Paving the way to the future

Introduction

Yesterday we at Gorilla Funds submitted a Melon Funding Proposal (MFP) to the Melon Technical Council. This is the third proposal submitted to the council and (with any luck) will be the next project to be funded by Melons governing board. In our proposal we define what we are hoping to achieve and where Gorilla Funds is heading over the next two years. We also highlight what we’ve already managed to accomplish how we’ll build on that success to promote the widespread adoption of the Melon protocol.

Built on Melon

We believe the Melon protocol represents a unique opportunity in that it bridges the worlds of traditional and decentralized finance. Melon all but eliminates the previous monumental barriers of entry to the financial world for everyday users both as fund manager and investors. People and groups who were restricted financially from participating in traditional investment vehicles are given the chance to do just that via the Melon protocol.

What are our plans?

Our primary goal is deceptively simple: Bring Melon funds to the world. We will do this by building simple, fast and intuitive tools that will allow users (both investors and fund managers) to interact with Melon funds in a seamless fashion.

The Fund Explorer is an interface designed for investors to explore funds built on Melon.

It will allow investors to:

Discover all the Funds built on Melon

Explore funds based on personal risk profiles and investment goals.

Invest and Withdraw into and out of funds directly. (**Depending on jurisdiction and regulatory compliance.**)

KYC to determine which funds they are legally able to participate in.

The Gorilla Funds Alpha is a good but simple first example of what our Fund Explorer will deliver. Gorilla Funds was the winner of the “Best Use Case for Melon” during the Kyber DeFi hackathon held late last year and we are excited to build on that success with some major improvements! Upcoming versions will feature advanced filter methods such as jurisdictional compliance, KPI metrics, and risk tolerance. It will also boast features like “fund of a week” and social components such as a “suggested by” feature that lets you see what your friends are investing in.

With the Frontend Fund Builder, we will empower the fund manager to:

Easily manage and present funds in a professional, pleasing format that is optimized cross-platform.

Deploy a “fund site” simply and without any coding knowledge necessary.

The Frontend Fund Builder makes it easy to build a personalized Web-App for a fund. This tool is useful for both a brand new manager just starting out who wants to deploy a simple yet functional landing page for investors to explore their funds or for sophisticated fund managers / institutions that need to display their crypto funds to customers on an existing site.

The steps to deploying a basic fund page:

Create a fund with Melon Terminal interface built by Avantgarde Finance. Go to your Fund Page on Gorilla Funds Via Metamask, link to the available backend of your fund with the same wallet that you used to create it. Fill in all the information you want about yourself, the fund, its goals etc…. Click “Generate” and your Website is automatically deployed.

Once we get the basics down pat, we will be adding tonnes of features and components via the Fund Page Designer which will allow for a high degree of customization and functionality. It will allow the fund manager to decide what relevant financial data is shown, how the site is structured, and provide an easy way to integrate custom design into a site.

What are our Goals?

Our ultimate goals for Gorilla Funds are:

To be THE central hub for investors to explore the universe of investable assets accessible via the Melon protocol. Act as “The WordPress for Decentralized Asset Fund Management”, making it as easy as possible for fund managers to show their work to the world. Educate new users to DeFi and this new financial paradigm on how to use melon funds, what it means to be financially independent and how to go about mitigating the risks associated with a self-managed portfolio of investments.

The Melon Protocol and the recently launched Terminal have made setting up an investment fund as simple as just a few clicks. Bringing these funds to the masses is the next step. Gorilla Funds will build the necessary tools to allow everyone, from investors to fund managers to explore this new world of financial assets and opportunities. Anyone with enough skill and enthusiasm can be a fund manager. Anyone with a crypto wallet can share in the growth of a fund. No one needs to be left behind.

What we have achieved and what we had to learn.

Over the past few months we have managed to build a basic (but fully functional) product. Refining the technology under the hood is a challenge but we are excited to start building. We are also focused on regulatory compliance as a priority for us.

Our vision is to see that the Melon protocol becomes THE backbone of a new global and decentralized asset management infrastructure that ecompasses billions of people and trillions of dollars worth of value. To achieve this we all have to act in good faith and strive to achieve compliance within the jurisdictions that we will be operating in. This also means that the progress may be slower than we would like at some points in time. The tech is ready, but sometimes the people aren’t. But we are on it — and we’ll never give up. We believe that the longer term payoff of patience and thoroughness will mean a more stable and wide reaching infrastructure than if we were simply to build as fast and loose. This is a lesson we at Gorilla Funds have learned from the ICO craze of 2017 and we believe it will serve us well in the coming years.

At last we are very happy to announce that Dave Clancy is joining the Gorilla Funds team. He will be working on Marketing, Communications, PR and any other thing that will help build out Gorilla Funds and make our dream come true….that is:

DeFi for the masses.