Melon Council Q2 2019 update, future planning & how to get involved

Dear Melon Community,

It’s been three months since Melonport launched v1.0 of Melon to the main-net and handed over the ongoing maintenance and governance of the protocol to the Melon Council.

We think it’s about time for an update!

What has been happening in Q2?

First things first - the stats!

Since launching the Melon protocol at the end of Q1, a total of 84 funds have been launched using the software on the main-net with a total AUM of approximately 155 ETH. A total amount of 1,604,856,325 amgu (asset management gas units) have been consumed. If you want to get started and play around with the first ever release of Melon (Zahreddino 1.01) — you can follow instructions here to get started immediately! Please don’t forget to log any issues that you have so that we can continue to improve the protocol and usability for you.

V1.01 release of Melon protocol:

While monitoring early activity on the network we discovered what initially appeared to be a bug in our ZeroEx exchange adapter. After further investigation, it turned out that the bug’s origin was inside the Solidity compiler itself. The bug meant that under specific circumstances, temporary accounting discrepancies could be observed on some funds that had open orders on ZeroEx; we classified the severity of the issue as medium. The V1.01 release contains bug fixes but since all v.01 versions are affected by this issue we kindly ask all users to re-deploy their funds on v1.01. More about this issue can be found here.

First Melon funding granted to Ash.Finance:

Ash has taken a unique approach to on-chain asset management by building a playful mobile interface for the Melon protocol. Ash allows users to compete based on the performance of their Melon funds. To complete a challenge, users have to pay a small fee which is collected in a rewards pool. Users with the highest levels and best fund performances are entitled to payouts from this rewards pool. In order to maintain their ranking and receive rewards, users have to complete new challenges and prove their skills.

In March 2019, Ash became the first project to make a formal proposal for grant funding to the Melon Council. After some discussions with the Council, as well as a private alpha testing period in which all Melon Council members took part, the Council approved a total grant of 150,345 MLN tokens to Ash for the completion of their roadmap. The grant has three different milestone payments which are each conditional on meeting specific terms and conditions. Ash recently published their roadmap which you can check out here!

The Melon Bug Bounty Program is now live!

Thanks to a grant received from Melonport AG before it was wound up, the Melon Council was able to set up an incentive programme to help continue work on the security of the protocol which is of utmost importance to us all. If you have anything to report on this front, please contact the Council at security@meloncouncil.io.

Madeeba Ltd releases new monitoring tool:

Madeeba Ltd is a company which is currently being set up by former Melonport founder and CEO Mona El Isa and some of the former Melonport team with an official start date targeted for October 2019. Madeeba Ltd plans to continue working on the protocol whilst also building scalable, user-friendly products for professional managers. More information will be announced in the coming months.

In the meantime, two of Madeeba’s developers have been contributing to the Melon protocol and have made substantial progress on a Melon fund explorer which we call the Melon Monitoring tool. The tool has come a long way since it was started with new visualisation features made possible in close collaboration with the Graph protocol. The tool currently allows visualisation of:

• Melon Engine stats (AMGU consumed, MLN burnt, estimated fund set up cost, etc)
• Fund universe and ranking by name, AUM, performance, date, etc
• Granular fund information by risk management rule set, fees, positions, etc
• A visualisation of the investors (by address) and asset universe used by all Melon funds.
• A library for all relevant addresses to verify

A recent submission by the Madeeba team on some of these features resulted in a win at the recent The Graph + CoinList Hackathon!

Woorton Reserve Manager:

Madeeba Ltd has been working closely with Woorton to build a reserve manager on Kyber Network which will be operated by Melon Council member Woorton. Since the price feeds of the Melon Protocol are determined by Kyber Network (and are therefore limited to assets listed on Kyber Network), this arrangement will enable more flexibility in the future in terms of assets which become available to Melon users.

Melon listed on DeFi Pulse!

It’s great to see teams like DeFi Pulse monitoring the growth of the DeFi space. What could be more exciting! DeFi Pulse has worked hard to check and verify smart-contract data representing the AUM growth on Melon which has led to its inclusion in their monitoring tool.

Future Planning:

For those who need a quick re-cap, the long-term goals underpinning the Melon governance model were as follows:

1. Preserving the integrity of the network
2. Maximising user adoption
3. Fostering innovation and increasing network attractiveness

The decision to grant funding to Ash finance was based largely on the broader objective of diversifying user adoption since in this case the Council believed that this new use-case would bring new users to the Melon protocol.

In future our focus will be on further strengthening the core protocol in order to give users a more robustly tested and functional protocol which will provide developers with a stronger base upon which to build and innovate. This involves continuing to add assets and asset types to the asset universe, integrating DEXs and therefore enhancing liquidity, adding more protocol features & integrations from across the DeFi space and entering into longer term security audits which can better handle the increasing complexity.

Community & Learning

We want the Melon community to flourish — and we understand the importance of communication in making that happen. We want to encourage people to learn about Melon, attract new users and hear from you what we can do to make the protocol even better.

Community through Social Media

We received some push-back from our community earlier this year after we decided to convert the Telegram channel into a read-only environment. Unfortunately, the amount of spam we were receiving was making it increasingly difficult to manage the channel and to respond to genuine questions and comments. In addition, a lot of the discussion in the Telegram channel focused on speculations about the price of MLN which was both highly detrimental to those in our community who genuinely want to learn about Melon as users or developers.

However, we do understand that for the Melon ecosystem to grow in a healthy way, we need to be able to communicate with our users and developers. To date, the Melon Council’s officially stated social media channels have been Twitter and Reddit which provide a good platform for updates but don’t engage stakeholders in a discussion. We received a pro-active suggestion from one of our community members to revive the old Melon Gitter channel and we loved it — so as of now, we have renamed two of the former Melonport Gitter channels which we have split into ‘Users’ and ‘Developers’. We thought it would be good to have a more interactive forum for users and developers to interact with one another.

It is worth noting that the Melon Council has also set up its own Medium account which will publish more regular updates which will also be available via the Melon protocol Medium account.

Next generation fund managers!

MAMA (the Multichain Asset Managers Association) recently gave a lecture at the University of Liechtenstein as part of Demelza Hays’ blockchain course. Following an introduction to the core concepts of portfolio management and TROFs (Technology Regulated and Operated Investment Funds), the students set up their own Melon funds in order to learn hands-on about blockchain and asset management. For the last two months, seven funds have been managed by the students, with MAMA sponsoring each of these funds (with 0.5ETH). This has essentially been the world’s first student on-chain fund management competition!

More importantly, we see this as just the beginning. MAMA has already received interest from other universities to replicate this approach. Stay tuned!

Developers — How to get involved

We think the following areas are a priority going forward, but if you’d like to propose any other work to the protocol we would love to hear your suggestions! You can send proposals to team@meloncouncil.io.

Make a proposal related to the core protocol!

When making a proposal, the following should be included:

• A short description of you and/or your team
• An outline of your proposed project, with a realistic roadmap and key milestones
• An explanation of how your proposal will add value to Melon stakeholders
• Why you’re the best person/team to carry out this project, with some information on skills, track record or some other demonstration of ability
• A clear project plan, as well as budget, to explain how you will execute the project

Melon Improvement Proposals — MIP’s

Over the last two years, the Melon team have received numerous suggestions about how the Melon protocol could evolve beyond the initial specifications. Some of these were implemented by the Melonport team, but others had to be parked for the time being due to limited resources. We’d like to revisit these MIPs (Melon Improvement Proposals)….

** A call to developers**

If you’re a developer (an individual, team or organisation) with the relevant skills and experience, why not have a go at implementing one of the listed MIPs in exchange for some MNL?

** A call to Users/Token holders**

We hope you’re enjoying playing around with Melon on the main-net! We appreciate all your feedback and love it when you log the bugs — we will eventually get to them! If next time you’re using Melon you think of a new feature or an improvement that you’d love to see on there, why not let us know and write it up as a ‘new issue’ and create your own MIP for future developers to implement?

Community — we want to hear from you!

We would love to see more community members & ecosystem stakeholders get involved. We’re always looking for volunteers to help manage communities, moderate chat rooms in other languages, run local meetups or propose new ideas. Ultimately, you don’t need our permission, but we’re happy to help facilitate and spread the word through our social media channels and provide content assistance when/where possible. Just email us on team@meloncouncil.io.

We are also happy to support any work that goes towards easing the regulatory burden for DeFi and open finance projects. We’re keen to help move the agenda forward for TROFs. If you have a background or expertise in financial law and would like to get involved — please do get in touch. We’re keen to hear any ideas, proposals or even solutions!

We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank all the community members who have supported us, challenged us, worked with us and generally played an instrumental part in the progress that has been achieved in these last few months. We are grateful for all your efforts and support and look forward to continued discussions and collaborations in the coming months.