughout the week.

Ian Simpson: Hi everyone! Can you give me an update on Melon…how it looks from an ordinary user’s perspective? Pretty user friendly or do I need some special setup to create a fund?

Mona El Isa: Hi Ian, thanks for asking this! As with most blockchain technologies, the user experience is not as smooth as we would like it but it should be possible for anyone to navigate through the steps. Today, we published an ELI5 which should help everyone get started. All you need is a laptop, good internet, some ETH for gas and about 15–20minutes of your time! There’s also a video that you can be helpful too.

Gourdo: Is there any formal outline/roadmap on what exactly is next for Melon?

Mona El Isa: Hi @gourdo! Yes! The roadmap has been published on github. We’re working on a few parts of it simultaneously but so its hard to give exact timelines as some parts are subject to more research… but here’s a nice table/diagram which shows the work flow and rough timings.. i’ll paste it below. In the meantime, the full detail to the proposal can be found here.

Mona El Isa: @channel we’d also like to take this opportunity to announce that we’ve listened to your feedback over the last few months and have launched the new Melon Protocol website (https://melonprotocol.com). We are aware that it was hard to find everything up-to-date and in one place after Melonport was wound down, so we hope this is a good starting point to helping you navigate yourselves around!

KEMi: As far as I understood Melon went live even since the channel closed down for comments. How successful is it and are people really using it to manage their assets, or it just still an experiment?

Mona El Isa: Thanks KEMi its a good question. To the first part, This telegram channel was previously maintained by Melonport which was dissolved when the Melon protocol governance was officially handed over to the Melon Council DAO in Feb 2019 (making us the first company to every give up full control of a DAPP protocol).

Over the summer (July) Avantgarde Finance made the second ever proposal to the Melon Council to implement the above 3 year roadmap (which included community development and engagement). About two weeks ago, the proposal was accepted and so Avantgarde Finance will now be attempting to implement this roadmap

Regarding the 2nd point of your question, its very easy to track the success of the network at anytime on the Melon Monitoring Tool, which was built leveraging the graph protocol … currently there are 135 investment vehicles on Melon with 1,358 ETH (230,000 USD) of Assets Under Management.There’s a nice blog available about the monitoring tool if you’re interested.

Until about a week ago, the desktop application of Melon limited the maximum Melon fund AUM size to 5,000 DAI. However, the Melon Council have now released a new version where the max cap is 50,000 DAI for newly created funds. Hope that answers the questions! (Note, there are currently no limits placed on anyone accessing the protocol at a smart-contract level).

marh: Hey @monaelisa and @jenna_official. Is there any way to get in touch and receive some feedback regarding a possible integration and leverage of melon protocol?

Mona El Isa: Sure, will DM you!

Edwin: Hi, where can i find out detailed information about how the different smart contracts work together that make a newly setup melon fund function?

Jenna Zenk: Hey @ed68n , here is a great talk from Travis (Head of protocol at Avantgarde Finance and formerly Melonport), who gives an overview of the contract architecture.

Edwin: Thanks a lot!

Travis Jacobs: Also check out https://docs.melonport.com for much more detail 😃!

dbyyc: Is the schedule of future capacity increases already set? For example, when would we might expect to see the first $1MM fund.

I’m: Hi .. is there any new roadmap for melon protocol?

Jenna Zenk: Over the summer, Avantgarde Finance propose a 3 year roadmap to the Melon Council DAO which was recently approved. The full roadmap can be found here.

Mona El Isa: In addition, Ash Finance made a proposal over the summer (they were actually the first)

KEMi: Thanks for answering the questions @monaelisa. I still need to swap my old Melon tokens to the new version. Do I still have time to do this?

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): Yes there’s an unlimited time period on that. Do you still have the instruction blog for this?

This is a really good explainer blog by john which walks you through it step by step. If you have any problems, you an always reach out to us on gitter or twitter when this channel is closed later today

KEMi: Thanks @monaelisa!

Aussie Crypto Man: How can I invest in melon funds created by people? And if I do… does the fund buy more in the selected projects? For example the fund includes btc xlm and Neo… I don’t quite get how it works?

Aussie Crypto Man: I already own Melon token… just on speculation 😁 the small bits I do understand I like 👍

Mona El Isa: Hi there. The best way would be to download the MMI (melon monitoring interface) desktop application. Connect your hardware wallet to it using frame and then click on the top left melon logo to see all funds. You can select any fund in there and hit the invest button . We’ll actually be publishing an ELI5 on that in a few days so I can circle back to you when that’s published if you like

Mona El Isa: The latest desktop app can be downloaded here @Aussie_Crypto_Man

Mona El Isa: Also other interesting resources for you @Aussie_Crypto_Man are the release blog which has a video in it (doesn’t cover investing in other people’s funds but at least will help you get set up). This ELI5 is a good place to get started too.

Mona El Isa: But also the monitoring tool will help you browse for interesting funds to invest in and help you visualise the information on the funds, their historical performances, rule sets etc …. @Aussie_Crypto_Man

Hope this helps !

Aussie Crypto Man: Yeah that’s great! Thanks for the links I will have a browse through 😁

Mona El Isa: 👍👍👍

Mona El Isa: Thanks @channel for all your questions and feedback. We’ll be un-muting the channel again next week to take more questions and look forward to speaking to you all then. Have a nice Sunday!