AMA's
Transcripts of past AMA
🎥 If you are interested in conducting an AMA with MELD send us a message in our Telegram Community Group
Hai: Yes, we've silently deployed several things to the testnet, and everything going into the first launch will be audited on the testnet starting from early December. I understand the word "silently" means it cannot be disclosed just yet? Hai: People like Hachi can deserialize all deployed scripts and reason if something is MELD or not. We're just not publicly announcing anything to prevent distractions towards our engineers.
Ken: No, we will not be formally extending the ISPO. we set a start and end and we are commented to it. This said, we are cooking up some super interesting stuff as an NFT for the ISPO delegators that will feed your need for $MELD.
Hai: Influencing is a strong work. We just want to contribute as much as we can. And it might be just a temporary things. As things get more stable, we have to focus more on our economies of DeFi services more.
Ken: I would say this is only the case regarding community. We are not interested in influencing the development of Cardano layer one. We are interested in helping the Cardano community become bigger and more collaborative.
Hai: No, we have been doing our best not to invent and maintain our own tooling. We'll go with the most suitable solution, and contribute directly to if had we need anything more.
Ken: Yes, there will be an announcement regarding one of these tomorrow.
Ken: We will have vaulting and insurance in Switzerland with a known and reputable vaulting service and monthly audits published.
Hai: Yes, we've been using Metamask to interface with Polygon for ADAmatic. It's working already but we're still seeking more ways to make UX smoother for wrapping.
Ken: Yes, but we are not adding any functionality to metamask, just supporting the access of the assets. We are trying to streamline the processes of using Polygon
Hai: No, we're not building a custom transaction builder at the moment. I think the proper solution is to contribute upstream in these cases.
Ken: Yes, we did and do want to do this. But we have been a bit slow in the finalization of the GUI work both in the design and the development. We now have a frontend web3 team working and we will most likely be bringing on a native mobile frontend team in the coming weeks.
Hai: There was a planned beta testing phase of the MELDapp that we had to delay. Wallet integration on the Cardano side wasn't very smooth, and we wished to have more stable connected services first too.
Hai: Yes, I would say so, as one possible option for wallet integration.
Hai: We have been investigating several different solutions. It is hard to verify any at this moment in time, but yes, ChainLink is among the top choices.
Hai: For several reasons we need to launch on Cardano. Until we have more resources to scale our ecosystem, most Polygon work will resolve around that end of the ADAmatic work. Our core models are designed for the UTxO ledger at the moment.
Ken: We chose at the beginning we would not prelaunch on a different chain and move over to Cardano. Additionally in some jurisdictions, if you launch a token with no functionality it will automatically be considered a Security. This is can cause tax problems for some holders. So we are committed to launching our token WITH functionality.
Hai: That said, as non-maximalists, we are always ready to expand MELD services and operations after launch, depending on user demands and technological advancements of related ecosystems.
It feels that the roadmap update that was published in the beginning of October is quite aggressive and potentially too tight. When can we expect a revised roadmap which includes 31st Jan launch, as well as realistic velocity and some contingency. Do you already know which elements from Q4 & Q1 will need more time than initially anticipated? Is the plan to stay within current resource setup or do you need to recruit additional staff to deliver what's on the roadmap?
Hai: Yes we already have a revised version, most are push-backs instead of removing or adding items. We can deliver with the current team, but are still constantly scaling as we speak.
Hai: Yes, we'll definitely list MELD at Cardano native exchanges when both are ready. Ken: We do not have Kucoin confirmed as a CEX. We currently have FMFW, Bequant, Changelly, Changelly Pro, HitBTC and BitTrue confirmed. We are talking to other CEX as well. We have not received confirmation that KuCoin and Binance will support CNT. Also, we are looking into Gate.io.
Ken: Yes, we no less than 5 in discussions right now. One will be announced tomorrow and another will be next week.
Ken: We are not talking to any big mainstream banks. We are talking to 3 retail banks (and other commercial banks) right now. Banks are very slow and methodical. So we are also talking with EMI and other types of institutions. We are also considering investing in a bank as a strategic partner. These are all on the table. We should have some of these finalized and announced before the token launch. Other types of bank like institution is a major area of commercial focus for us right now.
Hai : We needed to focus on the work itself more than writing about it lately, as it did take 3-6 hours to write a technical report back then. Would take a lot more now with the grown team and more in-depth works. That said, with this latest delay, we hope we'll have more space to breathe and write more of these.
Ken: Our Quants are working hard on this now. We will also provide (at least) some details before the end of the ISPO. We are trying to finalize it in the fews days. We will share it as soon as humanly possible. We just need to verify some of the technical tasks before we commit to details. I can just say... the NFTs will only be for delegators of the ISPO and they will be some bad ass %$&#!
Hai: MELD is funding Hachi alone at the moment. But with several other works, we keep the MELD core to ourselves, and generalize tooling for a wider ecosystem. As we mentioned in the delay article. A Cardano gain is a MELD gain. A DeFi Cardano gain is also a MELD gain.
Regarding the consortium of stake pools that will be recognized by MELD for staking tracking after Dec 7th - Will MELD be targeting SPOs who were voted to participate in the SundaeSwap token distribution or any other partners offering native assets via ISPOs? It would be awesome to have proxy exposure to ISPOs!
Hai: We haven't finalized the details yet, but yes, we'll close all but one pool after the ISPO, and will suggests partner or friendly pools for delegators to head to.
Ken: YES! we will be coming the to the US in 2023. We want the entire ecosystem to be in place before we start to engage with Treasury and the SEC. But yes, the US is on our roadmap.
Hai: It has to do a lot with bank integration through the non-profit MELD Foundation, which is a gradual process to decentralize fiat transactions, and improve UX in general, bringing more crypto x fiat services to many more people. We have also been researching many new ways to do DeFi, especially on the UTxO ledger. If these researches blossom, we believe we can redefi DeFi. A quick hint is that the current account-based service-centric DeFi is very capital-inefficient. Assets are only liquid in one single service, and there are frictions to move assets around. Our decentralized economies should fix that.
Ken: Between 2 and 5 years depending on market conditions.
Hai: I think we are still finalizing the list. But overall we favor partner pools, projects we believe in, and the pools who have been working with and supporting us.
Hai: Nothing is finalized yet, but we should be able to use MELD to pay transaction fees once babel fees are stable. Use it to pay wrapping fees through bridges like ADAmatic, etc. The researchers are also designing an insurance model around the MELD token as well, we'll publish our designs when ready.
Ken: Yes, we will be supporting several stable coins and we will be connected to Polygon/Ethereum via ADAmatic bridge. Hai: Yes, while we already have a MELDed Fiat solution that offer efficient stable coins on Cardano. We are always open to more options to end users. At the moment our researchers do have Djed in their to-study backlog, for example.
Hai: For the mentioned scope for the first launch, no.
Ken: You can stake your MELD and get APY from it. You can leverage your existing digital assets and take out loans. You can provide assets to the Vaults and get APY. These are the main benefits.
Would multiple oracles enable parallel injections of outside data into the protocol? Therefore speeding up the process? Also would it potential be used to cross-reference each other to make sure the data that's being pulled in is as coherent as possible? Or might that actually cost an error in the protocol if the data isn't coherent? I guess it comes down to the underlying quality of the data that has been indexed from where the Oracles are actually pulling it from.
Hai: Yes. Yes. Yes. Probably not. We do have to semi-trust the data sources. That said, we do have our own mechanisms to prevent odd behaviors. For example, if the difference between multiple sources is unreasonably high, or if the current one is too far away from the last report, we may shortly freeze user interactions on our protocol-level.
So Ken Olling, I'm originally from Los Angeles. I'm a designer by profession and in 2010 I gave up the design carrier to go into technology/software development. So I’ve been working with software for a while now and my journey in tech has coincided with the development of Crypto and the Blockchain. I started working with blockchain in 2018 and have had an on-and-off relationship with it since then. I think the advent of DeFi really changed my perspective on what DLT tech can do. When DeFi came and offered a direct alternative to finance. This really fired me up as I've been thinking and working with some of these financial service problems for a long time. The ICO boom was exciting and really kicked off the "ideas" But DeFi has done the hard work of innovating and building the core tech. That's when I started to think about the bigger problems and how I can contribute to the innovation. You know innovation is a loaded word. In many cases, it doesn't really mean anything. But in the case of DeFi, there is really honest innovation happening. That's what attracted me to it.
I would say the biggest differentiator is our commitment to the DeFi space. We created MELD to meet the goals of DeFi which is trustless, decentralized, and non-custodial. As the saying goes. If you don’t hold the keys, the crypto is not yours. We wanted to make a protocol for lending and borrowing, not another closed, private solution. The current options out there are centralized, private. More like a classic bank. DeFi came about as an answer to Banks and MELD can be part of that answer. Our goal is to play nice in the DeFi space. Work with and add to other protocols. This is very different from the approach of Blockfi, Nexo etc.
We are working hard on a few key pieces of technology. One is for us is to get the MELDapp launched and the second is to complete as much of the lending/borrowing smart contracts as early as possible to start simulating and auditing them. The Dapp is key for us to that everyone can start to interact with the protocol. Because of my design background. We are going to try and solve one of the great problems in Crypto. Bad user experience! We expect the MELDapp will be amazing and beautiful. As a close second, we are working on bringing MELDed assets on the Cardano blockchain, naming ETH, BTC, and BNB. As part of this MELDing, we are also bringing USD and EUR stable coins into the fold. But this is core development. We have been working on something really special that should be very interesting to the people here. Creating a new type of fair launch of the token. This we call an ISPO or an Initial Stake Pool Offering. This is where people that want to be a part of MELD, get some MELD tokens. They can stake their ADA in our ISPO stake pool. MELD gets the ADA rewards and the delegators get MELD tokens!!! This is exciting because it costs nothing to get MELD tokens. You don't 'give' away or buy anything. You help the community. You help secure the blockchain and you get to be part of MELD! And just like a normal Cardano stake pool, you can undelegate anytime you want. We think this can be a great way to balance the private sale of tokens with the community. If you stake early, then you get more tokens than any of the private sale buyers.
The use case is simple. You have crypto, you don't want to sell. Tie those assets up into the MELD protocol with a smart contract and then you can get up to 50% of the value in Fiat currency. USD or EUR. You can avoid capital gains tax. Borrow against the Crypto and in most countries borrowing and paying interest is tax-deductible. So the end cost gets close to zero. once you pay off the fiat loan. The smart contract is completed and you get your crypto back. But we don't "take" the crypto. It's only tied up in a smart contract. This is a HUGE difference between us and our competitors.
Our goal is to be the banking stack on Cardano. Providing a protocol to the DeFi ecosystem. This includes loans from crypto to fiat as explained. It also included crypto to crypto because the infrastructure is there. We also see in the future the ability to bring liquidity from the bank side into crypto (because the infrastructure is there).
Currently, our ecosystem is moving pretty fast. When we talk to other projects and other institutions they all are interested in what MELD offers. Projects that deal with other problems like data see MELD as being able to offer bank-like services to their customers. These projects will use the MELD protocol, add something like a MELD button in their Dapp. This is what we want. We want to play nice in this space. Be part of the community. On the innovation side. we are working with lending and borrowing. People have been doing this for thousands of years. And DeFi is still innovating in the space! We are working on amazing products like self-paying loans! Like zero-interest loans. This kind of innovation does not happen in traditional finance or fintech. It's only happening here in DeFi. It's only happening because people on this AMA and in this space want to invest in this kind of massive innovation. They see the big upside. They see they can make a lot of money supporting these new tools. So as we dig deeper into the space we see more and more opportunities for innovation.
Yes, this is a very good question. Working with Fiat currency is tricky. Only part of what we do is fiat-based. In that, we are building an oracle to connect to the open banking protocol to "control" the fiat bank side. The bank side is managed by the MELD foundation. A non-profit that will be created to be governed by MELD token holders. NOT a central set of managers/shareholders. So we are building a bridge between the two worlds; fiat and crypto. Smart contracts are built for these types of cases. When a user wants a loan they lock up their crypto and borrow fiat against it. The smart contract will generate all of the necessary paperwork for that country. And the paperwork will be sent to their bank and be available in the MELDapp. There are limitations in some countries. Yes. In the beginning, we will not be offering loans in the US (for example). But we have our legal team handling this and we can offer this service in most countries. Where some of the issues come about is when you try to charge interest rates as Banks do with credit cards. But our goal is to be fair and transparent. Everything is visible and auditable in the blockchain. Nothing hidden. This bank, legal, and jurisdiction parts are managed by the MELD foundation. Holding the MELD token gives you the right to be a part of the governance of the foundation. When you borrow or lend on the protocol you are rewarded with MELD tokens. So we are trying to make the protocol participants play the biggest role in governing the protocol. We want the users to benefit the most from the protocol.
Yes, this is a fair launch issue. We have seen this in so many token launches. This is precisely why we came up with ISPO. These rewards people that might not have a lot of extra capital but have ADA they don't want to sell. The ISPO will limit what a whale can do in the initial sale process. Also with the private token sale, we have a 4% per month vesting limit. This includes all parties. the investors, the team, the advisors, the partners, etc. The only people with no vesting limits are the ISPO participants. We think the people that are there with us from the beginning should be rewarded the most.
We really the approach that Cardano has taken with the white papers, research, and peer review of their approach. Well thought through, and well-executed. And know we are seeing the benefit of their work. There are several products we are working on that could simply not be possible with other blockchains. But to be clear. We love ETH and BTC we are excited to be a part of ALL of DeFi. There are obvious elements too. speed and cost of transactions. We are not maximalists. But we want to be one of the leaders in the Cardano blockchain for bank services. The technical team has been contributing to the Cardano blockchain and Plutus for more than 3 years. So this commitment is not a new thing for us.
We see this as a critical need. People need money to live. By car, get married, etc. We want to make service part of the DeFi ecosystem. Not some institution you have to give up your keys for. As to the collateral point. Our biggest goal in the borrowing functionality is to minimize liquidations. Liquidations help no one. So we have set the LTV to 50% and in addition to that, we have a MELD staking pool that works as insurance against market volatility and other problems. As we evolve we will build more sophisticated risk management features to hedge against unexpected market events. You can see it in the flash crash a few weeks ago. These events can and will happen. We want to build a protocol that takes this into consideration and tries to protect users. If the LTV was lower than 50% then you could get liquidations en mass. This is both bad business and unhealthy for the protocol. But the DeFi space is constantly evolving and we might find a better way to address this issue in the future. MELD will continuously innovate with new solutions.
First of all, I can say, security is our #1 priority. With user experience a close second. Security on Cardano is a big focus we have because smart contracts have not yet been rolled out so no one knows what issues there might be. We will be cautious. We have a process in place to audit before, during, and after smart contracts are deployed. We do our own attacks against our own protocol and we have very talented security engineers and white hats. As for KYC, we only do KYC on lenders and borrowers. You do not need to do KYC unless you are lending and borrowing fiat. KYC is needed for the smart contract to generate all of the paperwork needed for the loans specific to each jurisdiction. Hacking is something we are very concerned about. Seeing the number of hacks that happen almost weekly tells you how much energy is being put into trying to break things. We are currently working on bringing freelance white hats to attach our system in an ad hoc manner. This means we will make ourselves a target to test the system without a script. These efforts will help to harden our protocol and instill trust. In the event of a hack, our risk oracle will be able to mitigate some parts of hack and we have insurance to support any possible losses that might occur. Regarding outside interference. having a protocol helps us avoid these kinds of problems. because it's decentralized, non-custodial, and trustless it's also very democratic and free. We want the protocol to be free of influence from politics and regulatory changes.
We have assembled a huge team of very well-respected advisors not only from the crypto space but also from the industry. These people have a long reputation and support our work. Please look at the background of the team and our advisors. We have people like Amit Pradhan he is one of the founders of the Silicon Valley Blockchain Society. Amit and the others are all very reputable.
We have no token burning plans. Our goal is long-term and not to try and artificially increase the token price in the short term. The MELD token will increase in value based on use and also the MELD token can be staked to earn revenue.
High returns come from the use of the protocol. MELD does not promise high returns, MELD promises a solution that is useful to anyone that holds crypto and plans to hodl. Product market fit is what we are offering and when you make a token/protocol useful then you can make it profitable.
We think Africa is an amazing market. This is also one of the factors that influenced our decision on using the Cardano blockchain. We have plans in Africa over the next year and we are actively negotiating with a partner to this. Expect big news in the next 3 months.
I can say that these values are the reason why we started MELD and why we think it will be successful. We believe that if we can achieve these goals we will be very profitable and become a major participant in the DeFi space.
Sure. My name is Ken Olling. I have a background in design, tech, and finance. More specifically working with how these three elements come together under a tech umbrella. MELD began early last year after seeing many of my friends that have been heavily investing in crypto. They saw their portfolios grow but they have no money to pay for normal everyday things. like a car or holiday. This got me thinking about how to fix this problem and I started to focus on DeFi in particular as this is the most exciting and dynamic part of crypto right now. (in my opinion). Then MELD was born out of this need. How you can take advantage of all of the value you have built-in crypto and see some of that in the fiat world. But doing it without having to sell your crypto and pay capital gains tax. With MELD you can collateralize your crypto assets into a smart contract and then borrow fiat against it. All of this is in the PROTOCOL not in a private system. We wanted to make it a protocol because, for me, it needed to be trustless, decentralized, and most importantly non-custodial. The reason none of my friends use Nexo or BlockFi or similar products is that you have to give up your keys. We decided early on that MELD needed to build on the promise and values of DeFi, not CeFi. Also, most of these other fiat lending platforms are US-based, and it can be very difficult or impossible to get through their US-oriented KYC. This is the start of the MELD protocol and from these ideas, we are building what is basically the banking stack for the Cardano blockchain.
MELD is built on the Cardano blockchain. We will launch at the same time as the Goguen hard fork. We want to be a key community contributor to DeFi space. We will be bringing MELDed assets from other blockchains to Cardano. mETH, mBTC, mBNB, mUSD and mEUR. The most unique part of the DeFi protocol bridge to traditional bank wire transactions (SEPA SWIFT). We are building a bank Oracle to manage the off-chain fiat assets and this is how to are able to service fiat loans and do it via a DeFi protocol. This means when someone makes a bank payment for a fiat loan, and this recorded and verified on the blockchain. We want the MELD protocol to be integrated into other projects as well. To this end, we are working with several projects both Cardano and Ethereum based. We really want to create new types of lending and borrowing products that are only doable in the DeFi space. Two of the big products we are working on that will be launched in 2022 are Self-paying loans and zero-interest loans.
This year we will be completing the development of the lending and borrowing smart contracts. The risk oracle and bank oracle. All of these are under heavy development. We have an amazing dev team based in Vietnam. They split their time doing core development on the MELD platform but they also contribute to the Cardano development and have done that for the last 3 years. Also, things we are working on that will probably the first to be released are MELDed (or wrapped) assets. Bringing over ETH as mETH and renBTC as mBTC and BNB as mBNB on and off of the Cardano blockchain. These MELDed assets are almost complete now and we will be testing them in the coming weeks. Also because Cardano is launching smart contract support soon, the team is very focused on security. Doing external audits and bringing in white hats to attach the system on the test net to explore and address possible vulnerabilities. So this is on the product side of things. We also have very unique and new things we are releasing this month! We are announcing the MELD ISPO or Initial stake pool offering! This is a way for ADA holders to delegate their ADA to the ISPO stake pool. Based on the amount and time to delegate to the ISPO stake pool, you will get Airdropped MELD tokens when we launch. With this ISPO, the community can participate in support the development of MELD but they don't have to "pay" anything to get MELD tokens. In the MELD ISPO stake pool, the rewards generated in the pool go to the development of the MELD protocol. We wanted to create this in order to 1) minimize the impact of whales 2) lets normal people be a part of, and benefit from MELD tokens 3) offer the same thing as we are offering in our private sale of tokens. An ISPO can only be done using the Cardano blockchain. It's a by-product of how the Cardano team has architected their system.
Like I said above, the Dev Team has been contributing to the core Cardano development over the past 3 years. They are all Haskell developments and know the ecosystem very well including Plutus and others. We saw this when we start to prototype the lending and borrowing. It took them 3 days to build the first proof of concept and we could all test it out. We are two oracles that are part of the protocol. One is for managing risk across the whole of the protocol and the other is to handle off-chain activity and verification. Building these oracles and working with other oracle tech stacks has been challenging but because we are so experienced with Cardano we can focus on new additions instead of having to learn Cardano from scratch.
Right now I'm in Zug Switzerland working on several partnerships that we hope to announce in the next few months. The roadmap is on track and is largely dependent on the Goguen hard fork. MELD will launch at the exact same time as the hard fork. Right now we are well ahead of schedule and doing refinement, testing, and security hardening on the protocol. This is partly why we can work both on MELD and help out with core Cardano development. There will be more than a sneak-peek this summer. We will be launching the first version of the MELDapp on iOS and Android. So people can create their wallets, and start interacting with the protocol even if the MELD token is not there yet. Also like I said We are launching the MELD ISPO on June 20th (this month). So anyone interested in participating in the ISPO can subscribe to updates at: https://meld.com/signup/
For us, we are building MELD for the long game. The discussion we have with investors and developers and partners is talking about MELD in 2024. We need the full potential of MELD happening in the short term with some of these really exciting lending/borrowing products. Like self-paying loans. But in the long term, the opportunity for MELD to integrate with institutions and create new products. In a bull market, people want to hodl. When they hodl they still need fiat. So we see MELD being able to bridge this gap in the bear market. Also, it's best to test your financial models in a bear market. If you can make money in a bear market, then you surely can in a bull. when the bear market comes, we will be focusing on making a faster, more efficient protocol and launching new product updates.
yes, this is a good point. This leads back to the earlier question about 2024. We see MELD can bank the unbanked as the protocol matures. Also because we are focusing on a very simple easy to use MELD Dapp will help non-crypto people to get into space quickly and with little hassle. We think of it in terms of internet adoption. As the market grows MELD can easily bridge this gap because it works in both fiat and crypto. We can be the bridge builder.
Super! it's very simple.
1) you add your crypto to the MELDapp or link to them via Metamask or similar.
2) Choose the terms of the loan you want. (duration, amount, etc.)
3) Do KYC based on the country where you are receiving the money.
4) Commit the loan contract
5) Wait for confirmation in the MELDapp that the money has been wried and the receiving bank has confirmed it.
6) Pay back your loan via the MELDapp or your banking app.
Everything is done on the MELDapp. You receive loan status, all of the paperwork specific to your jurisdiction, and you see how much you have been earning is MELD based on your collateral. You get MELD tokens as a reward for lending or borrowing on the platform. The MELD tokens can be staked in the MELD staking pool which provides insurance for the protocol. For this MELD shakers get 40% of all fees from the protocol. All of this is open, decentralized, and trustless.
We are looking into the possibility of NFTs as collateral but we don't have any plans for it now. Our focus is on being ultra-low risk. So we need to wait and see how NFTs evolve in the space. As to the loan rate models. Interest rates will vary based on different types of loans. If it's a self-paying loan the interest rate will be riser than normal loans. But zero interest loans obviously have no interest. At the LTV level. our loans will be built around 50% LTV for Crypto to fiat loans. And up to 90% LTV for some crypto to crypto loans. We are also working on ways to limit risk exposer through other hedging methods. As to the controls on lending and borrowing. These are defined in the protocol and the MELD token holders govern the protocol. So changed to these levels and controls can be modified by MIP (MELD important proposal). MIPs are then voted on by MELD holders using the MELDapp. If it passes the protocol is changed.
Yes, the best way to check our intentions is to take a look at the team and advisors’ backgrounds. We all have long histories working in many industries and have very serious reputations to uphold. We are not coming to this new to the world of business, tech, and finance. I've sold 2 companies. Many of the team sit on boards of respectable companies. Yes, we are going to be audited from an external body. Right now the trouble with an audit is that there are very few people out there that can audit the Cardano blockchain. but it will happen over the summer. An example: one of the founders and the president of the Silicon Blockchain Society (SVBS) Amit Pradhan is one of our Advisors. These type of people will not risk their reputation unless they know it's a real project and a real team of responsible people. SVBS is also the lead investor in MELD.
Yes! It's very simple a problem every person holding crypto has. "Borrow fiat against your crypto. Don't give up your keys"
This is one of the things we are most excited about MELD!!! You can stake MELD and you earn 40% of all the fees generated on the protocol. The more it's used the more you earn!
Defiantly 3 - Building Community Trust!
This is the primary reason we came up with the ISPO. To make it possible for normal people to get MELD tokens in the same way "elite investors" do. We want a fair launch!!!!! https://meld.com/signup/
We do not burn tokens because we don't want to artificially manipulate the price. We do have a buyback plan that will feed grants for devs to build on MELD.
So my name is Hai, CEO, and Co-Founder of MELD Labs. I'm an entrepreneur, system architect, and Blockchain engineer from Vietnam. I'm standing today for my partner, Ken Olling as he had a meeting with investors and the Cardano Foundation that came up. I started my career in C++ doing game development, which quickly evolved into AI engineering. For the past 4 years, I've been working on Blockchain technologies, especially with the Cardano Blockchain. Even though we're still just starting, we already have a very lovely team at MELD. We have top executives, legal and operational people to structure and plan the project and to make sure everything progresses accordingly. We have a passionate and dedicated core development team right here in Vietnam, with a focus on Blockchain and functional programming. The core development team has contributed to the Cardano and the wider Haskell ecosystem for many years. So this whole development work is not new to us. We also have wonderful investor relations and marketing who have connected us to the top guys in the scene, as well as scaling the community as we speak. Finally, we have world-class advisors in all relevant fields of the project. Our team is still growing very strong, as our goal is to not make something decent quick but to deliver the best DeFi products on the scene.
MELD's mission is to build DeFi products that level the playing field and create opportunities for the bottom 97% of the world's population. We want to provide financial freedom and control to the masses, including the unbanked. Our major product is a lending protocol, where borrowers can deposit crypto as collateral to borrow fiat to spend on their daily life. The platform is decentralized, trustless, well-designed, and super-efficient, which leads to products like a self-paying loan, where borrowers can yield farm on their crypto collateral. There are many different ways for users to benefit from our lending platform. Lenders can provide fiat to earn very high interests and yield. Borrowers have access to a self-paying loan that is tax-efficient, that can actually bring net profit to the borrowers. Traders are going to have deep liquidity pools to trade on. MELD holders can also stake MELD as insurance to the whole platform and receive protocol fees for it. We're still pushing for better designs to bring even more profits to users. Because, unlike the centralized lending services, we don't own the platform or pay the bills, our only focus is to optimize profits for everyone involved, to further develop and scale it.
MELD is building a decentralized, ethical and cost-efficient lending protocol that is community-driven, highly profitable, and intuitive to use. There are already crypto-to-fiat lending services out there. But they are centralized, inefficient, geographically limited, and don't have a low barrier of entry. For example, many services only support US users. MELD is different in that we're looking to support the masses, ready to go the extra mile to cover more jurisdictions, to not let anyone behind. We're fully decentralized and non-custodial. Transactions are transparent on the Blockchain, and assets are locked with smart contracts. Users don't have to give up their keys or send their assets to anyone to be able to borrow. We also have cheap transaction fees, are tax-efficient, capital-efficient, and fast. Thanks to the underlying Cardano Blockchain, and above all to our scientific approach to building products. We don't deliver sloppy products fast. We design very carefully to deliver the best products.
We've been working with top guys in the scene. One of our earlier collaborations is with Amit Pradhan, Chairman of the Silicon Valley Blockchain Society, which is a VC fund focusing solely on Blockchain. Through that, we've been able to connect to many different projects in the ecosystem. We've been in talks with Aave, Binance, Rainfall, ChainLink, Polygon, and more. Lately, we've also been working with the Cardano Foundation, mostly to prepare for our ISPO, where users can securely delegate ADA to our stake pools, to earn MELD! One of our stand-out traits is that we always play nice to the whole DeFi ecosystem. Not just on Cardano, but also on the other Blockchains. We're also developing MELDed assets, which wrap and represent tokens from other Blockchains like BTC, ETH, BNB on Cardano for compatibility with our smart contracts. So you can still hold your long position on your trusted token while borrowing fiat to spend. At the end of the day, we're here to MELD the on-chain (crypto) and the off-chain (fiat) worlds. And all the different Blockchains, protocols, and technologies together, to help build the best DeFi ecosystem for end users.
We're going to release the MELDApp to iOS, Android, and a Chrome Extension. My partner, Ken, is a world-class designer, who has to invent Web Responsive at Audi way back in 2001. Until now, he has won too many apps of the year awards for even his partner to remember. He might as well win one more with MELDApp 😉 The point is that we're going to deliver the most user-friendly and beautiful DeFi App/Wallet ever. We truly care. We are working hard on both on-chain smart contract design, and off-chain oracle components to embody all these complex processes behind just a few button clicks. For example, after the required KYC for fiat transactions, lenders can deposit fiat, borrowers can lock up crypto to receive fiat via wire through just a few button clicks. We also have a very low barrier of entry, our yield generation and liquidation systems are so efficient we don't even need to do credit checks on borrowers. So you can just download the App, verify your identity then everything is ready to go in a few clicks. For the more involved users, you can also stake MELD to provide insurance to the whole platform, join governance processes, and receive protocol fees as a reward. Again, easily done through the MELDApp!
Sure. You can check our Tokenomics design and distribution here: https://meld.gitbook.io/meld/tokenomics/meld-token
We were going to mint 4 billion tokens with deflationary mechanisms of buyback and unique liquidity pool traits. The actual number might raise to 4, as we've been receiving more and more demand from users and ISPO participants. We're going to have around 20% of tokens locked for the treasury. Team distribution is also vested through the years, to prove our commitment to the project.
You can join our ISPO fair launch program to earn MELD. You just have to delegate your ADA to our stake pool, securely through wallets like Daedalus and Yoroi. Your ADA won't leave your wallet and you can unstake anytime. You'll get airdropped MELD for how much staking reward you bring us through the process. You can find more information about the ISPO here: How to participate in the MELD ISPO (https://medium.com/meld-labs/how-to-participate-in-the-meld-ispo-39f665603256)Learn about MELD ISPO (https://medium.com/meld-labs/meld-initial-stakepool-offering-1ce37f203e06)ISPO Signup - https://meld.com/signup/
In the longer run, you can buy MELD on Binance and other exchanges. We're going to have deep liquidity pools powered by MELD for these efficient trades. If you already have MELD you can stake to get even more as a reward!
Security is indeed our most important factor when it comes to product development. We have qualified in-house security engineers, have been working with world-class security advisors, and are going to hire the best auditors in the field. We're doing very careful security design, operations, and implementation to secure all end users, devices, stake pool servers, cloud infrastructure, smart contracts, and economic models. We're constantly attacking ourselves to find vulnerabilities from attackers' perspectives. Are also subscribed to all the latest news, seminars, courses, and similar resources from top security researchers to always stay up-to-date. Our novel approaches to DeFi are not trivial to develop so we've been expecting challenges all the way. Nothing stands out though as we've always managed to progress, thanks to our passion, patience, and scientific processes.
No, we're MELDing the crypto world with the fiat world! Our users will get exposure to many classes of assets, both crypto, and fiat, both digital and physical. We're working with both crypto companies and real-world banks and foundations. We're doing all the dirty and hard work to bridge the two worlds. So yes, do expect the best DeFi services for both crypto and fiat from us. Hang tight!
Our number priority now is to keep leading on technological progress on Cardano. To complete our lending platform and MELDed assets to launch later this year, with the complete Alonzo hard fork of Cardano. We're also focusing on all the legal and operational procedures, to make sure with every step we make. And we can't stress enough the importance of the community, which our marketing team is working hard every day to expand and support. For 2022 we're going to complete and stabilize the first version of the whole platform. With all products and services well-proven in real life. To then focus on keep lowering the entry barrier, to make sure we're not missing any single one. We have a passionate and dedicated legal team, with bankers all over the world to speed up the process. On the product side, our development team is going to transition into a more hard-core R&D process, where we work hard on the next innovations. To show that we're true leaders, not followers. Nice leaders it is, as we're going to publish research papers to the most credible conferences, not just for peer-review from the best researchers, but to also share with the whole ecosystem the progress everyone benefits from. So by the end of 2022, we expect to cover most of the world with our crypto-to-fiat loans, build the best community that cares, and start the development of our revolutionary v2 of the platform.
Hi All. MELD came about from seeing a need in the market. I have a lot of friends that invest in crypto like everyone here. they have been investing for a long time. Normal people with normal jobs. But because they have been investing for so long they have amassed a large about of value in their portfolios. But they are all poor in the real world. Because they put any extra money into crypto. They believe and have been rewarded so far. I want to see if there was a way to fix this. There has to be a way to unlock some of this value. They couldn't go to BlockFi or Nexo because they are not based in the states and they didn't/couldn't pass KYC. So Hai (my co-founder and the CEO) and I wanted to build a protocol that made it possible to get fiat loans from locking crypto into a smart contract. We want to do this based on the values of DeFi. so it's open trustless, decentralized, and most importantly non-custodial. You don't have to give up your keys as you do with all of the other fiat lending products. This is how MELD came about. MELD is bridging the gap between fiat and crypto in the DeFi space. Hai and his team have been developing on Cardano and contributing to the Cardano source code for the past 3 years. So they were a perfect fit for this protocol.
MELD is built on Cardano and they really give us a great advantage in many ways. It also allows us to create some really interesting products in this space. we have an oracle bridge between the crypto world and fiat accounts. so we are able to record what happens in the fiat world into the blockchain. With this oracle, we can then offering loans and credit lines in fiat currency (USD and Euros) based on a person collateralizing their crypto. As part of this process, we are also bringing "MELDed" assets onto the Cardano blockchain. ETH > mETH. renBTC > mBTC. BNB > mBNB. mUSD and mEUR as well. these give us the flexibility to work all of the liquidity locked in ADA and bring even more liquidity to the Cardano ecosystem. Because we have this we can create really exciting new products like the "Genius" loan which is a self paying fiat loan. the longer the loan runs the more it pays off the principal until the loan is gone. we will also be offering ADA-backed loans to mUSD and mEUR. All of this is controlled with the MELDapp on iOS and Android and as a Chrome extension.
Sure. the tokenomics are pretty nice! When you use the MELD protocol you get MELD tokens as a reward. The earlier to use the protocol the bigger the rewards (then reduce over several years). MELD is used to mint mUSD, mEUR, and other MELDed tokens. But you can also Stake MELD in our protocol staking pool and if you that then you get 40% of all of the fees collected. These fees are paid out every day! The protocol is deflationary. We don't burn any tokens, but we don't mint any either. We do have a buyback plan which you read about on our website. The MELD token is also used as a governance token. Where you can vote on changes to the protocol MELD improvement proposals (MIP). The protocol is controlled by a Swiss foundation, so the people using the protocol determine how it evolves. This is a protocol, not a platform. So it is not centrally controlled anywhere or by anyone. When MELD launches In Q4 we will do a one-time genesis event of 4,000,000,000 tokens. On the Tokenomics point. We are doing a really new and very interesting thing to make the launch of MELD a fair launch project. We are doing what is called an ISPO - Initial Stake Pool Offering. If you have ADA, you can stake it in the MELD stake pools and you will get MELD rewards based on the amount and time you stake. You can Delegate your ADA at any time and can remove it at any time. There is no lock-in period. This is only possible to do on the Cardano blockchain with ADA. And we think it's an amazing and MUCH fairer way to offer MELD to the community. You keep all of your ADA. You pay for nothing, but because you support us you get MELD in return. The MELD ISPO will start July 1, if you are interested in joining please sign up for more info here. https://meld.com/signup/. ISPOs have never been done before. It's a completely new way of funding a project and we hope it's the future of Crypto projects.
We are doing a MELD token private sale. This is like any other crypto token private sale. But the special thing is that the ISPO participants get a better deal on MELD by staking their ADA than the private investors do. We really want to give the community the biggest chance to participate in the MELD protocol all along the way. This is how we envision a fair launch. MELD will launch with the launch of the Goguen hard fork. So our launch date is a bit flexible in that way. Before the office Token launch, we will be releasing the MELDapp so people can start interacting with the protocol and we can begin working, testing, and discussing with the community. Also before we launch we will be announcing several partnerships with several other protocols in DeFi. I'm writing this AMA from Zug Switzerland where I have been having meetings all week with several of them. We hope to hear what people thinking about the ISPO and this new way of launching a protocol.
Well, at launch we will start with MELDed Assets like mETH and mBTC. We will also have ADA>mUSD loans. Soon after that, we will begin with Fiat loans and credit lines (with Debit card). But in the long term, we see MELD the banking stack on Cardano bringing many of the services in banking to the DeFi space and being able to work with other DeFi protocol to create new products. MELD can be a new kind of financial Dapp and really think we can help bank the unbanked! I think we will see huge changed in the financial world and the full potential of MELD will come to light in 2024.
Cardano is [email protected][email protected]@! We started to develop on Cardano because of speed, and loan transaction costs and we really like the way it has evolved. But now that we are using it, we see many more benefits that allow us to do things and make products that can't be done on other Blockchains. We are very lucky to have chosen the way we did. One of the products we are working on now (it's not complete yet) is creating a self-paying fiat loan. A loan that pays itself off!!!! The fact that Cardano is new is good. It can learn from mistakes made in the past and address them at a fundamental level. BUT!!! We love Ethereum and Bitcoin and BSC. (and Polkadot)... We want to work with all of the blockchains out there. Cardano is the choice we have made, but it's not the only choice it's just our choice.
To date, we have the lending and borrowing smart contracts completed. This is for both crypto to fiat and crypto to crypto. We are soon ready to start testing our MELDed asset smart contracts and work has started on the MELDapp. The team is working on both the MELD protocol and also still contributing the Cardano core source code. Like I said earlier, we will be launching the MELDapp this summer and it will first support the creation of a wallet, and soon after we will support ERC20 and BTC as well as linking to Metamask. You will be able to follow your rewards from the ISPO in the MELDapp and give feedback to the team. Please join our community and we will give you regular updates as well as answer any questions as we progress. We will be sharing new app designs and the core functionality with the community to incorporate features everyone wants.
We think that what MELD has to offer "DeFi Crypto to Fiat loans" is needed. Everyone that's in crypto doesn't want to give up their positions. If you are able to Hodl and still get some of that value in fiat then it a win-win for everyone. If you sell your crypto for cash you pay capital gains tax. If you borrow against your crypto the interest on the loan is (in most cases) tax-deductible. This is missing the market now. Now, the only products require you to give up your keys. MELD does not. MELD is truly decentralized and non-custodial. When the bear market comes. People will not want to sell their positions. In the bear market, your ability to get some fiat for the value of your crypto will be even more important. Also, we are going to first on Cardano. We will have a first-mover advantage. We want to be the banking stake on Cardano. This will be a necessary service for many DeFi Protocols.
Right now we are focused on the development of the MELD protocol but in the future, we have several plans for supporting projects that want to build on MELD. We will be offering grants from the MELD foundation in 2022 and we have some additional news that will come out next month that will be very exciting around this topic.
Sure. this is a very good question. ISPOs are completely new. In Cardano, you are able to contribute to a Cardano stake pool. This is called delegating your ADA. You do not transfer any ADA to us. We will never ask for or accept any transfers. Delegating you're ADA to the MELD ISPO stake pools means you will be getting MELD rewards based on the amount and time you delegate. Rewards are calculated every 5 days and you will be able to follow exactly how much you have accrued on the MELD website and on MELDapp. The earlier and more to contribute the more MELD you are rewarded. Once you unstake your ADA, the MELD rewards stop accruing. But you will still receive MELD based on the time you deligated. The ISPO will run for 32 epochs or 160 days. At the end of the 160 days, all ADA will be undelegated back to their owner's wallets.
The reason we have created the MELD ISPO is to make MELD as fair a launch as possible. It's open to anyone and everyone. There is still a private sale, but the ISPO participants get a better deal on MELD than "elite investors"
This is a major concern with us as well. Our ISPO is completely transparent and open. we publish everything and the rewards are public as well. Regarding a rug pull please look at our team and advisors, we all have long careers and reputations in the business world. For example, Amit Pradhan is the founder and chairman of the Silicon Valley Blockchain Society. we work with people that see the value in MELD and know the background of the team. Our dev team is public, not hidden and we have been contributing to Cardano for years.
Yes, we work with fiat currency and this requires special considerations and working with topics like KYC and making sure all of the necessary documentation is in place to provide loans to people. Some of this we have built into the protocol; when you take out a fiat loan you do KYC for your country and the smart contract will generate the correct documents you need (and send them to your MELDapp) for the jurisdiction.
- 1.Arbitrage on fiat loans
- 2.APY on MELD liquidity pools
- 3.MELD staking rewards
- 4.Fees for functionality like MELDed assets (mBTC, mETH, mBNB, mUSD, mEUR)
My name is Hai, CEO and Co-Founder of MELD. I'm an entrepreneur, system architect and blockchain engineer from Vietnam. I started my career developing games in C++, which evolved quickly into AI engineering. Now for the past 4 years I've been focusing on Blockchain technologies, especially building financial instruments in decentralized, trustless and non-custodial ways.
MELD at its core is a concept, to blend the on-chain (crypto) and the off-chain (fiat) worlds together, as well as the many Blockchains and DeFi protocols. We at MELD Labs have been pushing this concept forward through the development of multiple products and services. The first being a self-paying loan protocol where you can deposit crypto as collateral to lend fiat to spend in your daily life. With efficient technical designs, the collateral can be yield farmed on to pay the interest. The loan is also tax efficient, with most borrowers having a net profit after the loan duration! This way users can still keep their long position on their growing crypto, while still have the fiat money to live their life. Another critical service is MELDed assets, where we allow people to bring and represent tokens from other chains like BTC, ETH and BNB to Cardano for these usage. This increases liquidity, and help people stay long in their crypto of choice, instead of forcing Cardano/ADA. So we're not maximalists, we contribute to the whole ecosystem from all angles, bringing the best our of every protocol and platform.
We have a very lovely team here at MELD. My partner, Ken, was the only designer in the team that invented Web Responsive at Audi in 2001. He has so many App of the Year awards I can't even remember, might as well have another with MELDApp 😉 With him, we're expecting to launch the most user-friendly and beautiful DeFi/Wallet App ever. User-experience is after all our second most critical factor, only slighly behind security. We're working extra hard to embody all complex processes behind a few button clicks for users. After all, the mission for MELD is to expose financial instruments to every single person out there, with any background, anywhere. Ken is also an inspiring entrepreneur who leads. We also have a very productive operations and legal team, to make sure we're solid with every step we make. And a dedicated investor relations and marketing team who has brought us many valuable partnerships, investors and still growing our community storng as we speak. At the core, we have passionate engineers who have been contributing to Cardano, as well as the wider Haskell ecosystem for years. Building DeFi protocols is not trivial, but we have the experience and above the passion, always ready to go the extra miles to build the best products. We do things very formally and carefully as well, we don't build good products, we only deploy great products. Have to also mention our world-class advisors, who have been critical in making sure we always go the right way. I was talking with a world-class well-known security researchers about building a new-gen auditing tools for Cardano smart contracts just 10 minutes before this AMA. We do have a great team and are still working hard to grow it further. Hang tight!
We're also taking this very seriously, going to release a 50-page Yellow paper on our Tokenomics/Economics model. Have been working with top Quants and Economists to make sure we have the best core design to build on. The MELD token will be used as incentives for different agents in the protocol. MELD holders can stake to provide insurance to the whole ecosystem, join governance processes as leaders, and earn even more MELD as reward! We also have deflationary mechanisms with buyback and unique liquidity pool designs, to make sure the token grows stably. We're also launching an ISPO campaign, where you can delegate ADA to our stake pools in a trustless and secure manner, to get MELD airdrop when we launch! We have no control over your delegated ADA, that you unstake anytime and still get airdrops for the staked duration.
Yes, definitely. As mentioned, our mission is to provide financial instruments to every single person out there, and that user experience is key. We're also decentralized, so unlike our centralized competitors who have to pay the bills to maintain the services, we can totally focus on the products and users, who matter most after all. First, we're going to be fully transparent, both for on-chain transactions and off-chain fiat transactions. The MELD Foundation that manages and handles the fiat transaction is non-profit, and publishes data for third-party auditors as well. So users can enjoy the financial services knowing that no-one will be powerful enough to screw them over by changing protocol parameters at their will. Or if a technical issue or bankruptcy will bring everyone down with the centralized company. We're also extremely transparent with our announcements, roadmap and partnerships. Going to publish source-code and research papers for peer-review and third pary audits as well. And one of our most asked internal questions has been "why would users use our protocol?" Well, for transparency, efficiency and of course for rewards! We have a huge treasury pool to incentivize early adopters. You earn MELD rewards for lending, borrowing, staking, and more. The early you participate the more you get! And once you get into the processes, the interest and yield you earn will be so great that you would not be able to find anything to complain about. We're also hardcore thinkers and developers, who are pushing all limits to bring better user experience to a wider audience. Already working with banks to potentially issue MELD Debit Cards that are compatible with all VISA-like systems. Imagine using a credit card backed by your crypto in your everyday life. What's not to like? Please join!
My partner Ken has registered meld.com since 1995! MELDing things together to bring the best our of both ends has been his, and eventually our obsession. Our lending protocol benefits both fiat and crypto users. Our MELDed Assets service will be compatible with most chains and their unique DeFi protocols. We bridge and bring the best out of all worlds. As we believe in collaboration, that fiat compliments crypto and vice-versa, all different chains with their unique traits should complement each other, not competing for the worse of all. We're also MELDing all the nations and working classes together under the same fair protocol. It's a lot of hard work, as tricky laws arise when we handle fiat, and things are different among jurisdictions and places. But unlike our centralized competitors who prefer the more local market to optimize corporate profits and minimize operational challenges. We're ready to do all the hard and dirty work required to make this happen. Because at the end of the day we're not paying the bills, there is no profit or cost to optimize, and that every single user of the Blockchain works and maintains all this together. So yes, let's start MELDing together, we need all of you!
To not repeat myself and bore our lovely audience here, I've introduced the team in an earlier question. To build on that, I'd like to talk more about our approach. First, aren't we all novices here? The stock and equity markets need hundreds of years to come into shape. Or have them!? And that is the beauty of it, to have more grounds for innovation. We look at guys like Aave for inspiration. They go from P2P lending to a lending pool model, from a solid v1 to an efficient v2, and there will be more. So the whole ecosystem being novel only means there are crazy innovations in the wild. And users benefit the most from them. The key difference is in attitude and passion. We choose Cardano because of their research-first and quality-driven approaches. We've been studying, researching and working hard in such ecosystem for years in preparation for this day. A friend once told me to draw a beautiful picture, ICO, get rich, and shoot for the best on Ethereum in 2017. It was interesting tech so I did try drawing a beautiful promise. And for some reasons people bought it, and asked for more. But I got scared, because I know I wouldn't be able to build those random dreams. So I dropped the project and started to read more research papers, and to hone my skills ever since. We've only announced to project to the public earlier this week, after months of preparation from a large team. Because we research, and pour our hearts into the project. So no quick juicy meme announcements, just formal work that reduces risks of failure. Just hang right there, we won't disappoint.
Cardano comes from research labs, with highly peer-reviewed research papers for their design. They do walk slower this way, but the end result is phenomenal. Cardano has very fast transaction speed, and very low transaction fees. They also have innovative features like babel fees, for users to pay transaction fees in other native token, like the MELD token, so MELD users don't have to hold ADA to use the protocol! Cardano also has a very well-designed staking mechanism, which generates a revenue stream from staked ADA, for more money streams to incentivize DeFi users. As well as enabling a totally secure and trustless funding model in our ISPO. For our outstanding features.
- 1.We are the first decentralized, trustless and non-custodial crypto-to-fiat lending system.
- 2.We are very efficient, in terms of capital, tax, transaction speed and fees, interest and yield.
- 3.We have the most user-friendly and beautiful DeFi/Wallet App in the MELDApp to help everyone seamlessly utilizes these financial instruments, without the need to understand or interact with concepts like liquidity pools. Just enjoy the experience and let the experts do their job there.
As mentioned, security is definitely our number one factor. We have qualified in-house security engineers, been working with world-class security researchers and going to hire the best auditors in the scene. We're doing very careful security design, operations, and implementation to secure all end users, devices, stake pool servers, cloud infrastructure, smart contracts and economic models. We're constantly attacking ourselves to find vulnerabilities from attackers' perspective. Also subscribed to all the latest news, seminars, courses and other resources from top security researchers to always stay up-to-date. Very serious stuff. Users don't have to do KYC to use crypto-only functionalities of the MELDApp. Only required for fiat services. And yes, we'll pay the top price for bug hunters, welcome!
First, we don't really care for our revenue, let's talk money stream for protocol users instead. We collect fees from trading fees (yield), loan interest, MELDing asset fees. We also have more streams from staking, etc. These are used to incentivize different agents of the protocol. All working and benefiting each other. Business development has gone well. Again, we have a very solid legal and operational team to make sure every single step we take is solid. We've partnered and been in talk with many projects and banks. One notable mention is the Silicon Valley Blockchain Society, a huge Blockchain VC that has invested, advised and connected us to many other awesome projects in the scene. My partner Ken is probably meeting with a Swiss bank as we speak. We truly value partnerships and are pushing even harder for more. At the end of the day we need many successful pieces in the whole space to work together to bring the best to our users. And we're MELDing all of them, crypto and fiat, Cardano and Ethereum, and a lot more.
Sure. nice to meet everyone. My name is Ken Olling and I'm one of the co-founders of MELD. MELD is building the banking stack on the Cardano blockchain. We are a team of 15 now and we are based all over the world. I'm based in Norway. Our engineering team is based in Vietnam and we have people in Canada, Switzerland, and the UK. Our team has been developing on Cardano for the past 3 years and has been contributing to the Cardano source for the same amount of time. MELD is building the ability to borrow fiat (USD and EUR) against crypto assets. This makes it possible to unlock some of the value people have collected in crypto and use it in the fiat world without having to sell your crypto. This has 2 major benefits. 1. you can keep your crypto and see it increase in value. 2. if you sell then you have to pay capital gains tax. So borrowing against it postpones the taxation. Also when you take out a loan then you can deduct the interest from your taxes (in most countries). We are focused very much on the DeFi space. MELD is fully decentralized and trustless. but most importantly we are non-custodial. We don't take the keys to your cryptos like other lending platforms like BlockFi and Nexo. Our focus is to service the markets outside of the US for now. 62 percent of crypto investors are outside of the US. And our competitors focus on the US market. Especially with their KYC process. We are based in Singapore and Switzerland.
MELD means to blend or to bring together. MELD is bringing the crypto and the fiat space together in a single DeFi protocol. I've been in tech for a very long time since 1994 and I got the domain name MELD back in 1995 (before domain names cost money). I've been holding it to since the and believe this is a very good use of the name and fits our goal. We want a virtual bridge between the crypto world and fiat currency. The only way to really do that is to bring them together. The fiat accounts need to be reflected on the blockchain if you are going to do fiat lending.
As to the nature of the loans. We will have several different types of loans for different types of borrowers. As a basis for crypto to fiat loans, you will need to have twice the amount of crypto as you will borrow in fiat. If you collateralize $100k in BTC then you can borrow $50k in USD. But we also have loan types that let you borrow 90% of the collateral value and take out a loan in the MELD stable coin mUSD. Our focus is to provide a low-risk model because we want to minimize possible liquidations of customer positions.
Yes, we have been developing MELD since the summer of 2020. We are currently under heavy development on the smart contracts for both lending and borrowing of both fiat and crypto and the code for wrapped (MELDed) assets for bringing BTC, ETH, and BNB onto the Cardano blockchain. We are also working hard on a Dapp for the MELD protocol. the mobile App will be on iOS, Android, and as a Chrome extension. So have a lot underway and still a lot to do. You can expect to get the first version of the MELDapp in the app store this summer. So users can start to interact with the protocol. The other big thing we are working on is the first ISPO. An initial stake pool offering. This is a new way for communities to fund projects on the Cardano blockchain. In the MELD ISPO people that hold ADA can delegate their ADA to our stake pool. When they do this then based on the amount and time you stake you will be rewarded MELD tokens when we launch. We think this is a very fair way to allow the community to help and support the development of the MELD protocol without having to buy the token. If a person participates in the MELD ISPO and they stake 100 ADA for the full ISPO time which is 32 Epoch or about 5 months. Then the person will be rewarded about 200 MELD and they get their ADA back as well. We think this is a very safe and fairway for the community to work with new protocols in a better way and they are also to 'vote' with their ADA which projects get the funding. The ISPO has never been done before and Cardano makes this possible.
First of all, it's important to state that we love Ethereum and BSC!!!! We considered both but in the end, Cardano just made more sense. The architecture is very modern and solves a lot of the challenges that Ethereum is working on now and we really want to have a fully decentralized platform. But after we chose Cardano and started developing the tokenomics for MELD with Cardano in mind, then the unique and powerful characteristics became much more clear. If we were not on Cardano we would not be able to do an ISPO. We would have to follow a more classic path of ISO or ICO. Also when we have been working on products there are some projects we are building that are only possible on Cardano like negative interest loans for example. In general, Cardano has been an enabling technology making new business possibilities and letting our team think outside of the box. This said we are bringing ETH over to the Cardano blockchain as well as BTC and BNB. So we want to play nice with the whole of the DeFi community. We are in discussions with protocols from 3 different blockchains to work with them and either provide services to them or bring their products to Cardano.
Yes, So this basically plays back into risk and risk management. With MELD we have a risk oracle this is designed to monitor the various characteristics of the market from the general market behavior to the lending, borrowing, and LPs on the MELD protocol. Putting all of this together and informing the protocol on how to adjust for the changes in the market. We also have MELD staking which acts as a kind of insurance against these forces such as market volatility and other by-products like an impermanent loss. The staking polls allow you to deposit MELD tokens and earn 40% of all of the fees generated on the protocol. In return, the stake MELD secures the protocol. When you lend or borrow on the platform you will receive MELD tokens as a reward. You can use these in the MELD LPs or stake them to get more MELD. Additionally, we will over time be building technology to hedge against big swings in the market like the flash crash a few weeks ago. In general, our goal is to demonstrate that the MELD protocol is a safe and stable way to lend and borrow in the Cardano ecosystem.
I think the first point to ring up here is to look at the team involved. You can look into our team and advisors and look into their backgrounds. Everyone has very public and well know histories and reputations they have put behind it. Our dev team is amazing, they have been contributing to the development of Cardano for the past 3 years. This is not something that we have started overnight. We will not be delivering all of the technology and all of the products from day 1. We will be rolling them out over the next 18 months. Our timeline goes out to 2024 and that has always been the case from day 1. If we want to get money quickly be a short-sighted project we could have built on ETH or BSC and already been in the market. We seed the long-term benefits on Cardano and want to a contributor to the DeFi world. This is in part why we are in so many discussions with other protocols. You can find our roadmap on our website to see where we are going over the next 2 years.
An ISPO is very simple. You delegate your ADA to the MELD ISPO stake pool and based on the amount of time and quantity of ADA you stake, you will receive MELD tokens as a reward. The longer you stake the more MELD you get. The stake pool opens on July 1 and closes on December 8. If you participate for the full period you will be rewarded approximately 2 MELD for each ADA staked.
My name is Hai, CEO and Co-Founder of MELD. I'm an entrepreneur, system architect and Blockchain engineer from Vietnam. I started my career developing games in C++, which quickly turned into AI engineering. For the past 4 years I've been working on Blockchain technologies and DeFi solutions, especially on the Cardano Blockchain. It is my true honor to represent the lovely team at MELD here today, we have the top people on all fronts. Can't wait to introduce MELD and the team more!
MELD at the core is a concept, to MELD things together to bring the best out of both ends. At MELD Labs we are developing Blockchain and DeFi solutions that MELD the crypto (on-chain) and the fiat (off-chain) worlds. As well as the many Blockchain and protocols together. We are not maximalists. We believe crypto compliments fiat, Cardano compliments Ethereum, and all that good stuff. Our leading product is lending protocol where people can deposit crypto as on-chain collateral, to borrow fiat straight to your bank account. So you can keep your long position on the crypto, while still having fiat to pay your daily expenses. Borrowers yield farm on their collateral to pay back the interest, hence the name of self-paying loan. Borrowers, and most agents in the protocol are also incentivized with MELD tokens on these actions, which can be staked to get even more MELD as reward. This provides both insurance for the whole protocol, and yet another revenue stream to pay back the loan. The loan is also tax efficient, leaving borrowers with a net positive after the loan duration in great market conditions! We also provide MELDed assets, to bring mBTC, mETH, mBNB, etc to Cardano, for borrowers to stay long on those tokens, while still enjoying the efficiency of Cardano. As I said, we're working hard to bring the best out of several worlds. To make both fiat, crypto, and all the different Blockchains shine and compliment each other.
Up till now, we've been able to assemble a great team that is still growing everyday. We have an inspiring operational and legal team who has been going the extra mile to make every step we take solid. We deliberately choose to work with fiat, which requires long and exhaustive legal procedures, to automate such the process for the end users. We have a dedicated investor relations and marketing team who have been able to secure many great partnerships, and growing our community as we speak. We have an experienced development team who have been contributing to Cardano and the wider Haskell ecosystem for many years. And also a world-class advisor team who helps us push hard on all fronts. Sharing the same critical mission to bring efficient financial instruments to the mass (97%+!), we've been working very hard to put the project on track. Unlike other projects, we spend weeks working on the design and White Paper that is close to 60 page long. Yet we're still making improvements everyday, like after working with the Cardano Foundation last week, to push 2 ISPO stake pools to 6, or to bring the LTV from 50% to 67-90%, etc. Also having top Quants working on the economics and tokenomics models, going to publish a detailed Yellow Paper for them as well. We choose Cardano because we believe in their research-first and product-driven approach. Been going that extra mile to ensure quality, not ICOing quick then wish for the best. We're also launching the ISPO, where you can stake ADA with us to get MELD airdrop. This is extremely secure and fair, nothing ever leaves your wallet! So delegate with us now to get MELD! On the development side, we've had our protocol design now with components being built and tested very carefully. We've actually been able to build a proof-of-concept for our lending protocol months ago, being leaders on the whole Cardano ecosystem. But attractive demos are purely not enough. We've been focusing on the hardcore design, implementation and verification of the smart contracts, that we want to make sure lead. Leaders, not followers. We've been in talks with a world-class security researcher (also top Ethereum auditor) for a while now and just today, we're agreeing to work together on the first analysis and auditing tools for smart contracts. We're going to fund the project, but release for free and open-source purposes and soon as possible. We always play nice with the ecosystem, especially for DeFi, where we need many successful lego components to benefit the end users. We have also been talking to IOHK directly and contributing to Plutus directly. With this new world-class security gig, we're going to push the whole ecosystem forward. There are also great progress with the MELDApp. We're going to launch later this year and it will be a crazy ride. We've been able to have a lot down, but it's still nothing compared to our potential and commitment. So hang tight, we'll get there together, thanks!
I have gone through the team so let's focus on our lovely name here. My partner, Ken, Chairman of MELD has registered meld.com since 1995! MELDing things together to bring the best out of both ends has been his, and eventually our obsession. Blockchain technology are no doubt revolutionary, as it should be. But for whatever reasons it has brought us so many unnecessary holy wars. Fiat vs Crypto. Bitcoin vs Ethereum. Ethereum vs Cardano. And what not. I think there are merits in dying for your own belief. But dismissing other options for the sake of yours, only leaves some people behind. The fact you don't need crypto doesn't mean others don't, the same story for fiat, BTC, ETH, ADA, and more. Our mission is to bring a diverse set of efficient financial instruments to the mass, like every single person out there. If you need fiat we bring you fiat, if you want to stay long on ETH we support ETH. MELD doesn't leave anyone behind. Some of our competitors operate on a single jurisdiction for the sake of simplicity. While we're willing to go the extra miles to make MELD documents legit and accepted everywhere. So yes, MELD means MELDing crypto and fiat, all the Blockchains, protocols, people, and working classes together. Fair game for all.
The truth is that we wake up every day feeling extremely lucky and proud, for working in DeFi. First, DeFi is extremely fair, transparent, with a very low barrier to entry. If we could (we will) deliver, we're exposing so much to the mass out there. Throughout the years, I've touched over a hundred of different software products. Nothing comes close to this level of reach and usability. Second, DeFi is still a baby when compared to the traditional finance system, which also took hundreds of years to stabilize (or has it!?). The field is filled with so much innovation and creativity it's scary. Every now and then we read a research paper that blows our mind. And not just research papers, Uniswap came out of an online post for an idea! We don't need a tiring legal process to bring DeFi products and services to live. If you're good, people are going to use it. If the product is legit, no one cares who the builder is. No boundaries. No "you need a PhD to innovate" bs. At the moment we still need to learn a lot from the proven and battle-tested protocols. But as first movers on Cardano, we can't wait until the date we release innovative things out there. And we're not going to keep things to ourselves. That is our approach, really, to play nice with the ecosystem. To contribute and collaborate, not to compete. Finally, as mentioned before, we're not bank killers. There are still certain time and certain places where banks are better than crypto for the people. So we're going to play nice with everyone, to make sure people have the right tool when they need it. Pushing hard both the crypto (DeFi) and fiat worlds now.
Just to clarify, we're not located in Oslo. That's where our lovely Chairman, CCO and CMO are. MELD is GLOBAL. We have the MELD Foundation in the Switzerland. MELD LABS the development company in Singapore. And key people all over the world. As mentioned before, our mission is to bring all these cool stuff to every single person. That's why we have Foundation in Switzerland, to play nice and get the advantages through the credible banks there. And a development firm in Singapore for their openness with regard to crypto. So we're going to hit Europe and Asia very hard! Where US competitors have neglected because they only want to play in their own playground, for efficiency, to dodge troubles. Or perhaps because they just don't care about the rest of the world. We on the other hand will go everywhere. At the end of the day where there is a Cardano node, MELD will be there. Screw us, it's all about the nodes and users!
Yes, staked MELD will be used as insurance for the whole protocol, and stakers get even more MELD as reward for it. MELD is also used in our single-sided liquidity pools to bring the risk our of the other side. In the long run, MELD holders will join to run the MELD Foundation! We're also designing a mechanism to reduce protocol fees for MELD stakers. But at the end of the day, MELD holders are the protocol owners, and hence MELD will be used as such. For protocol governance and insurance. The growth of MELD in all front will push the demand for it furiously. Please check our ISPO campaign if you want a secure and safe way to get MELD airdrop, by staking ADA with us.
Right at the moment we've partnered with the Silicon Valley Blockchain Society (our lead investor!) who is a big VC specialized in Blockchain technologies. Amit Pradhan — the SVBS Chairman is also our advisor. He has brought us partnership with Rainfall and many other projects in that huge ecosystem. We've also joined private conversations to work directly with IOHK and the Cardano Foundation. We've been talking to many DeFi projects on Cardano as well, for DEX, Oracle, StableCoin integration. We've also been in touch with many projects outside the Cardano ecosystem, like Polygon, ChainLink, Binance, Aave, etc. I'm not going to drop names here until we get the partnerships deeper, as to not over-hype the audience. But trust that due to our own and DeFi's natures, partnerships are survival requirements. We're going to announce publicly when fit.
We have a way more beautiful ISPO in place for fair and secure fund-raising.
There are many different ways to make a profit on MELD. As a lender, you can provide fiat or crypto to the lending pool to earn interest and yield. As a borrower you yield farm on your deposited crypto collateral to pay back the interest. So in a bullish market (why you stay long on the crypto) you're going to have a negative interest on your loan! You can also deposit assets to a stability pool to earn a net positive on a liquidation event. All these participation scenarios are further incentivized with MELD tokens from the treasury pool. That you can stake to earn even more MELD reward as a further revenue stream. Protocol fees mainly come from trading fees on our deep liquidity pools by traders, and MELDing fees on our MELDed asset service, in exchange for exposure to deep liquidity of a diverse of asset classes. So no it's not too good to be true, it's a well-designed protocol that benefits all users.
The first Insurance Pool question from all the AMAs that I've done. Impressive stuff, thank you for reading through our design! To be shamelessly honest, this is more or less our only creative design thus far. The rest are mainly optimized proven designs. So we do this very carefully. The insurance pool was first born to prevent impermanent loss on our liquidity pools. So we design a dedicated pool to fight against such odd. Still refining it as we speak. Another critical scenario is to insure against collateral liquidated at a low price, but we have a stability pool for it as well. Another scenario is when we liquidated collateral on the stability pool halves in price in a short amount of time, which really should not happen... But all in all, these are very extreme market conditions. And if we remove the stakers, the insurance pool is essentially a "treasury" pool where parts of protocol fees go there to provide insurance. So if the math is done right, stakers only go in to provide even more insurance, and take a part of those protocol fees as reward. We're going to publish a Yellow Paper for our economics and tokenonics that cover all these good stuff in details. With also hard-core third party audits.
We have deflationary mechanisms like buy back or burning the MELD token in our one-sided liquidity pools (on withdrawal) to keep the token valuable. But this is either algorithmic or driven by the community. We never burn tokens for the sake of attracting people, especially not investors.
My name is Hai, CEO and Co-Founder of MELD. I'm an entrepreneur, system architect and blockchain engineer from Vietnam. I started my career developing 3D games in C++, which quickly turned into AI engineering. For the past 4 years I've been focusing on Blockchain technologies and DeFi solutions, especially on the Cardano Blockchain. MELD at its core is a concept, to MELD things together to bring the best out of both ends. At the moment it's MELDing the crypto (on-chain) and the fiat (off-chain) worlds, the different Blockchains (Cardano, Ethereum, Binance, Bitcoin, Polkadot, etc) and different protocols there, as well as people of different working class and from different countries. We are not maximalists, we believe crypto compliments fiat an vice versa. Each Blockchain has its unique traits and audience. And we're working hard everything to bring the best from each one. To provide the end users with as many options as possible. The mission is to provide financial instruments to every single person out there. And we're going the extra mile to do it, by working with fiat globally. Our front product is a lending protocol where you can deposit crypto as collateral to borrow fiat directly to your bank account. In a decentralized, trustless and non-custodial way! This way you can still stay long on your crypto, and having fiat to pay daily expenses.
My partner, Ken, has registered meld.com since 1995! MELDing things to bring the best of both ends has been his, and eventually our obsession. The idea for MELD Labs came from various friends of us, who is crypto rich but cash poor. They don't want to cash out on their crypto that they want to stay long on. There are already crypto-to-fiat lending services but they are centralized, US-driven, and non-efficient. At MELD we have been starting with a Switzerland Foundation and a Singaporean development firm. We're ready to bring all this to the rest of the world, in an efficient and trustless way. So users don't have to give up their key, send the crypto to these centralized holdings and literally just wish for the best. Down the road, we have been coming up with more products and services. Like MELDed assets, that wrap tokens from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance to Cardano. So borrowers can stay long on their crypto of choice, while still enjoying Cardano efficiency. We don't force users to cash out on ETH and buy ADA for collateral, no. We keep adding more support for more use cases and options, you do what you want with your assets. And we also hope this harmonic approach would bring the different Blockchains together as well. Since we need all those collaborations to push the whole DeFi ecosystem, which we always play nice to and do our best to push forward.
We don't need our own Blockchain, we're starting to develop on the Cardano Blockchain. And with services like MELDed assets we're going to work directly with others like Ethereum, Binance, Polkadot and Bitcoin. For some technical specifications, let's say we're going to develop the core smart contracts in Plutus. With the most user-friendly and beautiful App in the MELDApp. My partner, Ken, was a designer for 20+ years before going full awesome with his entrepreneurial ventures. He was the only designer in the team that invented Web Responsive at Audi in 2001. Has also won many App of the Year awards, might as well hit another one with MELDApp 😉. Us engineers are going to support it by developing many off-chain oracle solutions to interface with the real world and banking APIs. We won't stop pushing these technical endeavors to embody all the complex processes behind a few button clicks for the user. For cross-chain services like the MELDed services, we develop on other chains as well. Basically going all the extra miles to produce the best user-experience.
Community is definitely very critical to us, and this includes all the involved people. We're MELDing everyone together and have to make sure no-one is more privileged than another. The first key is transparency. We don't hide things from people, not unless enforced by the law. We have a passionate and dedicated investor relations and marketing team who have been able to bring many awesome partnerships, and expanding the community in all front as we speak. Just like this session, we've been doing 2 AMAs a day to get in touch with the community. We'll soon start doing podcasts and even more, everything we can to bring the community together. We're also not centralized or operate in a single jurisdiction. We're GLOBAL, and so is our community, trust. And have been going that extra mile to work with people from everywhere, instead of staying tight in the US to dodge the troubles like many competitors out there. Just talked with a passionate person who went great length at the importance of delivering financial instruments to Africa right yesterday. Our leading service at the moment is a crypto-to-fiat lending protocol, where you can deposit your crypto to borrow fiat to spend on your daily expesnses. This helps users stay long on their crypto while still being able to live comfortably in the fiat world. Our system is so efficient that these loans have negative interest in most cases. As the collateral is going to be deposited into a liquidity pool for the borrowers to yield farm on trading fees. The loan is also tax and capital efficient! Trustless and non-custodial, your crypto is clearly locked on-chain, you don't have to send it to anyone for give up your keys.
First, we are decentralized, trustless and non-custodial. You don't have to send your collateral to us, or give us your keys. Everything is done through smart contracts in a transparent and secure way. Second, we don't lock ourselves down to a single jurisdiction. We're working hard to support as many jurisdictions and areas as possible. Going that extra mile to bring these financial instruments to the mass, instead of staying safely in the US like most competitors. Third, we are very efficient, both thanks to the underlying chain's traits and mostly for our research-first and more formal approaches when it comes to development. We don't build something quick, have some profits, become second-tier and run away in a short amount of time. We want to keep pushing the limits and stay top of the game. This leads to novel designs that make the system very efficient. For example, as we speak, we're developing a mUSD stablecoin that can fund itself, leading to an exceptionally high LTV, and little to no transaction fees for users. Finally, we play nice to the whole ecosystem, we're open not closed. We're going to publish our code and research papers. Not just for third-party peer review from the best in the scene, but to also contribute to the whole DeFi ecosystem. After all, we need several successful projects in the scene to bring the best out of each one.
Security is absolutely our number one aspect of the project, slightly above user experience. We have qualified in-house security engineers. Have been working with world-class security researchers to build the first analysis, auditing, and disassembling tools for Cardano smart contracts. Open-source and free! And still going to hire the top auditors in the scene for our products. We do very serious designs, operations, and implementation to secure all end users, devices, stake pools, cloud infrastructure, smart contracts and economic models. Constantly attacking ourselves to find vulnerabilities from attackers' perspective. Are also subscribed to news, workshops, seminars, courses and similar resources from top security researchers and engineers to always stay up-to-date. Very serious stuff.
The MELD token is a key component to the whole ecosystem. First it is used for governance, users who want to be involved and play a big role in the ecosystem need MELD to open new proposals and vote on others. Users can also stake MELD to the insurance pool to earn even more MELD as reward. This also provides insurance to the whole ecosystem against very bad market conditions. With enough stake users will also be part of the MELD Foundation! Under the hood the MELD token is also used to maintain our novel one-sided liquidity pools. With burning and buy-back deflationary mechanisms to maintain its value. We're also working on new designs to further utilize it, to reduce protocol fees for MELD stakers, for example. One thing we'd like to mention is our ISPO campaign. Which is a new way of fund-raising that is fair and secure for people. Basically you can stake ADA with us at our stake pools, through wallets like Daedalus and Yoroi that we can't control. This is totally trustless, with you not needing to send your assets anywhere, nothing leaves your wallet! The ADA rewards from staking stays with us, and you get MELD airdrop for it. You can unstake anytime and still get airdrop for the staked duration. Which is 1 ADA for 0.065 MELD per epoch. If you stake the whole 32 epochs you're going to get 2.08 MELD for each staked ADA. The campaign officially launches on July 1st. But you can already delegate today for even more bonus! We're also not cashing on the ADA rewards to crash the ADA price like what an ICO often does. We'll keep staking to help maintain the Blockchain, and gain even more rewards to fund the protocol on-chain, and head for more partnership and integration in the Cardano ecosystem. The key is to always stay long on ADA. Even when we need fiat, we're going to just deposit the ADA rewards as collateral to borrow fiat through our own MELD lending protocol!
Yes, we have many different mechanisms to create revenue stream for protocol users. Lenders can provide fund to the lending pool and earn interest from that. Borrowers can yield farm on their collateral. Liquidity providers can yield farm on their deposits. Most of these actions are also rewarded with the MELD token from the treasury pool, that users can further stake to earn even more MELD reward! As a decentralized protocol that doesn't have to pay maintenance bills like the centralized competitors, we do always look for designs that benefit users the most.
We don't want instant success, we want to go long-term hence have the ability to push both fronts. Both a novel product with no users, and a second-tier that doesn't do justice for its users sound bad to us. At the moment, we're both pushing the technology limit on Cardano and building the community. We have a strong development and a marketing team so trust we can do both in parallel.
Yeah, MELD labs was created last year to be able to build the banking stack on the Cardano Blockchain. We started in the area of Crypto to Fiat loans. The reason for this is that i saw a lot of people I know that invest in crypto have big portfolios but are unwilling to sell anything. As a result of them holding their long position you end up being crypto rich and cash pool. They see the big benefits of investing in crypto so they take everything they can invest. And there are a few products out in the market that lend USD for crypto but they are all centralized and US based. So most of my friends couldn't pass KYC because they are no American. Also most of my friends were very skeptical of giving centralized systems like BlockFi the keys to their crypto. So we built MELD. We want to make a fully DeFi based Crypto to fiat protocol that is decentralized, trustless AND non-custodial. When we started talking to people, investors and other people in the crypto space they all were very positive and off we went. Also Hai my co-founder is a long time blockchain developer having worked on many projects gave me the confidence we you actually deliver. So MELD Is based in Singapore, The team is all over the world and the Engineering is based in Vietnam.
The MELD protocol uses the MELD token. The total supply minted at the launch is 4,000,000,000. The token is deflationary in that we do not mint new tokens and we have a buyback model in place. The MELD token is used for the following functions.
- 1.It's used tp pay for functions on the protocol such as mints MELDed (wrapped) assets like mUSD and mETH.
- 2.Its used a governance token for proposing and voting on MIP (MELD improvement proposals). These include the ability to change interest rate and fee policies.
- 3.MELD can be staked in the MELD staking pools in order to secure the protocol from liquidity issues and impermanent loss. The Staked MELD earns yield in the form of 40% of all fees on the protocol.
- 4.MELD token can be used in the MELD Vaults (LPs) and applied to the single-sided LP in order to earn yield from transactions in the AMM.
about 20% of the MELD tokens are used for rewards. If you lend or borrow on the protocol then you will earn MELD tokens. 30% of the tokens will be used in the private sale. 17.5 go to the team. 7.5% go to the partnerships. and 20% go to the ISPO - Initial stake pool offering which I'll talk about later. In all cases except the ISPO. all tokens granted vest 4% per month. So as part of the tokenomics we have developed a very interesting way to get everyone involved in the MELD project. this is NOT an ICO but an ISPO. Or an initial stake pool offering. The basic idea is that you can stake your ADA in the MELD ISPO stake pool on the Cardano blockchain and based on how much and how long you stake you will be rewarded with MELD tokens. If you stake for the full period 32 epoch (1 epoch = 5 days) then 1 ADA staked will reward you about 2 MELD tokens. this is a unique way to let anyone participate in the MELD protocol and get MELD tokens without having to invest, they only stake. At the end of the ISPO or any time prior you can unstake your ADA. You will still get the rewards accrued to that point.
Sure. So the team is amazing. Hai and the engineers have been contributing to the Cardano core development for the past 3 years. They are all long time Haskell developers. Having worked on several blockchain and DeFi projects prior to MELD. We still contribute to Cardano even now. As to the road map. At this point we will be launching MELD in November or a little sooner. This depends on the Alonzo release of Cardano with support for Smart Contracts. We have already built the lending and borrowing smart contract system. Soon it will be time to test it and we are well under way with MELDed (wrapped) assets as well. We will be launching with mUSD, mEUR, mETH, mBTC and mBNB. We are in our second version of the proof-of-concept and working on some other very exciting products. We will be releasing our mobile app the MELDapp over the summer and users can start to interact with the protocol at this point.
At launch you will be able to use ADA, BTC, ETH, BNB, mUSD and mEUR. these can used as collateral for the loans. Then you can borrow USD or EUR in fiat. You can also just lend and borrow crypto. The interest rate models are still under development. I can say they will be controlled by the risk oracle and take many different criteria into account. These mechanics or some variables in them can be adjusted by voting on the changes. You bring your own assets as collateral. There is no direct cost of principal except as defined in the risk models that govern the protocol. Loans are for fix durations. While lines of credit or open-ended and you are only charged interest on the money used.
Yes, MELD Is built on Cardano and we are very happy about the choice we made. We are and will be bridging assets to and from Ethereum and others. We are currently in discussion about our first bridge to another blockchain to provide lending and borrowing functionality there. We love Ethereum, they have been an inspiration to the work we do. We will be bringing over first ETH and renBTC and then later more ERC20 based tokens. As to efficiency, we believe the way Cardano's architecture has been developed. It will provide the greatest amount of efficiency and flexibility over other chains. This said, we will work very hard to be a part of the DeFi community on the major chains noted in the question above.
We will begin doing other marketing efforts starting today including magazine interviews. Podcasts and participating in the community. We have community telegram groups popping up all over the world and we will help support those too. Additionally we will be doing online advertising and meeting the community as events.
MELD is a simple a powerful idea. unlocking the value of your crypto as a fiat loan so you can keep your crypto positions and still see the benefit (cash) of it. We are building a DeFi protocol in order to do this. There are projects that give fiat loans against crypto but they are all centralized and they require that you give up your keys. MELD is building a decentralized and trustless protocol where your crypto is locked in a smart contract. It's non-custodial. In this way we can build our service into other DeFi protocol and we can work like Money Lego's with the rest of the ecosystem. You interact with the MELD protocol via the MELDapp on iOS, Android and as a chrome extension. You will be able to link your Metamask to it or transfer crypto assets into it from BTC, ETH and BNB. You can then choose the terms of your loan and the protocol creates a smart contract. For fiat loans, once you complete the KYC then the money wired to your bank account. When you borrow against your crypto you have 2 major benefits. You don't pay capital gains tax. The interest on the loan is tax-deductible in most countries. So in real terms the loan is basically free and you can keep seeing the upside as the crypto price goes up. We also offer several other products as part of the lending and borrowing. We will be bringing wrapped or MELDed assets to the cardano network as mETH, mBTC, mBNB, mUSD and mEUR. It's a simple idea but because we are building the banking stack it touches on many areas.
We are decentralized. ALL of our competitors are centralized and mostly in the US. We are Singapore and Switzerland based. We are trustless. Only a fiat loan requires KYC. ALL of our competitors require their customers to meet US KYC regulations. We are non-custodial. All of our competitors require you to give up the keys to your crypto. We hate this. We are innovative. Our competitors offer fiat loans. We offer crypto to crypto and crypto to fiat loans. We will offer self paying loans where you only pay the interest and the loan will pay itself off! We will offer negative interest on ADA backed loans. We want to CHANGE the face of lending and borrowing not just do what has always been done for the past 3000 years. And we want to play nice in DeFi. We are currently negotiating on 5 different collaborations both in the Cardano blockchain but also in Ethereum. We want to work with everyone! These products are only possible because DeFi has been so innovative. We love DeFi. It will take over the financial world!
Offering negative interest rate loans! Imaging what banks will think? No KYC negative interest rate loan. Now that is new. I want our team to build the most honest and transparent AND PROFITABLE banking stack. I want us to demonstrate that you can treat your customers with respect and honesty and still make a lot of money. The MELD protocol generates cashflows from staking the MELD token. So the more people that use it the more you can earn in yield. On top of that we have the bridge between fiat and crypto so this means we can become a liquidity provider into the DeFi space by offering mUSD/mEUR stable coins backed by the fiat side. We see this as a single system. Not a platform a protocol. On the crypto side it is decentralized. That's a given in DeFi. But on the bank side it's also decentralized because the protocol can connect to many banks and financial institutions. We want the MELD protocol to attract banks based on the same values we have; secure, open, transparent and trustless. We are currently in discussions with 4 banks to do just this.
yes, we are working closely with Silicon Valley Blockchain Society (our lead investor) on marketing and strategic partnerships. Also We are in discussion with several protocol to offer lending and borrowing functionality to them and as stated above we are talking with several banks. I think the biggest marketing/awareness is our ISPO. MELD is going to be launching the worlds first ISPO or Initial Stake Poll Offering. This is a little like an ICO but it does cost the participants any money. You stake your ADA (Cardano) in the MELD ISPO stake pool and when you do that the MELD team gets the ADA rewards and you get MELD token rewards. This is a fundamentally new way of raising awareness and giving the community the ability to be apart of the project. You can stake for as long or short a time as you want and you earn MELD tokens based on the amount of time and quantity of ADA you stake (delegate). We believe that this is the future of crypto projects because it offers a safe, fair and crypto-centric way of showing your support for a protocol or project. We wanted to make it possible for anyone in the Cardano ecosystem to quickly and easily "vote" with their ADA. At the end of the ISPO which is 32 Epochs (1 Epoch is 5 days). Then the MELD tokens will be airdropped to the participating wallets. If you stake for the full ISPO period you are rewarded just over 2 MELD for every 1 ADA you stake. Stake 10,000 ADA, get rewarded 20,000 MELD Tokens. It's simple, easy and can only be achieved in the crypto space. We have received great response from the community so far. The ISPO starts on July 1. But people have already started staking their ADA. The first of 6 MELD ISPO stake pools have more than 1.5m ADA already!!!!
Our dev team has been working on/contributing to the Cardano blockchain for the past 3 years. They are still doing that but to a much smaller degree now that they are building MELD. We have build the borrowing and lending smart contracts and we are now doing heavy development on the MELDed assets. We will begin testing in the next 2 weeks. We are also under heavy development of the MELDapp. This will be the most amazing, most beautiful mobile wallet ever. I have 25 years experience in UX/UI and design. We are going to set the standard for easy to use in crypto. The MELDapp version 1 will come out over the summer. The MELD protocol will launch in November of this year. We might launch earlier if the Cardano Alonzo release happens earlier. Our goal is to launch with the release of Smart Contract support on Cardano. For us the sooner the better. We will also be doing our first audit in September.
The specifics of the interest rate is currently under heavy development. in our option it's better to have a higher interest rate that is tax-deductible and have the loan pay itself off. Rather than have a lower rate and you have to the loan down. This said, we will be offering both. The regular loan will be lower rate and the interest rate will be defined by the protocol in coordination with the risk Oracle. For the crypt to crypto loans I would say the rates will be super competitive in all cases except for ADA based collateral. ADA collateral will be zero APR or less.
The entire purpose of the ISPO is to be fair. There is no way to be more fair. In the ISPO we are offering a BETTER value for the MELD token than the private sale investors are getting. some of the investors have said they will join the ISPO as well as invest. But to answer the question. No, being apart of the ISPO has nothing to do with the private sale. If you want to inquire about the private sale you will need to do that through normal channels. The ISPO has 800,000,000 allocated for it for now. If we manage to fill all 6 ISPO staking pools then we will take 200,000,000 from the private sale and add it to the more staking pools. In a perfect world we would like to only do the ISPO. but because this is new we needed side less risk and we are doing both. If the community votes and says this is the way forward. We will follow. But it's simple. Private sale investors are paying money. ISPO participants are paying nothing.
Composability in the formal language for this. This basically means we build the protocol and necessary APIs that allow other project to call the lending, borrowing, MELDing and other features and use them as part of another product. Example, we are in dialog with a security protocol that want to be able to offer lending and borrowing in Q1 2022. They don't want to build it themselves. We will open our API to them and as a result they can offer specialized lending and borrowing products (on a different blockchain) and we get access to liquidity and user on a different part of the DeFi echo system. Money Legos was born from the Ethereum DeFi space. We love, respect and want to help expand these idea. MELD plays nice with others.
This is going to depend on our expenses and your investing approach. There are basically two ways to deal with this in on the MELD protocol. First you can lock up some of your crypto and take out a large loan to cover all possible expenses in the near future. You will have cash at hand but if you don't use all of the cash then you will be paying for unnecessary interest. Second you can take out a line-of-credit when you only pay interest on the amount you have borrowed and this is connected to a MELD debit card. If you HODL and need to buy something big like a house or a car then a loan is probably better. If you just want to have a backup incase of those unexpected problems we all run into, then it's probably better to get a line-of-credit.
AMA -
My name is Hai, CEO and Co-Founder of MELD. I'm an entrepreneur, system architect and Blockchain engineer from Vietnam. I started my career as a game development, which quickly turned into AI engineering. For the past 4 years I've been working on Blockchain and DeFi solutions, especially with the Cardano Blockchain. I've known crypto for a long time, but only started to follow and study formally in 2017, after getting to know Cardano and their research-driven approach. Now I'm working with other wonderful people at MELD to MELD the crypto (on-chain) world and the fiat (off-chain) world, as well as all the different Blockchains and protocols. For example with the MELD lending protocol you can deposit crypto as collateral to borrow fiat to spend on your daily expenses. In a totally decentralized, trustless and non-custodial way. Our system is also highly sufficient, to produce self-paying or negative interest loans, by creating revenue streams from the loan and collateral. Like through yield farming or staking. We still have a lot to tell, hang tight!
The idea came from an observation, that many people are crypto rich, but cash poor. These people, including our friends, still need fiat to spend on their daily life, but also don't want to lose their long position on the crypto. There are already crypto-to-fiat lending services, but they are centralized, inefficient, custodial and not easy to participate for most people due to legal and other issues. Ours are completely decentralized, efficient, non-custodial with a very low barrier to entry. We're going the extra mile to cover as many users as possible, not just stay safe in our own homeland. MELD at its core is a concept, about MELDing things together to bring the best out of both ends. And we're doing it here with the crypto and fiat worlds, and more!
We have a wonderful team at MELD that is continuously scaling. We have a dedicated operational and legal team that makes sure we make every step right. We have a passionate investor relations and marketing team who has brought many great partnerships, as well as tirelessly growing the community as we speak. At the core is an experienced team who has contributed to Cardano and the wider Haskell ecosystem in general for years. There are also world-class advisors in all front, whose experiences are priceless thus far. We've also been able to attract many great minds since announcing the project recently. For example, we've already gathered nearly 1.5m ADA delegated from the community before our ISPO campaign even launches. With new ideas being discussed every day. The DeFi is still a baby compared to its full potential. So it's hard to claim expertise this early on. But that also means there will be a lot more room for innovation. At the very least, we are bleeding every day to bring financial services to the mass, to every single one out there. We're not replacing fiat with crypto, Ethereum with Cardano, or anything. We're bringing everything together to compliment each other, then let the end-users choose what is best for them. And that, at the end of the day, is what matters most at the moment.
Our mission is to bring secure and efficient financial services to every single person out there. This includes innovating technologies. Building communities with compassion. And MELD everything together in harmony. We're not maximalists. We believe crypto compliments fiat and vice-versa. Different Blockchains have different advantages due to their traits. What we're looking most forward to is to innovate technologies and user experience, build lovely communities and MELD great platforms together. So the end-users can choose what is best for them, and that every single one will have their solid financial service of choice.
The protocol is under heavy development at the moment, with the first launch date in December this year. This includes MELDed services and parts if not all of the lending protocol. The MELDApp that acts as a wallet, and also an entry point to the protocol will be ready by then as well. The ISPO, a new secure and fair fund-raising campaign will run in 5 months towards launch. And a solid, collaborative and smooth community would then mark an awesome 2021 for us. For 2022 we're going to complete the first version of the whole ecosystem. As well as going those extra miles to make fiat available in more jurisdictions. Continue to expand the community. And transition into a dedicated R&D period, in preparation for an innovative v2. To prove that we're leaders, not followers. Nice leaders as well, as we're going to publish our code and research papers. Not just for third party peer-review from the best experts, but to also share all findings and innovations with the whole ecosystem. At the end of the day we need many winners to build a great ecosystem for the end-users. And that we always play nice to the whole community. In fact, MELD Labs might not be needed anymore in 5 years. As the MELD Protocol and Foundation will be fully decentralized, by the people, and for the people. MELD holders will be the owners of the whole package, for both on-chain and off-chain governance. Decentralization Baby!
As a decentralized project, we don't really generate revenues for us. Since we don't have to pay the bills with most infrastructure run by the community, we can focus on optimizing incentives for the users. Lenders will earn very good interest and yield for their investment. Borrowers can yield farm on or stake their collateral to create a revenue stream to self-pay the loan itself. This process is also very tax-efficient. Liquidity providers can yield farm on their deposit. And most protocol users like these will get MELD reward for their participation, which they can stake to earn even more MELD reward! Yield comes from trading fees, interest comes from borrowers and there are also protocol fees for services like MELDed assets. So this is not too good to be true, but a well-designed protocol that brings benefits to anyone. We've been doing well with partnerships with many projects in the scene. Our lead investor is Silicon Valley Blockchain Society, which is a VC specialized in Blockchain, partnerships from this front only are already huge. On the fiat side we've also been having huge progress with different banks to handle fiat. Our engineering team is at nearly 10 people now and is still going very strong. Might as well reach 30 by the end of the year, enough gunpowder to deliver the best stuff. This is not counting engineers from many partnerships. Like the ones who are working with us on the first analysis, auditing and disassembling tools for Cardano smart contracts.
Sure, we have certain advantages in this front since we also work with fiat. Lenders can lend fiat without having any crypto and earn interest on it. Before gradually getting deeper into this crypto world. We're going to also have a very intuitive App to help people get familiar with all these stuff. My partner, Ken, before becoming an awesome serial entrepreneurs was a designer for over 20 years. He was the only designer in the team that invented Web Responsive at Audi in 2001. Have won so many App of the Year I can't even remember, might as well hit another one with our MELDApp 😉. The point is that we're having all the expertise to deliver the most user-friendly and beautiful DeFi App ever. And we care a lot to do it. For example, we've also been working on off-chain Oracles and Bank APIs to make more seamless integration. Everything to embody all these complex processes under a few button clicks. Let the experts build and audit the product, and let the users enjoy their financial instruments of choice in joy! Do expect many more people walking into crypto through our bridge from the fiat world!
A lot of MELD tokens will be distributed right from the get-go to ISPO participants, stake ADA with us now to get MELD reward! As time goes by, team and pre-sale investors will vest more tokens into circulation. We also have a deep treasury pool to incentivize participants like lenders and borrowers. More MELD will be brought into the scene as more people use the protocol. MELD also fuels our single-sided liquidity pools. With buy back, burning and other deflationary mechanisms to maintain its value.
Security is indeed our most important factor. We have qualified in-house security engineers. Been working with world-class researchers to build the first analysis, auditing and disassembling tools for Cardano Smart Contracts. First, free, open-source. Also going the top auditing firms for our products and services. We do very dedicated designs, operations and implementation to secure all end devices, end-users, stake pools, cloud infrastructure, smart contract and economic models. Are also subscribed to news, seminars, courses, and other resources from top security researchers and engineers to always stay up-to-date. Very serious stuff. Absolutely top tier.
We're creating working products and services. We're running Cardano stake pools to help maintain the Cardano Blockchain itself. For now it's still small but very soon we're going to pledge and stake a lot of ADA for this cause. We also have credible partners, and also stay extremely transparent with our progress. The development team and private presale investors have to vest for years. We only airdrop in full to the community users to stake ADA with us during our ISPO. We're also going that extra miles to work with banks and different jurisdictions. Meme projects simply don't go that far. No point draining money early on expensive lawyers unless you're serious, and put money where your mouth is. But yes, at the end of the day, it's the products and services that count. Not just a crypto to send around for fun, but actual lending, borrowing, staking and governance applications.
So MELD is basically the banking stack on the Cardano blockchain. We are building lending and borrowing functionality and associated services in a decentralized and trustless manner. We are working toward a money lego's model on Cardano. Our protocol in decentralized and non-custodial. With MELD you can collateralize your crypto (ADA, BTC, ETH, BNB) and get fiat loans. You interact with the protocol via the MELDapp on iOS, Android or as a Chrome extension and set the terms of your loan then your crypto is locked into a smart contracts and the fiat is wired to your bank account in your chosen country. We started MELD because we saw lots of people had accumulated big crypto portfolios but were cash poor. They didn't want to hand over their keys to someone by BlockFi, Celsius or Nexo. We want to make s a truly trustless and decentralized protocol that is easy to use and built for an international investor. Not an American investor.
I think the most interesting features are two products we are working on. The first is a crypto to fiat loan we can a Genius loan. This is a loan that pays itself off. You take the loan like a normal loan but you only have to pay the interest on the fiat loan, not the principle. The principle is auto-paid off my the protocol so on average between 3 and 5 years (depending on market conditions) the loan will pay off the principle. And in most countries fiat loan interest payments are tax deductible so the loan is essentially free. The other product that's really interesting is an ADA backed loan that you can borrow mUSD stable coin against. In this loan you can take out up to 90% of the value of the collateral and interest rate on the loan is -1%. IT's a NEGATIVE interest loan!!!!! In addition to these really new products we are also innovating on the community side. MELD will begin the worlds first ISPO start July 1, 2021 in just 7 days. An ISPO is an Initial Stake Pool Offering. Think of it like an ICO meets staking. You can stake (delegate) ADA to the MELD ISPO stake pool and based on the time and amount you delegate, you get rewarded in MELD tokens as an airdrop. If you stake 100 ADA for the full ISPO period which is 32 Epoch (1 Epoch = 5 days) Then you will be rewarded 200 MELD tokens. You never buy anything. You are rewarded for your community support. In this way, we can get the whole of the Cardano community involved in the ISPO and support our development. We believe this is a much fairer way to launch a project. And the this is possible because we are on the Cardano blockchain. The ISPO doesn't start until July 1. But we have more than 1.5m ADA delegated already!!!!! We are super fired up about the ISPO
Balance. We want to bridge the gap between crypto and fiat. Doing it in a way that our users can keep their crypto positions. but get fiat (cash) for normal life events like buy a house or get marrieds. If you sell your crypto then 1. you don't benefit if it goes up and 2. you have to capital gains tax. If you borrow it, you don't pay capital gains and you can deduct the interest from the loan. Its a win/win for eveyone. Also we want to make it SUPER easy to do. if you get a fiat loan you need to do KYC for your country. Not for the US. and you are getting a crypto to crypto loan there is no KYC. Like what i said about the Genius loan and the -1% interest loan, we want to invent new and better financial products where we can make money and also provide good solutions. It needs to benefit both lenders and borrowers. We are also bringing MELDed (wrapped) assets to Cardano. We will be providing mETH, mBTC, mBNB, mUSD and mEUR. these are what we will start with and expand from there to offer a bridge into other blockchains.
No, our business model and plans are long term. We do not have a burn to make the price go up models. We do have a buyback plan. You can read about it in the Whitepaper. We want to be able to offer a strong, predictable and long term solution that users can count on. The token has other mechanics to make it scarce but through utility. You can stake the MELD token in our MELD vaults. The MELD stake pools provides insurance against unforeseen liquidity problems and impermanent loss. In return for providing this type of insurance on the protocol MELD stakers get 40% of all fees generated on the protocol. Additionally we will be offering LPs that we call MELD vaults. These are Single sided LPs with MELD on the other side. So you can add MELD to the LPs and get APY. So have several ways MELD holders can yield farm the token to gain APY which we hope will lock up more and more MELD to make it more scarce.
Security is the no1 goal for MELD. With that we are focusing on building, testing and simulating our smart contracts. We will be having an Audit done the protocol in September. the reason why we are waiting until then is that the Cardano smart contract support on the test net is still too young. We need the audit to happen in a realistic and mature environment. In addition to that we have 3 staging of simulation of smart contracts. First is redeployment with multi-actor simulation. second is on chain continuous auditing and finally we have data science based human auditing. We are not allowing any or all tokens/coins on the protocol because need to have a strong framework based on experience before we open it up to more than the 6 additional tokens. We have a Risk oracle that behaves like a witness node. and runs our risk modeling system across the protocol. The oracles operate to understand the state of the market, to understand the state of lending/borrowing, to understand LPs and staking and activate any necessary adjustments to the protocol it minimize exposer and hedge the positions the protocol manages. The biggest challenge we have is that Cardano smart contracts are so new. The our team (which has been contributing to the Cardano source for 3 years) is probably more knowledgeable that the Auditors at this point.
In a bear market people are in more need of cash than in a bull market. We expect the demand for our protocol to GO UP in the bare market. You can say no to a -1% interest loan when the market goes down. When it goes bear, many people hodl. When you hodl you still need to pay rent. MELD can help people get through the bear market without having to sell their crypto. Additionally we are looking at new markets. Areas where you have a lot of unbanked. Like easy Asia and Africa. We want to provide bank-like services and tools to these people. Our business plan is built toward 2024 and being able to be mature enough to offer a full range of services to the entire planet. Helping people run run MELD nodes around the world and earn from supporting the new world of finance in DeFI.
The MELD protocol will launch in November of this year. When we launch we will be offering MELDed assets, Lending and Borrowing, Support of ADA, BTC, ETH and BNB. As to the APR on the staking we are not sure yet. we need to run more complete simulations on it. All I can say there is that the shakers get 40% of all fees generated on the platform. We expect that to be a pretty big number. When we do release these numbers they will coincide with our simulation results. As the APR on loans. this will vary a great deal based on the type of loan. If it's a genius loan then the interest will be a little higher because it pays itself off. We have (as mentioned) negative interest rate loans. And then we have regular loans and a line-of-credit. What i can say is the interest rate will NOT be decided by us. The protocol will decide the interest rate and adjust it based on usage and risk. Then the community can introduce a MIP (MELD Improvement Proposal) to change that model and the community can vote on it.
- 1.MELD token represents total locked value on the protocol + future discounted cashflows from the LPs and Staking.
- 2.You can stake the MELD token and APY for securing the protocol. 40% of all fees.
- 3.You can use it in the MELD Vaults and get APY as a liquidity provider. This is 0.2%
- 4.You use the MELD token to vote on MIP and adjust the behavior of the protocol.
- 5.You can use MELD to mint MELDed Assets like mETH and mUSD.
So our main objective is to develop state-of-the-art DeFi solutions, with the mission to deliver them to every single person on Earth. We operate on both the crypto and fiat worlds. And unlike our competitors who mainly stay in one for simplicity, we operate in multiple jurisdictions. Truly going those extra miles to expose the financial instruments to every single person. No-one will be left behind just because they are not US citizens, or any such a condition.
Right now we've been able to establish a solid team that is still growing very strong. We have a leading operational and legal team that makes sure every single step we take is solid. We have dedicated investor relations and marketing team to secure valuable partnerships. and working day and night to expand and support the community as we speak. Also a very passionate development team who has been contributing to Cardano, and the wider Haskell ecosystem for many years. Have to also mention the many world-class advisors that have led us in all fronts. On the product side we've been making great progress with the MELDApp, the Lending protocol and the MELDed assets services. Ready to launch this December! We're also launching an ISPO campaign, where you can stake ADA with us to get MELD airdrops. This is a new way of fund-raising that is secure and fair, totally community-driven. Nothing ever leaves the participants' wallet, you can stake just 1 ADA and still get MELD with each Cardano epoch. You can also unstake anytime, all through standard wallets like Daedalus and Yoroi, things that we can't control. For the next year we're going to deploy the full ecosystem. Then keep on building the community, as well as supporting more jurisdiction. The development will go into R&D to prepare for a revolutionary v2. We want to be leaders, not followers.
The ISPO is a truly bless for the community and the protocol, all possible thanks to Cardano's staking mechanism. Participants can easily join with just 1 ADA and a wallet like Daedalus and Yoroi. No sign-up required. All data is completely transparent on the Blockchain. You stake with us we airdrop MELD to you, that's all. You can unstake anytime and still get the amount for staked duration, once we launch this December. If you stake with us right from the get-go then you'll get more than 2 MELD for each staked ADA. We officially launch the ISPO on July 1st, but have been able to attract over 60 early delegators already. Who will get the extra bonus that they deserve, you can go get some right now as well 😉 The current live stake is around 1.63m ADA, and do expect it to explode soon. As we've been able to attract the Cardano Foundation, and the many dedicated communities in the whole ecosystem. After the ISPO we'll lower the margin close to 0 for participants to get ADA rewards as usual. We also don't need to cash out on the ADA rewards, just keep staking to help maintain the Blockchain, and earn even more ADA. This way we always stay long on ADA, and have a huge net positive on the whole ecosystem.
We won't stop to innovate anytime soon. But let's start with our crypto-to-fiat lending protocol. Existing services are CeFi. We are working very hard to make ours DeFi. With a non-profit MELD Foundation to handle the fiat. That will be managed by MELD holders. Crypto operations are simply on-chain. Efficient, decentralized and non-custodial. Users never have to give up their keys or send their assets to anyone. We're also working on a negative interest stable coin design. And self-paying solutions. Constantly generating revenue streams from user assets. And since we're decentralized, we don't make us rich or have to pay the bills. Just working hard to optimize the users' benefit, and to build a stable and scalable ecosystem.
We allow lenders to provide fiat to our lending pool, and borrowers to borrow fiat from that using crypto as collateral. In the longer we'll also create a line of credit from the on-chain crypto, to fund a MELD Debit Card that is compatible with VISA and services like that! There are multiple issues when it comes to fiat, but our legal team and development are working very hard to reduce the pain for end users. You'll still have to do KYC and AML but once that's done, it's smooth sailing with our system being able to auto-generate paperwork and such! The MELD Foundation that manages fiat is non-profit, and has its data audited by third party entities. We're also working on many DAO, off-chain Oracle and multi-sig solutions to make sure everything is centralized. And that no-one is powerful enough to change the protocol up-side-down at will. Finally, our interest, yield and revenue streams are very high, thanks to Cardano's well researched and designed features. They are way higher than the inflation rate. Fiat lenders and borrowers will also get rewarded MELD tokens for their participation in the protocol. Which they can stake to get even more MELD as reward. Yet another revenue stream!
Our safe answer at the moment is 50% LTV, which means if you deposit $1000 in crypto you get an instant loan of $500 in fiat, wired directly to your bank account. That said, we've been working on some novel approaches that would raise the LTV to 67%-91%. Based on both proven approaches on Ethereum, further optimized with Cardano efficiency. Loan periods can be long, like 3-6 years. But you can also repay early. We are extremely flexible as a decentralized protocol. And the beauty of our protocol is that it has a extremely low barrier to entry. Just KYC/AML, no credit-check! Our system is so efficient that it could semi-auto handle risk in most cases. No need to raise the barrier just to protect themselves like the centralized alternatives. With Atala Prism, Rainfall, and projects like that going around. We'll just keep expanding and expanding, jurisdictions after jurisdictions. Until we cover every single one who has an identity.
Security is definitely our most important factor. We have qualified in-house security engineers. Have been working with world-class security researchers to build the first analysis, auditing, and disassembling tools for Cardano smart contracts. Also going to hire the top third party auditors in the scene for our products and services. Working hard on serious designs, operations and implementation to secure all end users, end devices, stake pools, cloud infrastructure, smart contracts and economic models. Also subscribed to the latest news, seminars, courses and similar resources from top security researchers to always stay up-to-date. Very serious endeavor.
MELD at the core is a concept, to MELD things together to bring the best out of both ends. For example, we're developing a crypto-to-fiat lending protocol that exposes the best out of both fiat and crypto to the end users. One can deposit crypto as collateral to borrow fiat to spend in their daily life. So that they can stay long on their crypto investment but still have the convenience of fiat. This is also extremely tax-efficient. As cashing out on any token, like a USD stablecoin risks a capital gain tax event. While borrowing fiat against collateral isn't, with the fiat loan interest being tax-deductible in many jurisdictions. We are also decentralized, trustless and non-custodial. With a non-profit MELD Foundation to handle fiat, with transparent ledger for third party audit. Both the protocol and the MELD Foundation will be managed by MELD holders. So think Aave, Compound but more tax efficient and automation when users need fiat. Think Nexo, BlockFi but decentralized and more efficient. People don't have to give up their keys when coming to the MELD protocol. We also have interoperability solutions like the MELDed Assets like mBTC, mETH, etc. To bring other tokens to the Cardano Blockchain and be compatible with the MELD protocol. So people can stay long on their crypto of choice, with more liquidity flowing into Cardano as well! We still have a more ambition to share.
Oops, I think I got too passionate and answer deep into this question through the previous! To top that, I'll say that our mission is to bring secure and efficient services to the mass, and by that I mean every single person out there. So the first point is that the services have to be diverse, hence different users can select what is most suitable for them. That is why we offer both crypto and fiat services. With services that utilize both like the crypto-to-fiat services. The second point is that we have to keep the barrier to entry low. And cover most if not all jurisdictions. For now fiat services still require very heavy paperwork, licenses and permissions, which also differ among jurisdictions. But we're ready to go that long road to unlock one by one. To truly deliver a decentralized and efficient protocol that every single one out there can join. For services users can provide liquidity as lenders to earn interest and yield. Borrowers can borrow fiat while staying long on their crypto, with negative interest loans that pay itself. We also have MELDed assets that bring crypto from other chains to Cardano so people can stay long on their crypto of choice in the MELD ecosystem. We also have an ADA-backed negative interest mUSD/mEUR service. And many other crypto-only services as well. We won't stop innovating any time soon, to make sure anybody can find their service that benefits them the most.
For services users can provide liquidity as lenders to earn interest and yield. Borrowers can borrow fiat while staying long on their crypto, with negative interest loans that pay itself. We also have MELDed assets that bring crypto from other chains to Cardano so people can stay long on their crypto of choice in the MELD ecosystem. An ADA-backed negative interest mUSD/mEUR service. And many other crypto-only services as well. We won't stop innovating any time soon, to make sure anybody can find their service that benefits them the most.
We have high interest and yield to attract lenders providing liquidity into our lending pool. We've already attracted many lenders, with an expectation to launch the lending service with a lending pool of at least $20m. And as the protocol matures and gets more proven, lenders will just keep coming. We can also solve a few restrictions, for example we can offer yield-only lending solutions. As Sharia law forbids loans with interest. Such approach attracts many great banks from the Middle East. We also have MELDed Assets to bring other tokens from different chains to Cardano, hence more liquidity on the crypto side as well. Our deep liquidity pools are funded by big collateral, hence more liquidity for traders, which in turn means more trading fees and yield for both lenders and borrowers. For security, it is definitely our number one concern. We have qualified in-house security engineers (still recruiting aggressively!). Have been working with world-class security researchers and engineers to build the first analysis, auditing, and disassembling tools for Cardano smart contracts. Also going to hire the top third party auditors in the scene for our products and services. Aggressively attacking our own models to find vulnerabilities from attackers' perspective as well. We work hard on serious designs, operations and implementation to secure all end users, end devices, stake pools, cloud infrastructure, smart contracts and economic models. Also subscribed to the latest news, seminars, courses and similar resources from top security researchers to always stay up-to-date. A very serious endeavor.
We are very ambitious, with high-level roadmap till 2025 already. Hence also more smaller milestones along the way. Until now everything has gone according to plan. With a rather successful ISPO. Today is only the 6th day of a 5-month long campaign, but we've been delegated nearly $200m worth of ADA from the community. Fund-raising is going well, with many world-class, industry leaders joining the advisory board. We're going to have press releases about them soon! The development team and the community team are also scaling organically. There are still bumps along the way, but we've been able to thrive in an open field with no dead end insight! That said, we do expect certain difficulties in the future. First is that it's non-trivial to support fiat operations, especially at large scale, in many jurisdictions, with a crypto-related protocol as a cherry on top. So we anticipate certain delays that arise when working with new jurisdictions and banks. In preparation, our investor relations have been working hard to secure many world-class advisors and partners in the field. To speed these procedures up with their reputation, expertise and connections. Another difficulty comes from the fact that Smart Contracts haven't gone live to the Cardano Blockchain yet. So our roadmap might get pushed if there are further delays there. But that also means more time to refine our design and products. In summary, things have gone well so far and we are still speeding up. Nothing to worry about, we're ready to sprint for years!
Aave and Compound have decentralized, trustless and non-custodial lending protocols as well. But they don't operate in fiat. When people need fiat, our solution is very tax-efficient. No capital gain tax when compared to cashing out on a token like USDT. With fiat loan interest being tax-deductible in most jurisdictions. We are very autonomous as well, so people don't have to cash things out and do fiat paperwork themselves. MELD can automatically wire the loan and generate fiat paperwork. Nexo and BlockFi also have crypto-to-fiat lending. But they are centralized, operate in one single jurisdiction with a higher barrier to entry. We are decentralized, trustless and non-custodial that people don't have to give up their key. We want to cover the whole world, with a lower barrier to entry as well. The mindset is also completely different. Centralized companies focus on corporate profit. The MELD protocol and non-profit MELD Foundation just focus on the users' profit. And yes, we do require KYC/AML for fiat operations. We don't require that for the many crypto-only services. For crypto we're going to support ADA, BTC, ETH, BNB, and more. For fiat we start with USD and EUR, but should be able to support more with time as well.
Yes, community is king for decentralized projects like ours. We have a huge plan to grow the community, with both fun/dynamic and professional/classy solutions. We do have a very wonderful marketing team with many creative ideas. I have many dope ideas to share right now but let's keep it for the surprise and all. But let's say we're going to keep upping the game to enhance connection with the community. Another important thing to note is that we are ambitious and go long-term. The fun is needed. But we want to stay at a professional level to make sure the MELD protocol is still the focus. And that the development team and the community should grow organically together to understand and embrace each other better. And yes we're still recruiting like crazy and not going to stop any time soon. And we do select the best crops, with 4 rounds of interview for key engineering roles for example. If you love what we do send us your CV now!!
First, we go long-term. Our ambition is to cover the whole world with secure and efficient financial services based on and around the MELD protocol. We do both crypto, and especially fiat for all jurisdictions. With a huge backlog of innovative ideas to push for the many years to come. With such a hardcore road map, any short bearish season should statistically not hurt us much. To further prevent risk for MELD holders, we design the MELD token so that it is most valuable when being staked. For the holders to join governance processes and receive a cut from the real time protocol fees. So when the market has a hard time, holders can still stake MELD for profit. We also focus on a state-of-the-art liquidation system. That only liquidates at the lowest ratio possible (109% or even lower) to avoid liquidation risks for borrowers. And so efficient that the penalty is minimal, while the liquidators still have a net profit. In summary, we go long term and have all the strategies to avoid short term bearish seasons.
There isn't really a minimal amount when it comes to voting. The more you stake the louder the voice, but you don't have to reach any threshold to have a voice. The staked MELD tokens are also used as insurance for the protocol, to fight LP impermanent loss and other market conditions. For that, MELD stakers earn a share of the real time protocol fees. So at its core the MELD token is a utility token for protocol governance and insurance. In the future, MELD stakers will not just manage the protocol. They will also manage the MELD DAO, and the MELD Foundation!
The MELD token's value lies in its utility in the ecosystem. Holders can stake it to earn protocol fees. As well as having a voice in the protocol, the DAO and the non-profit MELD Foundation. As the ecosystem matures with many more products and services, the demand for such voice would definitely rise. As well as the ability to earn protocol fees. The staked MELD token also provides insurance, and balances our one-sided liquidity pools. Holding the MELD in the long run means you can earn a lot from protocol fees, and join governance processes at each step. To see its demand, hence its value grows with time as well. For achievements I think we can mention our ISPO campaign. Today is only the 6th day in our 5 month long campaign but we've got around $200m worth of ADA delegated.
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