Developing on MELD
The MELD blockchain is an innovative solution to bring programmability and interoperability to the MELD ecosystem.
The MELD Blockchain is an implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The C-Chain’s API supports Geth's API and supports the deployment and execution of smart contracts written in Solidity.
The C-Chain is an instance of the Coreth Virtual Machine.
Validators
MELD relies on a system of independent validators with Proof of Staked (PoS) consensus that can support short block time and a novel solution for lower fees. Each bonded validator candidates of staking will become validators and produce blocks. MELD will introduce more validators into the network has the chain grows in users and traffic.
Near Zero Gas Fees
The MELD validators are incentivised through block rewards paid in $MELD to validators and delegators. Block rewards are a result of revenue generated by the MELD Lending & Borrowing protocol. This is in stark contrast to other PoS chains that pay validators from gas fees or treasury. As a result of this mechanic, block rewards increase as TVL increases in the Lending & Borrowing protocol and TVL on the blockchain in general.
With this system gas fee are not susceptible to token price action and gas fees will stay low perpetually. Gas costs are only in place to prevent DDoS attacks.
Rewards
All the MELD validators in the current validator set will be rewarded with revenue from the MELD Lending & Borrowing protocol. This is very different from all other blockchains that either rely on rewards to come form transaction fees (ie Ethereum and BNB) or they are subsidised by treasury funds (ie Avalanche and Cardano). As MELD is not an inflationary token, there will be no mining rewards as what Bitcoin and Ethereum network generate, and the gas fee has no relationship to reward for validators. As MELD is also utility tokens with other use cases, delegators and validators will still enjoy other benefits of holding MELD.
The reward for validators is the fees collected from the activities on the MELD Lending & Borrowing protocol. Validators can decide how much to give back to the delegators who stake their MELD to them, in order to attract more staking. Every validator will take turns to produce the blocks in the same probability, thus, all the stable validators get a similar size of the reward. Meanwhile, the stakes on each validator may be different, so this brings a counter-intuitive situation that more users trust and delegate to one validator, they potentially get less reward. So rational delegators will tend to delegate to the one with fewer stakes as long as the validator is still trustful (insecure validator may bring slashable risk).
Learn more about staking and validators here.
Smart Contracts
The MELD Chain fully supports EVM-compatible smart contracts and protocols. Cross-chain transfer and other communication are possible due to native support of interoperability. The MELD Chain is be:
A self-sovereign blockchain: Provides security and safety with elected validators.
EVM-compatible: Supports all the existing Ethereum tooling along with faster finality and cheaper transaction fees.
Fast Finality: Finalises the chain within two blocks in most cases.
Interoperable: Comes with efficient native on chain communication; Optimised for scaling high-performance dApps that require a fast and smooth user experience.
Distributed with on-chain governance: Proof of Staked (PoS) brings in decentralisation and community participants. As the native token, MELD serves as both the gas of smart contract execution and tokens for staking.
Last updated
