Melonaires,

Thank you for your continued support and patience throughout the last week in waiting for this update.

In just over a month since the $MELON Launch campaign began, our community has grown beyond our imagination. We reached 500K+ unique website visitors, 200K+ airdrop participants, 300K+ discord members, and 150K+ X followers (after losing tens of thousands of fallen soldiers). We exploded to become one of the most exciting Web3 projects in this bear season.

We wouldn't have been able to do any of this without you, our community, so thank you for everything so far.

A couple of weeks ago, during the midst of our growth, we got approached by most of the leading centralized exchanges and launchpads with offers to collaborate. We explored these opportunities in great depth and left no stone unturned in order to make sure to enable the best launch for our community. Due to that, we had to extend the IDO by an extra two weeks.

During this time, we explored and considered numerous CEX listing deals, launchpad offers, and numerous IDO tokenomics models that were presented to us.

After careful consideration, dozens of meetings and discussions. We have decided to stick closer to the original launch plan that is more in line with the Web3 ethos of decentralization and a community-first approach. The aim behind these changes is to ensure the most seamless, fair, and beneficial launch experience for all of you, our MELON community.

The $MELON Token will launch as follows:

Full Tokenomics - Whitepaper / Detailed Spreadsheet

Analyzing the recent meme-coin sucesses

Before going into each individual explanation for the decisions we made, let’s look at the success of the recent memecoin hype of the likes of $PEPE and HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu ($BITCOIN).

If we look at the design of the tokenomics, launch, and listing. We will see a common theme.

• It’s designed to be community-first

• Most activity during the launch is on DEX

• Driven by Web3 ethos of transparency and decentralization

$MELON is not a meme coin, but a utility token with a whole set of products and an ecosystem already built. However, we took many inspirations from the ethos of decentralization, and community first approach that the recent memecoins possess, in order to design the most optimal launch strategy.

Here is how individual approaches compared between Meme coins and IDO coins of the recent years.

1. Tokenomics

We explored and considered numerous deals and Tokenomics models, that were suggested. Most of which were based on traditional launchpad strategies with “Low Float Tokenomics”.

However, we ultimately decided against them for the following reasons:

• These models are a lot of times operated as a pump and dump, where early buyers in previous rounds bought in cheap and sold on later token buyers.

• The IDO buyers usually get a very small percentage of the tokens in the circulating supply (usually around 5% to 20%).

• It’s usually not sustainable to hold the price, because as soon as vesting unlocks happen, the early buyers will dump tokens on retail holders.

Due to this, many tokens launched in this style have graphs that look like this:

So instead, we decided to opt for the community-driven approach, where we give the community majority of the tokens all unlocked at the IDO.

The IDO Pre-sale will have 12.5% of the total supply available for the community to purchase. These tokens will be 100% unlocked and will make up 80% of the initial circulating market cap. If we include the Community and Melon Pass airdrops, this amounts to 95% tokens held by the community at the time of launch. This is a stark comparison to 5% to 20% with the usual IDO tokenomics.

This will allow the community to be in control, rather than a group of insiders.

The result will hopefully look like this example from HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu ($BITCOIN), which is a community driven memecoin.

2. Launchpads

In the end, we have opted to self-launch the token on our own Melon Launchpad.

The main reasons for this are:

• The allocation would otherwise go to a number of Launchpad members, whose main priority is quick profit and dumping the tokens, rather than our own thriving community.

• We otherwise wouldn’t be able to reward our loyal Melonaires with the IDO potions.

In addition, the launchpads would take a large fee from the community (10% to 20%)

3. Exchange Listing

Again, if we go back to the Meme Coin examples, we see that all successful meme coins started on DEX, and doing so was actually part of the reason why they went as big as they did.

Thanks to trading on DEX, all the volume data gets picked up by DeFi tools such as DexTools, numerous telegram bots, and groups, and that is how the Meme coins gained traction and hype. Initially listing on CEX will certainly not be able to get the same results.

Additionally, listing only on DEX will enable full transparency on what is happening and can prevent insider trading and manipulation.

Furthermore, some centralized exchanges have been known to dump tokens on the communities and sabotage projects.

$PEPE was trading mostly on DEXs before starting to be listed on CEX. Here is an example of HPOS10I ($BITCOIN) memecoin trading volume. We can see clearly that Uniswap has the majority of the volume traded.

Due to all the above facts, we decided to list exclusively on DEX as the best solution. We are partnering with Arrakis.Finance, which will improve liquidity provision and ensure that the $MELON token will trade on Uniswap V3 with much better performance and lower slippage.

Having that said, the $MELON CEX listing will follow after the initial DEX listings.

4. Pricing

The pricing for the token has been derived from the average floor price of the Melon Pass over the last week, divided by the MP airdrop amount (36,000) which works out to be around $0.007

• This pricing is even smaller compared to the average pre-seed and seed round price, which was, on average $0.011.

• This is the only IDO in recent memory in which the public price is lower than the seed price of VCs, which is unheard of. Most IDO prices are 2x to 10x higher than the seed round prices.

Conclusion

We believe the provisions made will facilitate the best launch for the community. This launch is just the start, we are committed in continuing to build the key infrastructure for the web3 creator economy and collectible content here at Melon.

This is just the beginning. See you all on September 10th, on https://melon.ooo/