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 14th & 21st November, 2019

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: hi @channel, welcome back to Melonade Thursday! The chat room is now open for 24hours if anyone has any questions to direct to anyone on the Melon teams (Melon Council DAO, Ash Finance, Avantgarde Finance and recently added Gorrilla Funds & Portle who you’ll be hearing more about in coming days). This channel is moderated by Avantgarde Finance.

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: Some of you were asking about the Ash progress and beta last week. Coincidentally the team put out a really interesting blog about Ash Versus which clarifies the rules of the games and a clear vision on where it’s going. A really good read if you haven’t already read it!

Joni: Hey guys. Do you plan to build something like a melon academy with easy tools to learn things about the melonprotocol and on-chain asset management? Also maybe sth like the learn and earn on coinbase? Thanks in advance

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: Hey @Joni, Yup, not immediately but definitely on the card for early next year. The ELI5 series has been a very beginning — if you haven’t seen this i would suggest you take a look. We’ve already been asked to give classes around on-chain asset management regularly so We have been thinking about how to scale this education so that it can reach more hands. Definitely love your feedback on that.

What kind of tools did you have in mind?

Joni: Also is it technical possible to integrate traditional assets into the melon protocol? Sth like a mix of on-chain and off-chain asset management? Or an ETF of the Dax etc or have they to be tokenized? I’m not really familiar with the technical stuff, so I hope my question is understandable.

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: hi @LilSwag2y! They do indeed have to be tokenized. We believe it will take a bit longer for security tokenization to be widespread but in the meantime you may have some interesting replications of DAX and other seurities through synthetic products

Al: Hey Mona, I read the article and really interesting. Any plans for build Melon on mobile apps??

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: Hi @AI! We ourselves are not building on mobile, but ash is certainly only building on mobile. I would recommend trying their app, its in beta and now is a great time to send them your feedback and help shape it!

Юрий Р: Hey guys. Do you plan to build on Polkadot? And when +-?

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: Hello ! Interoperability research is part of Avantgarde’s 3 year roadmap, and we’ve followed closely the projects and teams working on that. We haven’t commited to a specific platform yet, but we hope to find out more once interoperability protocols like Polkadot go live next year. The idea is once Melon is on a blockchain that can interact with other blockchains, you get access to a whole new world of non ERC 20 assets.

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: @channel For those of you who asked for an ELI5 on setting up a Melon fund, Part II is now out and provides a step by step guide to trading within your fund!

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: Exciting news. $MLN is now available on

Ethfinex (rebranded Deversifi) trustless OTC markets as a result of @melonprotocol’s community-led discord channel. Join the OTC channel here if you’re looking for MLN flow.

Willem Jensen: Hello guys i have a question about the website

Willem Jensen: What does this mean?

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: Hi @willemjensen . Melonport delivered the two year promise it made to token holders and delivered a working asset management protocol in feb 2019 on time . Part of the promise was to decentralise governance. That meant that Melonport also gave up control of what it had built and handed that control over to the Melon Council DAO which is decentralised by design.

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: If you go to the melon protocol website / governance section you can read more about that

Willem Jensen: Yes I saw that Melonport delivered the the two years promise, very nice to be honest!

Willem Jensen: But this website isn’t relevant no more?

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: No, now all the projects building on melon are reflected on the melon protocol website

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: The Melon protocol website . encompasses the whole ecosystem; the Melon Council DAO, Ash finance, Avantgarde Finance and there are also two new projects which just started building on Melon (Gorilla Funds and Portle.io). The last two . (Gorilla Funds and Portle) are not on website yet but we will provide updates on their projects soon (they happen to be winners from the recent Kyber Defi hackathon)

Willem Jensen: Thanks!!

serejandmyself: Hey! Will melon remain open source and will follow its initial paradigm or does avantgarde finance has plans to start custodial services (KYC, aml and all the other fairytale creatures — pun intended. Sorry).

The question is — what path do you guys plan on following. A decentralized path. A custodial path. Or a mixture. Please provide some details with your answer (if possible).

Thanks!

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: hi @serejandmyself . Everything Avantgarde does for the Melon protocol will be open source. We definitely have no plans to start custodying, that defies one of the main principles of Melon and would remove all the investor protections and value that the protocol provides currently. Eg. We wouldn’t be able to calculate share price of the fund daily, implement risk management, enforce “good” behaviours of the manager and that he/she implements the investment strategy he/she promised (prevents theft,

On the KYC/AML front — users can use Melon as they like. In a completely anonymous way or by overlaying a KYC on the investor whitelisting procedure. We don’t get involved at that stage it is a user choice

Every fund on Melon is customizable and there is nothing to prevent some users from building in KYC/AML on it but this will never be imposed from our side

serejandmyself: Excellent answers. Thanks

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: You’re welcome!

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: Just want to raise everyone’s attention to one of the latest projects in the ecosystem building on Melon. @gorrillafunds recently won the Kyber Hackathon and theyre not going to stop there. Check out Jakob Sievers vision and where he wants to take it from here… I am sure he would welcome like minded people to join him in his mission :)

Onur Müller: Hi there, l have a few questions: Is it possible to get voting rights or other influence to the Melon Protocol by the community/MLN holders? Or are the decision rights at the Melon Council? ( e.g voting for an upgrade of a smart contract or maybe some wants to add new coins/exchanges) And how the Melon Council members were elected?

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: hi Onur ! The way you get representation in the Melon Council DAO is by being a users. Users have the right to nominate representatives on the Melon Council DAO. We try to keep the ratio at 5L2 (Melon Technical Council: User Representatives) so there is definitely room for a nomination soon. We will help facilitate this soon for a chat forum between provable users only. The point of having user representation is exactly so that they can guide the council on the priorities.

Onur Müller: You have a fixed amount of MLN token which will be minted every year (about 300k). Let’s say there is a huge pump and the Melon Engine will burn a lot of MLN token, so that the MLN amount year x — MLN amount year x+1 is positive.. ( Dont know if this is possible, l was just thinking about it)

=> This would lead to a price increase, so that the MLN holders could take profits, but what other impacts would this scenario have?

Wouldn’t it be easier to let a smart contract handle the amount of MLN dependend on the environment?

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: Good question! Whether the protocol is inflationary or deflationary will depend on: (total number of tokens in circulation at the end of year “n” + inflation at end of year “n+1”) — (tokens burnt in year n+1).

If this number is < tokens in circulation in year n then this would be deflationary and likely to be good for token holders. We are not concerned about too many tokens being burnt too fast because the Melon Council DAO can adjust parameters if we get to that stage — there will be sufficient time to react. Hope that makes sense! Delfation would be a good invironment for token holders and developers and that scenario is what we aim for in the next 3–4 years by driving usage and tokenomics accordingly.

Onur Müller: l’m a user of the MMI and have a question about it.. in the “risk profil” there are asset whitelist and asset blacklist.. whats the difference?

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: The Whitelist policy defines a list of asset tokens eligible for investment by the fund. If this policy is configured and deployed by the fund, the fund will only ever be able to hold positions in the asset tokens specified on the list. This policy does not consider the denomination asset token. The rationale for this policy is to present a guarantee to fund investors that only a specified subset of the Melon asset token universe is investable for the fund. The asset whitelist policy cannot be removed from the fund, however whitelist member asset tokens can be removed at a later point in time by the manager. Fund positions in asset tokens removed from the whitelist will remain unaffected, but trades after the removal will fail.

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: The blacklist policy defines a list of asset tokens which are ineligible for investment by the fund. If this policy is configured and deployed by the fund, the fund will never be able to hold positions in the asset tokens specified on the list. This policy does not consider the denomination asset token. The rationale for this policy is to present a guarantee to fund investors that a specified subset of the Melon fund asset token universe will never be invested by the fund. The asset blacklist policy cannot be removed from the fund, however specific asset tokens can be added to the blacklist at a later point in time by the manager. Fund positions in asset tokens added later to the blacklist will remain unaffected, but trades after the addition will fail. All maker order and take order trades, as well as investment requests, will be subject to the policy if it is deployed with the fund. It may not be practical to deploy this policy in conjunction with the asset whitelist policy.

Onur Müller: And if l set a price tolerance.. what happens when the tolerance is crossed?

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: If you set a price tolerance of say 10% and the manager tries to trade at a price that is 10% away from the best available price in the market (to the investor’s disadvantage), the trade will be blocked. this is an investor protection.

Onur Müller: And are leverages possible over e.g compound?

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: Not yet, but integration of lending protocol and related risk mgmt is on the cards!

Onur Müller: And one about Frame.. in which points is Frame better than Metamask?

Jenna Zenk: Regarding frame vs metamask, we re not suggesting one is better than the other, in fact we ll probably have both integrated on the next release ( they both allow you to use a hardware wallet)

Onur Müller: Thank you very much for the extensive answers:)!

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: 👍

Onur Müller: Is it correct to say that the total supply of MLN was 1'250'000 at the beginning but now the supply is 1'232'734 because of the usage of the Melon Network?

Jenna Zenk: Hey Onur,

Initial supply = 932,613 (Melonport burnt a large amount of tokens), Inflation year 1 = 300,600

On March 1st 2019, when year 1 inflation was minted, total supply was 1,233,213

Since then, some MLN were burnt because of network usage, which give the current supply of 1,232,752

Onur Müller: Ok thanks!

Mining Hardware: How does the inflation works? Do you have staking?

Mona El Isa | Melon Protocol: Hi Mining Hardware. Inflation is fixed at 300,600 MLN minted per year. The Melon Council DAO can allocate these tokens to projects or teams building on Melon or burn these tokens. It would only be sensible for the DAO to allocate the tokens if they believe the projects building will outweigh the dilution effect. We don’t have staking at this time but other use-cases for MLN can be layered in by people building products on MLN independently of the DAO (eg. staking). This could be interesting.