Hello everyone!

For just over a year now at Melonport AG we’ve been busy working on the concept of the Melon Protocol. We’ve kept our heads down, focusing on putting together the Green Paper, working hard to build out the early concept of the Melon Protocol itself and the Smart Contract Contribution System that would allow us to fund its continued development.

It wasn’t easy, and we certainly didn’t get everything right first time. We were, however, exceptionally lucky to have such strong support from many members of the Melon/Ethereum/blockchain community and beyond.

Earlier this month, we were proud to release a beta version of the Melon Protocol which is now available on the Ropsten testnet. The code for this has been open-sourced and can now be found on the Melonport Github repo. If you get a chance, please do take a took and let us know what you think! User feedback is of course very important to us as we continue to iterate and develop.

On Sunday the 12th of February after a great deal of testing, tuning and more testing, Reto Trinkler deployed the Smart Contract Contribution System to the Ethereum mainnet. Everything was ready for the start of the Melon Contribution Period at 12:00 CET on Wednesday the 15th of February.

One day later, we are now very pleased to say that the Melon Contribution Smart Contract System reached it’s funding limit in a record time of 13 minutes and 23 seconds, with 99% of the funds arriving within 3 minutes! The contract received exactly 227000 Ether from contributors around the world. We extend our thanks and gratitude to everyone who participated.

Now the real work begins. We look forward to working with you all to build out the Melon Protocol ecosystem, and we are genuinely excited for what the future will bring.

Here’s a summary of the last few days at Melonport HQ in Crypto Valley (Zug) in Switzerland, and some technical analysis of (albeit very short) contribution period itself.

Outside Melonport HQ, Zug

Sunday 12th February: Contribution Smart Contract was deployed from the Zug office and goes live!

Beyond being a crypto hub, Zug has other benefits too.

Reto Trinkler can’t sleep…. He’s battle testing the contract over and over again with extreme calm and cool, working night and day with the rest of the team to answer questions and make sure everything looks secure.

Monday morning: Bitcoin Suisse successfully take up the full pre-allocation of 25% of the 500,000 tokens available to them by the Smart-Contract-System. The countdown for the rest of the token sale begins…

Tuesday morning: After a sleepless night of doing further checks on the contract, Reto Trinkler is still going and joined by the rest of the team. Everyone is calm and cautiously excited and maybe a little jumpy but almost too busy to notice. After heading home for the evening, the team is relieved to receive photographic evidence that Reto Trinkler has finally eaten something:

Power food

Wednesday morning: Nobody has slept.. Everyone is running on adrenalin and we are all focused and straight into our work from the second we get into the office. The Countdown is on the screen in the background and time flies.. We are nervous — website traffic is much higher than we ever dared to imagine three hours before the sale.

Gavin Wood is on standby also doing another round of checks.

We upgrade to a much higher server capacity and create a backup contribution page to partially offload some of the traffic. Busy testing both pages and being inundated with last minute questions, the next thing we know 10 minutes to go. Someone takes a photograph and asks us to pose for this “historic” moment, Reto breaks into a laugh.

Mona, Reto and George engage in preflight checks before takeoff!

8 seconds to go!

The sale starts at 12:00PM CET — transactions start flying in, it’s over so fast!

Happy team, emotional moment :)

A special thanks to;

Dr Andreas Glarner and the MME Team for being on standby the last three days

Dr Gavin Wood and Parity Technologies

Jehan Chu

Taylor Monahan and the team at MyEtherWallet

From the slack:

@housemobile for his diligent & continuous feedback

@ethfans for their translations and support

@awrell

@hsk99

And all other members of the community who contributed in any way in helping us get to where we are today.

Finally, keep your ears to the ground. We’ve got plenty of big news on the way!

Sincerely,

The Melonport Team!