Abstract We employ density functional calculations to study the electron transfer-based antioxidant activity of resveratrol derivatives from melinjo. The derivatives are monomer resveratrol which is trans-resveratrol, and dimer resveratrol which are gnetin C, gnetin L, and gnemonoside C. The results show that gnetin C has the lowest adiabatic ionization potential both in gas phase and water environment. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that dimer resveratrol is consistent to have better electron transfer ability than its monomer. This may due to the destabilization of the high occupied molecular orbital energy of resveratrol. However, the presence of glucoside in gnemonoside C does not affect the electron transfer-based antioxidant activity of dimer resveratrol.