Several Ethereum-based protocols or Dapps saw their smart contracts being affected as a result of the Istanbul hard fork which took place on December 8th, 2019. Whilst the Melon protocol smart contracts were not directly affected by the Istanbul hard fork, some protocols that Melon is tightly integrated with were affected.

The Kyber team migrated their KyberNetwork contract on December 2nd (Istanbul upgrade), in anticipation that this contract would be broken by EIP 1884, which was included in the fork. No breaking changes were expected for consumers of the KyberNetworkProxy contract.

However, this upgrade included a change which blocked queries of a token against itself, which is a call the Melon pricefeed contract made to the KyberNetworkProxy contract. This prevented our pricefeed contract from having valid prices against ETH, rendering it virtually unusable.

All assets are safe, and all investors in Melon funds are able to redeem their shares at any time, as always. By design, the Melon protocol redemption process is independent of the pricefeed.

The implication of this issue is that Melon funds created prior to December 2nd, 2019 are unable to trade or take on new investors going forward; redeeming is the only action possible with those funds. v1.0 of Melon funds were designed to be immutable, meaning it is not possible to change a fund’s properties after the fund is deployed. In the version in question, a fund’s price source was included in this category of immutable properties, although it is something that we might look to change in the future.

Relevant changes were made to the pricefeed contract and the new contract has now been reviewed, deployed and updated on the Melon registry by the Melon Council DAO (see here, vote #13 and #14). This enables new funds to be created and managed as before, at a smart contract level.

At the user interface level, the desktop application Melon Manager Interface so far relied on the former pricefeed to produce the list of funds. In recent weeks, the Avantgarde Finance team has devoted all of their resources to prioritizing a new front-end release with an improved UX. Rather than shifting their focus to bringing the desktop application back to full functionality, they decided to pursue their efforts towards completing the new version of the Melon interface ahead of schedule. In return for user-patience, they’d like to invite anyone who was running a fund on the current desktop application to contact them directly and receive an early beta invitation to test it privately and provide feedback before the public release.

In the meantime, to ease the process for users who would like to redeem their assets, Avantgarde Finance has deployed a web application that lets you see the funds you manage or are invested in, and that enables you to redeem your shares and/or shut down your funds. It also lets you cancel your expired investment requests, thereby getting back the assets that you deposited for an investment. You can either decide to redeem your assets now through that interface, or wait for the new release to do it and migrate your fund. You can access that light Melon interface at https://redeem.avantgarde.finance/.

We apologize for any inconvenience to users, and hope that the upcoming web-based Melon Manager Interface release will be worth the wait.