MELD Research Part 2
In the first article, we only looked at MELD’s founder, Ken Olling (https://medium.com/@scatdao/ken-olling-meld-ceo-research-92697b273c26). For this article we are focusing on the rest of the team, reviewing the project roadmaps and tokenomics, and ending with a look at their community.
Senior Management
Utilizing The Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/) we went through the company’s website (https://www.meld.com/) and reviewed the different snapshots available to see how Senior Management has changed over the last year and a half. It is summarized below.
MELD Team June 2021
MELD Team December 2021
Hai Nguyen Quang, CEO is replaced by Ken Olling and switches title to CTO
Meld Team March 2022
Lise Wessel, CMO replaced by Andrew Klein
Patrick Ramsauer added as CFO
Dave Lin, COO no longer on team and position not replaced
Thomas Tallis, CCO no longer on team and position not replaced
Nicholas Collinson, CPO no longer on team and position not replaced
MELD Team November 2022
Hai Nguyen Quang, CTO is no longer listed as CTO, changed to advisor now
Duc Nguyen Anh Project Manager is no longer on team and position not replaced
Speaking of Project Manager, we did a search and found an open job posting for that role that Meld is currently trying to fill. This suggests that the position is still vacant and we are unsure how this could impact the current roadmap, as the PM is normally imperative for the planning, execution and completion of a project
https://crypto.jobs/?search=meld&location=
MELD Team December 2022
Nehal Khushal, Chief Strategy Officer added
Gediminas Kiveris, Head of Treasury added
Jose (Pepe) Blasco, CTO added
Executive Team Takeaways
From June 2021 to December 2022 there have been 10 changes in top management that we are aware of. Since we utilized the way back machine for this, it’s possible there are other changes not caught in the snapshot that we missed. We review turnover in key management as a way to assess the health of the Company. These people are responsible for driving key areas of a company and bringing in someone new can be disruptive and take considerable time for the new person to get up to speed. So while any company should replace someone if they are not a good fit or are ineffective, having many changes in a short period can be indicative of internal problems.
Note: We reached out to Ken Olling through email on December 6th 2022 to provide any context on why we have seen so many changes but have not heard back.
Hai Nguyen Quang
While on the topic of key management, we would like to note something. When looking through older articles and documentation, they list Ken Olling and Hai Nguyen Quang as co-founders.
In an interview with Kaizen Crypto on July 22, 2021, Ken said the following about Hai. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0FDO_81Yg4&lc=UgyCE0o6Rvqd0CvgwzN4AaABAg)
“The only reason I was willing to pull the trigger on this project was because of Hai. He has the skill, he has the pedigree, he has the background, he has the mentality, he has the approach necessary for attacking something like this.”
However, going through the role changes, we see Hai going from CEO to CTO to no longer being listed as part of the team and shown as an advisor. It is unclear why this person who was integral to the options at first and co-founded the project eventually was moved out of management, or what this could mean for the project going forward. We reviewed Meld’s Medium account for any articles or press releases regarding Hai leaving management, but none were found. Additionally, Hai has deleted his LinkedIn and any other public social media.
Note: We reached out to Ken Olling through email on December 7th 2022 for comment or to provide some context but did not receive a response.
Update: Someone from the MELD community sent us this Twitter space from September 22, 2022 where Ken comments on Hai. The portion starts around 24:45 and ends around 26:44. He states that Hai didn’t want to work in crypto anymore. He wanted to work with security research and AI. Ken thought it was best for him to do that. He is a techincal advisor now. Twitter Space: https://twitter.com/MELD_Defi/status/1572608681589587968?s=20&t=KkIgMO-NZNzyZwSbQe5lJg
Hai Takeaways
You may be wondering, why are we looking at this at all. For new businesses, disputes between founders can lead to trouble. If there is any kind of falling out, there can be disagreements which can lead to lawsuits which can throw the business into jeopardy. Ken stated during a Twitter space that Hai left to go work in AI and that it was amicable. The general lack of communication through a press release, Medium article, or Tweet combined with Hai deleting his social media accounts can give an impression that there may have been more to the story here. There has been no indication from MELD that this is the case.
Blockchain Developers
Looking at the blockchain developers for MELD, we see that there are 5 listed on the website.
Interestingly, the 4 with the blue boxes all came from the same Company, Kikai — Tech Co., Ltd and all attended the same university, Vietnam National University. The 3 girls all have the exact same date range while working there while Thanh’s says he was there an additional 2 months.
Blockchain Dev’s Previous Experience (according to Linkedin)
For Dong, this was her first job out of college.
For Thuy, she had one previous job for 1 year and 2 months that says she worked with functional programing
For An Le, this was her first job out of college
For Thanh, he had no prior Haskell programming experience prior to this job.
Dat Duong who is the Senior Blockchain Engineer only has a 4 month internship listed that involves functional programming.
We also reviewed a Medium article by MELD titled “Meet Meld — Dat Duong Thanh (https://medium.com/meld-labs/meet-meld-dat-duong-thanh-a9520bfe7618) where Dat breaks down his experience prior to joining Meld in which he states “to be honest, when I joined MELD I didn’t have much experience/involvement with crypto.” He goes on to mention that he spent one month learning basic knowledge about Haskell and blockchain, took the interview, and joined Meld.
However, he also stated “I’m not a master of everything, but I can learn things very quickly. I didn’t really have a background in Haskell, but I knew Scala very well which is also a functional programming language, so there are some similarities on that front which made learning Haskell much easier.”
Developer Key Takeaways
The blockchain dev’s did not appear to have a lot of experience with Haskell/Plutus prior to working for MELD and for some this was their first job out of college. And the Senior engineer who is managing them has 1 month of basic review of Haskell before beginning his role of managing the other 4 devs (but did have experience in Scala, another functional programming language). While there isn’t a ton of experience to go by here, there also isn’t enough information available publicly to claim they are not great at their jobs. If you are researching and you encounter a situation such as this, we recommend speaking with the developers if available. Note: We attempted to contact some of them through LinkedIn messaging but received no reply
Roadmap
Utilizing The Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/) we went through the company’s website and reviewed the different snapshots available to see how the roadmap has changed from the projects start until today.
Initial Roadmap July 2021
We can see the initial roadmap had the Dapp launching in Q3 2021
Roadmap December 2021
By December, the roadmap changed to have the Dapp launch in Q4 2021. There is now a split between the MELD Dapp and MELD lending/borrowing, indicating that the Dapp would launch first and not contain the primary function of lending or borrowing, which would occur in 2022.
There was also a Medium article released in November discussing the changing roadmap: https://medium.com/meld-labs/meld-roadmap-update-2-318801f3426f
Roadmap February 2022
By February, the roadmap was changed to have the Dapp launch in Q1 2022. Lending/Borrowing was set to hit testnet in Q3 2022 and mainnet in Q4 2022.
Roadmap September 2022
By September 2022 the roadmap has been changed to have lending/borrowing release in Q2 2023. This is the last update as of writing.
Roadmap Takeaways
In general, it is good for companies to set realistic roadmaps and stick to them. While building on Cardano, this can sometimes be easier said than done. We have seen most projects incur large delays since the launch of smart contracts in 2021. If a company sets an original release date for Q3 2021 and it is not ready until Q2 2023, it can make you question how much thought and planning went into the original timelines or how they could have arrived at that estimate. But again, this has been such a common occurrence in our ecosystem that it does not raise too many eyebrows. We would hope to see them stick to this updated timeline and begin their main business of borrowing and lending as of Q2 2023, because other similar products have launched or plan to launch before then, which could eat up their market share.
Tokenomics
Below are the MELD Tokenomics as of December 8, 2022. If we add up all the tokens that go to the benefit of the team creating the product we get 80% (private sale 30% + Team 17.5% + ISPO 22.9% +Partnerships 4.6% + Foundation 5%). Tokens that are going to things like ISPO technically end up in community hands which is good, but the funds go to the team vs being owned by the token holders, so in this instance we usually would consider that as benefiting the team vs part of the community allocation.
There are vesting schedules in place for these allocations. For the private sale, the tokens vest 4% per month until fully vested. The roadmap shows this happening Q2 2021. Which means 100% of these tokens should be unlocked by Q2 2023 when the roadmap has them launching borrowing & lending. Team members, partners, and advisors have a lock up of 9 months from the token launch (Q1 2022) and then begin their 4% vesting per month. This means their tokens will start releasing Q1 2023 and about 50% of their tokens will be received in 2023.
Here are a few other projects tokenomics for comparison. Everyone is different, so it is up to you to decide what your preference is or what you believe is “better”.
Liqwid
Below is the token distribution for Liqwid. This is probably a good comparison as they are both in the same niche (lending & borrowing). We see an allocation of 25% going to the benefit of the team with the rest going to the benefit of the users/token holders. We also note that they have 60% of the tokens reserved for users of the platform compared to the 20% that we saw with MELD.
AADA
Below is the token distribution for AADA. Another good comparison as it also is a lending & borrowing platform. If we add up the total amount that benefits the team it would be 61.86% (Partners 6.78% + Private Round 18.64 + Public Round 4.24 + Team 10.17 + Public Distribution 13.56 + Marketing 5.08 + Advisors 3.39 = 61.86%).
Tokenomics Takeaways
If you are new to crypto, you may be wondering why any of these numbers matter. One consideration is selling pressure. If there are large allocations of tokens that go to private sales for a price much lower than what retail is able to buy them for, this can potentially create sell pressure when the investors’ tokens become available and they want to realize their gains. The same concept applies to tokens that go to team members/advisors/parters. If large allocations of tokens have gone to these people for their services, it can have a significant impact on the price if and when they decide to sell. One of the ways to mitigate this is having vesting schedules that release a smaller number of tokens as time passes, which Meld does have in place.
Another consideration is the total amount available for users of the platform. Typically you will see DEX and Lending Dapps have a token subsidy to encourage people to use the product and increase its available liquidity. Many investors and users are agnostic of the platform and are simply searching which ones will give them the best ROI. If there are similar products and one has a much larger allocation to encourage users and liquidity, that can potentially put it in a better position in terms of use and TVL. The other side of the coin here is having large subsidies will increase the supply quickly which can dilute the value of the token.
Community
The final thing we are going to touch on here is community. Based on everything we have seen so far, MELD has a very large and passionate community. This became apparent when we released our last article on MELD CEO Ken Olling, which was met with several comments and DM’s that we are amateur hacks who don’t know what we are doing. While nobody likes to be called names, you can’t help but admire the dedication and support that shows.
When searching their token (MELD) on Cexplorer (https://cexplorer.io/token) , we see that it is the 8th highest token on Cardano in terms of holders with 38,480.
This is a relatively impressive number of holders. We see Sundae at towards the top with 86K holders, but then while searching other Cardano DeFi we see Minswap with 19.4K, Wingriders with 10.09K, and Liqwid with 7.08K (very small % of LQ supply in circulation).
Looking at their Twitter account, they have 58.1K followers at the time of writing this article. Looking through their tweets, they have many likes, retweets, and comments for each. Their current pinned tweet for example, had 789 comments. We skimmed through to assess if this is driven by bots giving generic spaceship emoji comments or similar that some projects use to fake engagement. Looking through we recognize many accounts run by real people showing their approval and excitement for what MELD shared.
Community Takeaways
You may be wondering why we are bothering to check these things regarding their community. In the end, the Cardano projects that people actually use are the ones that will win and last. Having a big community means you will potentially have lots of people using your product or service as well as discussing and promoting it which attracts new users. Having a large number of holders is also healthy for a project vs having a small number of people own the entire supply. When a few whales own the majority of the supply means they can control the price or if they ever decide to divest from the project, it could crash the price. Therefore, seeing a large number of holders is usually a positive sign for the project you are researching.
MELD has an undeniably large and passionate community and if they all plan to use the protocol whenever it releases, this gives it a big advantage. We hope you will use this article as an example of how one can research any project with resources available to you today. Want to learn how to research but don’t know how to get started? Go to Dyortool.io — Do Your Own Research Tool and start your journey with us. Please be sure to share your findings with us.
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Disclaimer
- The information in this article is produced for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended to be used as a financial promotion. No information, data, or analysis presented are intended to form the basis of any investment decision. This is not investment advice, solicitation of any kind nor an endorsement. Nothing in this document should be construed as an offer or inducement to engage in any form of investing activity.
