Melonport Announcement: Token (MLN) Pre-sale February 15th, 2017 — Contribution and Specification Documents are now available for review!

Melonport is proud to officially announce the launch the initial Melon token sale on February 15th, 2017. There will be a second token sale in Q1/Q2 2018. More information on this below. Both token sales will fund what is expected to be a two year workshop coordinated by Melonport AG before the Melon protocol is deployed in its entirety.

Overview of Melonport and the Melon Protocol

Melonport is the private company building the open-source Melon protocol. The Melon protocol is a blockchain based protocol for asset management built on the Ethereum platform. The protocol allows you to do four things:

• Set up portfolio structures using a collection of smart-contracts (Core & Modules)
• Manage digital assets within the pre-defined parameters selected by the User’s portfolio structure
• Build an auditable, visible track record with virtually no setup costs and minimal variable costs.
• Invest in other portfolios, or have others invest in yours.

This all happens in an open, competitive and decentralised manner. The Melon Protocol Green Paper provides a, detailed description of what Melonport aims to achieve, and is the best way to gain a understanding of what we want to build and share.

The Team

Reto Trinkler (Co-Founder & Chairman), Mona El Isa (Co-Founder & CEO), Dr. Gavin Wood (Advisor), Dr. Andreas Glarner (Advisor) and Jehan Chu (Advisor). For the full team profile and bios, please refer to the Team Page on the Melonport website.

Roadmap

Phase I: PoC2 — will be completed and released before the start of the initial token sale.

Phase II: Moving from PoCs to first live release. We will focus on getting the Melon protocol up and running on the Ethereum main network allowing Users to set up portfolio structures and trade ERC20 tokens within the parameters of the portfolio in a completely decentralised way. The first live release will include, the core smart contracts and a full suite of modules. The modules will fall under the following classes:

• Price feeds
• Asset universe (or trading registrar) modules
• Exchange
• Risk management
• Performance & Management fees

Phase II will also consist of two security audits, a bug bounty programme, a Melon formal specifications document and a basic functioning UI.

Phase III Here, we will focus on finalising the governance structure and deploying the Melon protocol in its entirety. This will complete Melonport’s workshop function and handover the Melon protocol and its governance to Melon token holders. We also plan to use funds to ramp up and improve the front end of Melon as well as marketing and communications budget around the project helping us build strong partnerships key industry players in the financial space.

For a full, detailed description of all development phases and timeline, please go to section 4 & 5 on the Melon Specifications document.

The Melon token (MLN)

The Melon token (MLN) is a core component of Melon and is designed to provide a “usage right” to the Melon software. This “usage fee” will most likely be imposed on trading and can be thought of as a license fee for the software solution made available to the user. From an economic perspective it works similar to a tobin tax — in this way, the opportunistic profitable high frequency trading strategies would cause steady high demand for MLN. The socially responsible “low frequency trading” investor would gladly pay the tiny tax. The average investor would need to consume slightly more MLN but this would likely still be substantially below other alternative solutions.

All MLN tokens that are paid by Users to access the Melon protocol will go into smart contract(s) called a “Governance & Multichain fund”. The purpose of this fund is that stakeholders can vote to spend tokens deploying Melon on other future blockchains or to cover governance (including maintenance) of the Melon protocol.

A maximum of 1,250,000 MLN will be created across both contribution periods before the protocol is deployed to the live network. Following the live deployment of Melon, a fixed amount of new tokens will be created periodically and be distributed towards the most widely used Module developers.

The exact amount that will be created is still subject to further research. In particular, we look to consider sufficient incentivisation for developers to build modules (similar to how in PoW/PoS blockchains inflation is determined to have sufficient incentivisation for Miners to mine or for Stakers to stake).

A difficulty factor will be assigned to each module class and future inflation will be directed to module developers proportionate to the usage of the modules and the difficulty factor ascribed to them (see illustration). The exact difficulty factors will be decided by Melonport and will be finalised in stage III along with protocol governance. The illustration above gives an idea of how this might look.

Developers will be able to charge their own additional fees if they choose (in Ether for example).

Melonport will not censor any modules. Module developers will have to build their own reputation or leverage of an existing one.

Additional explainer diagrams are available on the full Melon specifications document.

Initial token sale details

Start date: Feb 15th, 2017

• A maximum of 1,250,000 MLN will be created across both contribution periods before the protocol is deployed to the live network.
• 750,000 Melon tokens in total will be created by the contribution smart-contracts this February. 600,000 of these will be tradable, 150,000 of these will be non-tradable for a period of two years (or until the deployment of Melon in its entirety).
• 500,000 Melon tokens will be on sale to the public. Price will be set by Melonport closer to the date but we expect 5 CHF of contribution towards the project will give Users 1 MLN token.
• 100,000 tradable Melon tokens will be created for Melonport to be used at the company’s discretion.
• 150,000 non-tradable Melon tokens will be created for Melonport Founders, Advisors & Corporate Partners.

All tradable tokens will be tradable after the end of the contribution period (at 4 weeks).

Second token Sale:

• 500,000 tradable Melon tokens will be created at a future date expected to be in Q1-Q2 2018.
• Melonport will set the price closer to the time of the sale.
• No other tokens will be created until the launch of the protocol and after that, they will be created by inflation only.

For a look at the whole executive summary term sheet: please visit the following link.

Wrap up

Finally… This post is very long, but we want to make sure anyone who is wanting to interact with Melon has the very best information available. This way, they can make an educated decision on how they would like to contribute to this project. We will always do our very best to be as transparent as possible. Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments below. Thank you very much for your time!

Reto Trinkler
Co-Founder & Chairman

&

Mona El Isa
Co-Founder & CEO