The Melon Council is thrilled to announce that it has awarded MLN tokens* to Avantgarde Finance. Avantgarde submitted a proposal to the Melon Council to take on the role of lead developer of the Melon protocol; a new standard for on-chain asset management. The Melon Council have spent the last few weeks assessing the proposal, challenging Avantgarde and helping refine it to what it is today. The vote finally passed the threshold today on aragonOS making the roadmap implementation possible.

Avantgarde will now undertake a series of protocol improvements and DeFi integrations, develop exciting new features and continue to grow the Melon community. Avantgarde is the second organisation to submit a successful proposal to the Melon Council; the first, Ash finance, is now live on the Kovan test-net, with more than 950 participants signed up for beta testing.

“The Melon Council couldn’t be more excited to have Avantgarde take the lead in further developing the protocol. We have an ambitious roadmap ahead of us and there is no better team to execute on it than the one that initially conceived and developed the protocol.” — Fabian Gompf

The proposal sets out a three year road map for taking a leadership role in developing the Melon protocol. It set out the following objectives:

Increase awareness around the protocol and its merits

Maximize usage of the Melon protocol by increasing network attractiveness

Take Melon to the next level from a technical perspective (improvements, features, integrations)

Avantgarde aims to meet these objectives by:

Growing and strengthening the Melon ecosystem. Our aim is to ensure that the Melon protocol is properly and accurately understood and recognised as the on-chain asset management infrastructure of the future.

Making resources and materials available to a wide range of educational bodies, DeFi community members, developers and other stakeholders to facilitate adoption and interaction with the Melon Protocol.

Undertaking technical improvements, integrations and enhance the user experience to encourage adoption.

Finding and creating new and easy ways that users can interact with the protocol in an easy and compliant way

Working with regulators and policymakers to help shape regulatory and legal frameworks to realise the full potential of Melon funds.

Importantly, the proposal Avantgarde made to the Melon Council offers to lock up 75% of the tokens for a range of 2 to 5 years.

*The logic of this proposal can be rationalised as follows;

Future development and maintenance are dependent on the value of the token, and the value of the token is dependent on protocol usage.

In the early years of the Melon network, we expect user adoption to be slow as there is still work to be done on reducing frictions in the blockchain and protocol DAPP space. This could put short term pressure on the price of MLN if new supply comes into circulation through inflation without a substantial burn-rate (protocol usage) to balance out new supply.

In order for protocol work to to be done medium term, this work needs to be incentivised whilst ideally dampening the immediate circulating supply effect it would require.

The Avantgarde proposal provides a solution by removing supply from circulation and therefore re-shaping the supply curve such that it is substantially more convex in nature for the first 3 years. Short-medium term circulating token supply is removed through a vesting schedule which removes pressure from the network.

This allows time for UX and functionality improvements to take place which should spur on increased usage.

The proposed structure aims to align Avantgarde interest with the interests of the entire Melon Ecosystem (token holders, users & developers).

We look forward to supporting them on this journey and helping Melon reach its full potential!