No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it. — H.E. Luccock.

How it all began..

In February 2017, the Melonport team made a promise to the Melon Community and they kept it. Two years after launching Melonport, the Melon protocol was handed over to the the Melon Council DAO, paving the way for Asset Management 3.0. But what may at first glance appear to be the end of a story in fact is just the beginning.

Some of the former Melonport team have taken a much needed break since the protocol was launched, reflecting on what they’ve achieved and what they’re going to do next. As part of this process they’ve been thinking about what motivated them to get involved with Melonport in the first place. If you asked the team, they would each give different answers but one common motivation unites them all, and unites Avantgarde Finance today: the promise of a better financial future.

The ambition for Melon is to radically transform asset management by building an inclusive, reliable and transparent system, free from costly intermediaries or third party interference. But our vision goes beyond this.

We believe in financial empowerment, freedom, open source and decentralisation. We believe in models, technologies and projects that help people claim and regain economic and political power over traditional organisations. We believe that decentralised finance can change the way people live, how they transact and collaborate with one another. We believe blockchain technology can empower billions of people around the world, especially in the most remote places. We believe that we are part of a great movement that will continue to grow in the coming years. We believe that together as a movement, we can change things for the better.

We’ve worked hard over the past 2.5 years trying to reach these goals and we’ll work even harder in the near future to share what we achieve with you and the rest of the world. This shared motivation brings most of our old team back together again in the form of Avantgarde Finance; ready to begin executing on Chapter II of Melon; our newly proposed 3 year roadmap for Melon.

To our community

One of our main beliefs is that none of this would have been, or will be possible without our community.

Over the past two years we’ve focused on quite complex, technical issues surrounding the Melon protocol, but we haven’t focused enough on what truly matters to us, our community.

So, to our M-0 and M-1 attendees, our several thousand followers on Telegram, Twitter, LinkedIn, our Medium blog post readers, our advisors and partners, our fellow crypto enthusiasts, our friends and family, and to all those who supported and challenged us, and continue to do so, we would like to express our warmest thanks and gratitude.

We may not have always expressed it clearly enough, but our community is incredibly important to us and going forward so are the future users of Melon. Here are some examples that show this:

● The Melonport team kept the promise made to its community two years ago by delivering v1.0 of the Melon protocol, with the full set of promised features and more. We are acutely aware that Melon hasn’t yet reached its full potential, which is why Avantgarde Finance will work hard to include more features and easier usability going forward to solve user frictions and improve experiences.

● Melonport tried to build Melon in the most user-friendly way possible so that non-developers can interact with the protocol too. However, we are conscious of the fact that there’s still lots of room for improvement for the front end, UX and UI. This will continue to be a major priority for us.

● Melonport created a user-centric governance model, the Melon Council, consisting not only of people with technical skills (developers and auditors) but also importantly the users themselves (Melon Exposed Businesses). As usage of the network increases, representatives will be able to propose, drive and co-implement new features in the future network.

● Melonport leveraged the MLN token to align the incentives of token holders and developers (two of the major stakeholders in our ecosystem). The MLN token model mechanically links the token purchasing power with the usage of the network which is pretty unique as far as DAPP protocols go!

● Avantgarde Finance will engage with new users native to the web3 ecosystem, further building out the Melon ecosystem and with the primary ambition to drive user adoption going forward. You’ll hear more about this in coming months but you’ll be excited to hear that we are in contact with several talented teams who have had exciting proposals to share and we’re working hard to facilitate these. As always, if you have any proposals you’d like to share with us please get in touch!

It’s one thing to say that the community is one of our top priorities, but its another thing to prove it. Well today, we’ll attempt to do both!

We’re asking you to have a say in what our next community move should be. Below, are four propositions — which of them would you like us to prioritise next? Let us know by commenting in the section below the article or voting on the Twitter poll. If you think we should be doing something completely different then let us know that too! We’ll gather all your answers by the end of November and will aim to implement your choice by Jan 2020.

Organise a large talent scouting manager competition in 2020 with prize pool for best on-chain performers. Provide more user support by creating a MEB (Melon Exposed Business) channel for direct communication with team and nomination of users to the Melon Council. Get on with it already and set a date for M-2. We’re all keen to re-group again and get the latest on what asset management 3.0 has to offer. Something completely different that we haven’t thought of! Give us your suggestion below and we might throw that in too if we can make it happen :)

We’ll meet again soon

Our community has always been a tremendous source of inspiration, motivation and support and we would like to return the favour, no matter how small. We learned a lot from you, tried to implement as many of your ideas as possible and so it feels right to actively involve you in the next phase of our adventure.

We still have many challenges to tackle, many exciting ideas to implement, many people to meet and many goals to reach. But because the journey has only just begun and because there is still a long way to go to achieve our beliefs and objectives, we will need you more than ever. But today we felt the need to thank you all as we are very proud to have such an amazing community by our side.