Melonade Thursdays are where we un-mute the Melon Protocol Telegram channel for 24 hours to provide a casual environment for our community members to converse with the Avantgarde Finance (former Melonport team) about all things Melon. Avantgarde Finance recently became the second team to receive funding in vested MLN from the Melon Council DAO in exchange for fulfilling the lead developer role on Melon and implementing the newly proposed three year roadmap.

Transcript: Thursday 7th November, 2019

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): Hi @channel! Welcome to Melonade Thursdays are where we un-mute the Melon Protocol Telegram channel for 24 hours to provide a casual environment for our community members to converse with the Avantgarde Finance (former Melonport team) about all things Melon. Avantgarde Finance recently became the second team to receive funding in vested MLN from the Melon Council DAO in exchange for fulfilling the lead developer role on Melon and implementing the newly proposed three year roadmap.

Zaré Woorton (Melon Council DAO): 🤗🤗🤗

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): Okay, so kicking off with a question from Slido:

Anonymous: Got Melon (MLN) delisted on Bittrex Global? Not possible to find it on the markets at Bittrex. Even coinmarketcap removed it as a market. Thanks in advance.

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): Thanks for the question. As far as we are aware, Bittrex International is closing operations in the US as well as about 30 other countries. However, interestingly they are launching Bittrex Global at the same time. We have received an email from them saying they have pre-selected Melon to be included in Bittrex global. We had to send them over some token information to them but it sounds like they do have the intention to re-list the token in their new legal entity.

G M: Hi there, what is your plan to increase MLN price going forward? Is MLN tokens only used to open new funds on the protocol ? Do you have any other uses cases ?

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): Hi @gm0099! We do not control the price. However, the token model is such that the more users use the platform the more the higher the token sink is. This should directly link usage of the network to price of MLN, nicely aligning incentives. We are seeing a lot of use cases lining up from native web3 applications that we’re really excited to share. Most of these should be rolled out in 2020 as we are working on certain adaptions, modifications and providing support to enable these products work. The MLN gas is also charged on invest function and also on the claiming fee (management + performance fees) functions

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): @gm0099 what some people sometimes miss and what we’re quite excited about is that people building applications on top of Melon can also introduce new MLN token use-cases (eg. staking) and don’t need our permission to do so

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): I saw there were a couple of very intersting Hackathon submissions recently from the DeFi hackathon we participated in — I’m excited to help nurture these projects too and enable them. The hackathon only closed a couple of days ago and the judging is happening right now so I’m excited to share more about that soon

Jean-Noël: Hi, Why does MLN have no MLN/EUR trade pair in Kraken Exchange ?

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance: Hi @jnevo i actually don’t know the answer to that I’m sorry. It is out of our hands which pairs they list.

Wega 58: Am I correct by saying that the new 3-year roadmap will cost a minimum of $4.2m. Does this funding come from the development pool?

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): Hi Wega! That’s our best estimate at the moment (we could probably accomplish more, with more funds — you’ll notice there are a few sections of the roadmap that say “subject to funding”). We are funded by the “development pool” of MLN tokens in the sense that the Melon Council DAO has agreed to award them to us in return for completion of the 3 year roadmap. However, it is important to note that the operational costs we incur are not being funded by the sale of MLN token in the market. Actually, most of the tokens we will receive are vested over 2–5 years so that wouldn’t be possible anyway. For the first year Avantgarde Finance is funded (in fiat) by its main shareholder. At some point in future, we may raise more money in fiat by doing an equity round (or some other kind of raise). However, driving the value in the token is our main incentive and we really believe we can do it, or else we wouldn’t be funding our development in fiat.

Wega 58: Mona thank you for your answer. I am going to ask a follow-up question shortly.

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): Sure

Wega 58: I can see the incentive for token holder here but would it be better to allocate MLN pool to secure the funding?

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): How do you mean?

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): By adjusting the monetary policy to fit the 3-year roadmap budget.

Wega 58: Constructive inflation to the circulating supply.

Wega 58: Doing this will eliminate any funding issues in the future and secures the roadmap development.

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): Interesting. It is not possible to adjust the inflation higher, only lower. Also, if we did this it would be to the detriment of token holders. Changing the rules of the game and imposing dilution effect on them at this stage is not fair. However, I should say that we do feel quite confident in the token model in that when usage starts to pick up (eg. with an easier to use front-end) we do believe that it is one of the few token models that will reflect this in the price longer term.

Even more so because;

i) it is not widely known fact that Melonport burnt about 317,000 MLN token this year (not sure why, but market didn’t seem to realise that — maybe because everything was in free fall at the time)

ii) the vesting plan removes a lot of the supply in short term and releases it longer term gradually which nicely aligns with when we expect a large inflection point in usage

iii) there was a big vesting cliff in March which caused some selling pressure and I hope that is now largely done

Mona El Isa (Melon Council DAO): Are you already familiar with our token model?

Mona El Isa (Melon Council DAO): I can recommend these two pieces i) Melonomics part II — The Melon Engine ii) Why I’m so confident about the future of Melon.

Wega 58: Thank you very much for the answer gives me a clear vision where the team stands on a token model.

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): You’re very welcome!

brad.eth: Quick question, if someone finds the contract address for a Melon Fund and simply sends ETH to it from their wallet, what happens? Does the ETH get invested per the fund’s structure? Are they be able to withdraw it?

Jenna Zenk (Avantgarde Finance): Hey Brad! No that’s not how it works, ether or tokens sent directly to a fund address are lost. In order to invest in a fund, one must go through the invest process, which requires calling the requestInvestment() and executeRequest() functions

brad.eth: Got it, I figured they’d be lost. Thanks Jenna!

Jenna Zenk (Avantgarde Finance): Anytime! We’re planning to make the process of investing in a fund easier from a UI perspective, so stay tuned 🙂

brad.eth: Good to hear! As it stands, is the MMI the only UI available for investing in a fund?

Jenna Zenk (Avantgarde Finance): yes that’s right and we are very conscious it is not convenient for users at the moment. Should be better soon.

Jenna Zenk (Avantgarde Finance): We encourage people to build their own UIs as well, as it happens 2 participants in the Kyber hackathon built UI for that as well

Jenna Zenk (Avantgarde Finance): It’s not fully functional yet but it’s looking on a good track

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): For a sneak peak into those hackathon submissions…..

i) Gorilla Funds

ii) Potle.io

Very excited to see these projects progress… !

brad.eth: Awesome to see progress on this front. Thanks for the quick responses!

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): Thanks for the great questions Brad!

Al: Hi there, how’s ash finance progress?? I didn’t hear anything since their launch beta

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): Hello @AI! The Ash Beta has been running smoothly and feedback has been very positive so far. Some parts of the app are still buggy and several features are still under development at the moment (eg. copy trading, group funds, refinement of the Versus mode etc.). Currently, there are 118 active users with a daily average of 3 challenges per user.

Next step is a feedback survey to get feedback on UX and what users are missing in the app. Copy trading and group fund modules are being developed right now and will be completed (and open sourced) in Q1 next year. After plugin of these modules as well as giveth donation module, the preparations for the first beta tournament will start. Signups for the tournament will start early Q2 (people who already have an account don’t need to sign up, they will get a notification).

The team will be sending another 50 invites out this week (around 960 in total).

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): On the side R&D for Ash’s proposition to integrate prediction markets, this has started — they are currently testing this and working with gnosis team to explore what an integration might look like

Mona El Isa (Avantgarde Finance): Thanks for all the great questions @channel! We’ll be back same time next Thursday :)

Jenna Zenk (Avantgarde Finance): 👋