Intro

Earlier this year, Melonport sponsored a smart-contract workshop led by Blockchain Connector with a particular focus on how we see risk management modules coming to life within the Melon protocol.

The goal of the workshop was to get to know our large and diverse developer community and try out some ideas on them. It was a great opportunity to unveil some of our latest thinking on smart contracts applied to melon funds.

The quality of the group was superb and included developers from well known traditional hedge funds, start-ups, decentralised exchanges and other interesting individuals who have been keen on Melon from the start.

In particular, we got speaking with Andrej Cvoro from Decenter. We were impressed by previous work they had done with Lemon Email Dapp under an open-source GPLv3 license. Unfortunately, earlier this year — development on Lemon Email Dapp was terminated.

Some of the Lemon Email Dapp developers left to form Decenter. We felt that we shared many of the same core values and principles when it came to technology (open, secure, reliable), so we came up with the idea of teaming up with Decenter to create a cool new feature of secure messaging service between managers and investors of Melon funds.

How does it work?

After visiting melon.email, users can create an account as long as they have a private key.

Users can authenticate themselves by signing a message using the same private key that represents them in the fund. This will initially generate a new private/public key pair that will be used for message encryption. This means that all information exchanged through Melon Mail is end-to-end encrypted. Additionally, the application is 100% decentralized, since it consists entirely of the front-end code interacting with Ethereum smart contracts and storing data on IPFS, a peer-to-peer storage network.

How does it interact with Melon protocol?

As of the latest Melon release, it is now possible for Melon Managers to whitelist the investors in their funds. In other words, you can permission people who are allowed to invest in your fund through a participation module such as a 3rd party KYC/AML provider.

In theory, managers/investors don’t need to reveal their identity to each other in order to meet KYC/AML requirements. Melon Mail provides a secure and privacy preserving communication service between investors and fund managers. Now fund managers and investors can securely communicate without necessarily ever needing to reveal their identity to each other.

The first 3rd party participation module being built is in collaboration with ConsenSys uPort and the Canton of Zug.

We will give more information about the ConsenSys uPort module in a future blog.

The Melonport Team