Monitoring the Melon
DAOn by the bay.
Where the watermelons grow.
Back to my home, I dare not go.
For if I do, my mother will say,
“Did you ever invest — in a fund that’s best?”
DAOn byyyy the bay, DAOn by the bay!
Melon Protocol
Founded in 2016 by Melonport AG, Melon is a decentralized asset management protocol that allows investors to create their own funds and manage and trade assets. Currently there are over 100 funds on Melon with $60K+ AUM. Melon is integrated with Kyber, OasisDEX, 0x and its relayers to enable trading of up to 11 assets including WETH, WBTC, DAI, USDC and others.
Melon was first deployed on mainnet in February 2018. The team entered the Ethereum space passionate about decentralization and thus always planned to create the Melon Council, a DAO to manage future protocol upgrades and maintenance.
In February 2019, Melon launched v1 of its protocol, began unwinding the company and announced the formation of the Melon Council, composed of the Melon Technical Council (MTC) and Melon Exposure Business (MEB).
Last month, the Melon Council launched on Aragon to enable decentralized governance. Initially the council has been bootstrapped by the former Melonport team selecting the technical council. Moving forward, the Council will vote on new members as well as protocol changes including contract upgrades and fee adjustments.
“If your protocol upgrades are centralized, it isn’t DeFi.” — Jenna Zenk, CTO Avantgarde Finance
Using Aragon’s Agent, members vote on upgrades and once quorum is achieved (50% for technical changes), the contract upgrade is programmatically executed. This means there’s no centralized admin access to the protocol. However, in addition to the DAO governance, Melon fund managers are self-sovereign and must upgrade their own funds to the next version if they’d like to adopt the protocol changes. The Melon Council is also in charge of maintaining the Melon protocol.
This past week Avantgarde Finance submitted a proposal to lead development efforts for the next 3 years. Avantgarde Finance is composed of the former Melonport team and will focus on building financial tools on Melon and growing the protocol’s usage. In particular, the team is interested in helping DAOs build funds on top of Melon, to experiment with new capital formation mechanisms and to manage DAO treasuries
Melon Monitoring Tool & Subgraph
This past week Avantgarde also released the Melon Monitoring Tool built on The Graph, to help investors and managers track Melon activity and financial metrics. The tool is intended to help managers track their funds, allow investors to analyze performance across funds and the Melon Council to assess network usage.
The Graph is an Ethereum querying protocol that allows apps to efficiently index data from the blockchain and represent it in a UI like the Monitoring Tool. The Melon subgraph tracks hundreds of smart contracts, making it one of the most complex subgraphs deployed today.
By querying the Melon subgraph you can gain access to:
- Network data, e.g. number of funds, total assets under management
- Engine data, e.g. current amgu price, MLN burned
- Fund data, e.g. share price, risk policies, trades
- Manager data, e.g. funds per manager
- Investor data, e.g. overview of all investments, return per fund
- Trading data, e.g. trades per decentralized exchange, trades per fund
- Asset data e.g. asset prices, overall amount invested into asset
The subgraph can also show us how many times Melon has been upgraded after a Melon Council vote.
We can query the subgraph for registries which pulls all past versions of the Melon contract that allows users to make funds. We can find out:
- The current contract owner — Melon’s owner is the AppUpgradeableProxy which is the Melon Council DAO contract on Aragon (Melon Technical Agent)
- How many times the contract has been upgraded and the current version of the contract — there are four versions in this query:
- Two versions were test contracts before Melon deployed to mainnet
- The first mainnet contract was deployed in February
- The second upgraded contract (current version) was deployed in March following a bug in a solidity compiler
We can also query the registries contract to see the number of exchangeAdapters there have been — which are the number of exchange upgrades such as updating to the new 0x contract.
Subgraphs are a really easy way to see when and by who contracts have been upgraded (ideally by a DAO!) Melon has only upgraded their contracts once, but as the DeFi ecosystem grows and dapps expand their capabilities, we’re likely to see more upgrades. This will become critical data as more value is locked in DeFi and dApps aim to decentralize their upgrade process.
Use The Graph today!
If you’re looking to query Ethereum to create a UI that tracks DeFi or to conduct analysis on Ethereum data, query the subgraphs that are live today. Deployed subgraphs include Uniswap, Compound, Synthetix, MakerDAO, MolochDAO and many more!
Or if you’d like to simplify your app’s data indexing, deploy your own subgraph. Check out The Graph docs to learn how you can run a graph node, deploy a subgraph and query other subgraphs.
You can also join the Discord channel to chat about deploying a subgraph and join The Graph community.
