Melon Opened MLN Migration to a New Ethereum Contract

Melonport opened the migration of its MLN token to a new Ethereum contract at 15:00 Central European Time on February 1, 2019, replacing the contract that had represented MLN since the project’s 2017 token sale. The change was an operational prerequisite for the planned version 1.0 release of Melon, an Ethereum-based protocol for creating and managing on-chain investment funds.

The event mattered because a token contract is not merely a ticker symbol. It defines the balances, transfer rules and privileged functions recognized by wallets, exchanges and applications. From February 1, the project treated `0xec67005c4E498Ec7f55E092bd1d35cbC47C91892` as the new MLN contract. Etherscan’s verified contract record identifies it as “Melon Token,” with the symbol MLN and 18 decimals.

Holders faced two migration paths

Melonport said Kraken, Bittrex and Bitfinex would process the migration for MLN held on those exchanges before the 15:00 CET cutoff. Kraken’s own support record later confirmed that MLN balances held there were swapped automatically on February 1.

Self-custody holders had to interact with Ethereum themselves. The published procedure required an approval transaction authorizing the migration contract to move old MLN, followed by a `transmute` transaction that sent old tokens into the migration contract and returned new MLN. There was no deadline in the project’s instructions, but old MLN sent directly to a participating exchange after the cutoff risked not being credited. That distinction made custody location consequential: an exchange balance depended on the venue’s conversion process, while a private-wallet balance depended on the holder executing the correct contract calls.

The surviving records verify the announced mechanism and contract identities. They do not, by themselves, establish how much MLN had migrated by the end of February 1 or whether every exchange completed its internal accounting at the same time.

Supply rules changed with the contract

Melonport reported an initial supply of 932,613 new MLN, below the earlier 1.25 million-token figure. It attributed the reduction to two operations: 248,000 tokens described as non-issued were minted to the zero address, and 69,388 issued but undistributed tokens remaining from the project’s Olympiad program were burned.

Those figures should be read as the project’s contract-accounting description, not a market-capitalization calculation. Subtracting the two stated burn amounts from exactly 1,250,000 produces 932,612, one token below the reported new supply. The event-day announcement did not explain that one-token difference, so this reconstruction does not resolve it by assumption.

The new contract also enabled future issuance. Melonport said annual minting of 300,600 MLN to the Melon Council address would begin on March 1, 2019. It also embedded burning functionality for the planned Melon Engine fee model. The 300,600 figure was a gross annual issuance rule announced on February 1, not a forecast of net circulating-supply growth: future burns, council actions and token-migration progress could affect the amount visible in circulation.

A preparatory milestone, not the protocol launch

Melonport said the new token and migration contracts had been audited by Solidified and ChainSecurity. An audit supported deployment readiness but did not eliminate smart-contract, user-interface or transaction-signing risk. Holders still had to distinguish the old token, new token and migration contract and avoid sending assets to the wrong address.

The strict event-day conclusion is therefore limited. On February 1, Melonport changed MLN’s canonical Ethereum contract and opened the conversion process needed for its next protocol version. Melon v1.0 had not yet been released, and the announced March 1 issuance had not yet begun.

Later context

On March 1, 2019, Melonport announced Melon v1.0, code-named Zahreddino, as a set of Ethereum mainnet contracts accompanied by the Melon Manager Interface. That later launch confirms what the February 1 migration prepared for, but it was not known as a completed outcome on the migration date.