Melon & M-1
In February Melonport (the for-profit entity that built the protocol in the last two years) wound down and, at a keystroke, the Melon protocol became decentralised. The Melon Council is now overseeing the governance, management and promotion of the Melon protocol (think Linux Foundation for Linux). The old Melonport team only have a single seat on the table of eight. At the annual Melon conference M-1, we were very proud to be announced as Melon Council members! Janos will be representing.
Committee members in the Melon Council will have the opportunity to vote when it comes to matters such as being able to invite new members into the council, being able to adequately update the Melon protocol smart contracts, appropriately adjusting the ‘amgu’(Asset Management Gas Units) price, updating protocol parameters and many more, thus a super important role in the Ecosystem. Apart from Janos, the Melon Council features Will Harborne from Ethfinex, Melon code auditor Nick Munoz-McDonald, Matthew Di Ferrante from ZK Labs, Zahreddine Touag from Woorton, Martin Lundfall from Maker & Dapphub, Fabian Gompf from Parity and Jenna Zenk for the new Melon team entity (something is in the works there!).
The Melon committee was announced at the annual Melon Asset Management conference, M-1 which was held in Zug, Switzerland in partnership with the Multichain Asset Managers Association (MAMA). There were lots of presentations and panels discussing the future of digital asset management, asset trading and asset custody. If you are KR1 follower, you will know we were the first investors to support Melon and their vision with one of our first investments ever made as an entity.
The M-1 event showcased an all-star cast in an intimate setting with world-class discussions around asset management and it’s future. KR1’s Janos took part in a panel of “Who is pioneering investments in crypto and what will it take for them to transition their own operations and trading to asset management 3.0”. Joining the panel were Chance Du from Coefficient Ventures, Russell Newton from GABI and Jonathan Allen from Dekrypt Capital.
Another KR1 portfolio company had a panel slot as well, Seb from Vo1t was talking about the roles of digital asset custodians with Zare from Woorton.
Ethereum co-founder and Polkadot founder Gavin Wood gave an update on Polkadot’s Substrate and revealed the cryptoeconomic model for Polkadot. It was great to have more information on the levers behind the protocol, which if on schedule will have its Genesis block Q4 this year.
Oh, before we move on to the next topic, Melon 1.0 is now live on the Ethereum mainnet. Go and check it out!
Ethereum Upgrade
Ethereum’s Constantinople hard fork went smoothly (yay!) after a couple of postponements late last year and in January. Miner block rewards reduced from 3 ETH to 2 ETH, making mining Ether even less profitable and putting some more pressure on the supply issuance. The road to ETH 2.0 is now fully underway!
KR1 in the media
We were quoted in an article discussing the BitMEX report on Crypto Briefing. The BitMEX report examines the potential drivers of the next financial crash and what role Bitcoin and crypto could play. The report highlights that risk has shifted from retail banking deposits to potentially highly-leveraged debt vehicles.
Keld van Schreven, Co-Founder at KR1, agrees with the premise of the BitMEX report but emphasised to Crypto Briefing that Bitcoin may become an alternative monetary system, against failing fiat currencies.
“In Venezuela, the use of Bitcoin has gone up to $81 million a year,” van Schreven wrote in an email. “Consider that less than three years ago Venezuela’s volume was less than 1% of what it is now, around 800k. That’s a massive increase.”
“This is real use and more than just a hedge against a recession but a parallel money system. There are many factors at play in Bitcoin’s price movements, but this is just one.”
KRYPTONIGHT LONDON
We hosted another of our (infrequent!) KRYPTONIGHT LONDON meetups and had some world class London-based projects present onstage.
Argent
Itamar Lesuisse from Argent presented the “first smart wallet for Ethereum-based cryptocurrencies and apps”, now in beta, which had never been seen before (join the queue here iOS and Android).
We seed funded Argent as the only crypto fund participating with some world-class VCs like Index, Creandum and Firstminute Capital.
Watch Itamar’s Argent presentation in the video below.
Watch Keld interview Itamar during the Meetup.
Aztec Protocol
We were also honoured to welcome Zac Williamson and Tom Pocock from Aztec Protocol, which is helping with shielding data in Ethereum smart contracts using mystical zero-knowledge proofs or in their own words “uses cutting-edge zero-knowledge proofs to enable private transactions on Ethereum. This enables the logic of transactions to be validated, whilst keeping the values encrypted.” Aztech is famous for even getting Vitalik’s attention about their live deployment and working solution right now on the mainnet.
Watch them below.
Vega Protocol
Barney Mannerings from Vega Protocol also presented. Vega is a decentralised financial derivatives and liquidity protocol allowing any market to be created and traded. In their own words, “open and decentralise markets, by fully automating the processes and incentives for trading and settling financial products, in a trust-minimising distributed network of pseudonymous participants”.
Watch the video here.
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KR1 is Europe’s leading digital asset investment company supporting early-stage decentralised and open source blockchain projects. Founded in 2016, KR1 has been a notable first investor in many key projects that will power the decentralised assets, platforms and protocols that form the emerging Web3 infrastructure.
In the spirit of the open and decentralised movement, any individual or institution can buy KR1 shares through the London-based NEX public stock exchange.
