Hello, Melon Council here. Today we’d like to give you a 101 on Melon Funding Proposals: What are they? How is the inflation spent? Can you get rewarded for working on the Melon protocol? What happens to un-spent tokens?

Incentivising development through the Melon inflation pool

In February this year, Melonport delivered v1.0 of the Melon Protocol, and officially handed over future development and control to a user representative and technically skilled body referred to as the Melon Council.

Each year, there is a set inflation of MLN tokens which are available for the council to allocate to projects who submit Melon Funding Proposals (MFPs) which they feel will benefit the Melon ecosystem and contribute to its continued improvement. The Melon Council is in charge of allocating those resources as they see fit. Those tokens can be used to fund projects building on top of Melon, to reward/compensate developers contributing to the Melon codebase, or we can decide to burn them if there is no relevant or worthwhile project/development team to be funded on a specific year.

What is a Melon Funding Proposal (MFP)?

MFPs are a key element in growing the Melon ecosystem. A Melon Funding Proposal is an offer made by an individual or group of individuals to work on a specific feature, MIP (see below), integration, improvement of the Melon protocol, or even to build a use case on top of Melon, in exchange for a reward in MLN tokens. Through MFPs, the Melon Council is able to compensate any person or entity contributing to the Melon protocol and its ecosystem development.

How does it work?

If you are a developer who wishes to contribute to Melon, by adding a new feature, integrating with another protocol, implementing an existing MIP, or improving the existing codebase, you can apply for a MLN grant by sending your proposal to the Melon Council at team@meloncouncil.io.

If you are a team building a project in the asset management 3.0 space, and you plan to build on top of the Melon infrastructure, you can also apply for a MLN grant (see Melonomics 1: https://medium.com/melonprotocol/melonomics-part-1-aligning-interests-through-token-unification-d0b98a02de46) by sending your proposal to the Melon Council at team@meloncouncil.io.

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Each MFP must be also documented on the dedicated github repository: https://github.com/melonproject/MFP

The Melon Council conducts a thorough review of the outstanding proposals and evaluate them before proceeding to a vote. If the MFP is deemed relevant and beneficial to the Melon ecosystem, the Melon Council will approve it and enter into an agreement with the applicant. Approval of an MPF requires a 50% majority + 1 vote.

The first MFP was approved in April 2019, you can read details here: https://medium.com/melonprotocol/mfp-1-5fbeb892b081

What does a good proposal look like?

What is a Melon Improvement Proposal (MIP)?

Inspired by the EIP convention in the Ethereum ecosystem, the Melon ecosystem centralises all improvements proposals/ideas into one repository: https://github.com/melonproject/MIP.

Melon Improvement Proposals describe various improvement suggestions, feature requests and other potential evolution of the Melon protocol. The intention of this repository is to gather in one place all ideas and feature requests that are relevant to the Melon protocol and to enable technical discussions around those. Anyone is welcome and highly encouraged to contribute by submit ideas or participate in existing discussions.

If you are a developer or a team, you can submit your own MIP, or pick any existing MIP and make a MFP for its implementation.

The Melon Council will also submit MIPs for features/ideas that are deemed important for the protocol. The likelihood of getting an MFP approval for the implementation of an existing MIP that makes sense to most stakeholders is high.

Development priorities

The Melon protocol is very young, and therefore lots of protocol improvements/developments are expected to be made in the first few years.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of areas that the Melon Council will be happy to fund:

Integration with more decentralised exchanges

Integration with other DeFi protocols

Integration of new asset types

Security reviews/improvements

Formal specifications

Development of new risk management rules

Research on integration with interoperability protocols

Liquidity enhancing solutions

Research on the integration of privacy features

Other decentralised price oracle solutions

This list is obviously non-exhaustive and we can’t wait to hear what you think should be put on the priority list for funding. Reach out at team@meloncouncil.io with your suggestions.