The Melonport ICO (first round, seed) was completed in under 10 minutes, and the project raised 227,000 Ether, which is around $2.9 million. Melonport (now dissolved, while melonprotocol exists) pitches itself as blockchain software for asset management. The ICO was finished way too early for many enthusiasts and therefore I believe the token wasn’t as widely distributed as it could have been.
In all, 500,000 Melon tokens were for sale to the public, out of the 750,000 created by the team for this round. The total supply of Melon tokens will not exceed 1,250,000 tokens, with the rest of the 500,000 tokens potentially being sold in a second round next year in 2018. The Melon ICO price was around 0.45 ETH.
The Melonport ICO was notable in the frenzy returning to the ICO markets, reminiscent of the First Blood and Singular DTV ICOs of 2016 that also got filled in record time of under 15 minutes for both the projects.
Another interesting aspect of the Melon ICO was that 56,750 ETH were sold via Bitcoin Suisse via their services which accepts not just ETH like the Melonport ICO smart contracts, but also currencies like BTC and even fiat currencies like CHF. In this way, Bitcoin Suisse was acting as an ‘investment bank’ for this ICO, reserving and guaranteeing a certain supply to be sold out to investors via their services. Terms between Melonport and Bitcoin Suisse haven’t been made public. Bitcoin Suisse was able to reserve 25% of all the Melon tokens sold to the public in the ICO, i.e. 125,000 Melon tokens were sold via Bitcoin Suisse for a total of 56,750 ETH. The price per Melon token was around 0.45 ETH (2.20 Melon per ETH). Bitcoin Suisse charged investors a fee of 1.25% and a flat fee of 100 CHF. Therefore it is likely that some of the big fish in the crypto markets had gone through Bitcoin Suisse instead of the little guys.
There has been no announcement from funds like ICONOMI or Coin Fund on whether they invested in the Melon ICO or not. In any case, as the ICO frenzy showed, it is a well followed and well watched project.
The Melon tokens are expected to start trading and become liquid in around 4 weeks. We anticipate a large increase in the trading price compared to the ICO price when it starts trading.
Photo Credit: harsha