Melmint overview

This is a brief, high-level introduction to Melmint.

The wiki has a more in-depth discussion of MEL and Melmint.

Introduction

Melmint is the our key mechanism for stabilizing MEL, Mel's base currency. MEL avoids the volatile price of traditional cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH, making it a much better store of value and unit of account.

But, unlike "stablecoins", MEL does not rely on any external trust in fiat assets or oracles. Instead, Melmint is an oracle-free system that keeps the value of 1 MEL around 1 DOSC.

What is a DOSC?

A “DOSC” is a “day of sequential computation”. It’s defined as the cost of running a sequential computation for 24 hours, using the fastest processor available.

For example, a DOSC in the year 2000 is the cost of occupying the fastest single CPU core available in 2000 for 24 hours, while a DOSC in the year 2021 is the cost of doing the same with a 2021 processor.

What makes DOSC a good peg target?

It has a relatively stable purchasing power. Empirically, the “fastest processor” typically costs about the same, despite its performance drastically increasing over time. We explore this further in our DOSC analysis data. There are also deeper a priori reasons why processor time is a good long-term measure of value.
More importantly, it can be measured through a sequential proof-of-work on-chain by an autonomous mechanism with full endogenous trust. No oracle needs to be trusted to tell us how much a DOSC is.

Participating in Melmint

Contribute CPU measurements

To participate in Melmint, you can run your own instance of melminter, a convenient CLI that turns CPU computation into MEL.

Though it turns computation into money, melminter is not a "miner" and does not help secure the network. Instead, it bids for MEL __ using _computation_, contributing information about the current price of computation to the network. This then drives the Melmint mechanism to keep the 1 MEL = 1 DOSC peg.

Make arbitrage trades

Melmint's stability depends on a community of traders profiting from arbitrage between the MEL/SYM, ERG/SYM, and ERG/MEL Melswap pools. Learn more in the article on Melmint arbitrage!