Transcript of the Ampleforth office hours on 02.02.2022

Simon:
Keep an eye on the governance forum moving forward, that 1 year cliff for FORTH token claims is approaching soon and it’s great to see all the ideas floating around. It was really cool to see Meter propose that swap and for FORTH holders to vote it in.

Also i think i speak for Matt when i say: Sign up for the AMPL newsletter if you haven’t! Convince a friend to read it as well. That’s a resource for anyone who wants to keep tabs on all things AMPL.

Question 1:
What is currently in development for anything that’s marketing related ?

Brandon:
The best people to answer that would be Matt or Evan… But ideally we won’t need to say much because you’ll already start to see it normally. I think some material is starting to ramp up soon.

Matt:
We touched on this a bit last week, the short answer is a lot! We’re in the process of overhauling our content pipeline, to focus on more visual, short-form and, for lack of a better way of putting it, fun content. Our primary goal right now is to expand our top of funnel awareness — AKA, reaching folks in the crypto ecosystem who don’t know AMPL, or only have minimal context. look out for more promoted/paid tweets, instagram posts, etc to be popping up in your minifeeds over the coming weeks. We’ve also got a big campaign in the works that we can’t talk publicly about just yet… but it’s going to be an exciting one to unveil soon.

Question 2:
Aalavandhan, do you remember when I asked if Geyser accepted and distributed tokens generally and not just AMPL? It wasn’t an empty question without purpose.

Scratching the surface here. Quick question, we track how much of AMPL Aave holds in their treasury, but why aren’t we more excited about buying AAVE out, and owning it, totally?

Aalavandhan:
Yea geyser does accept multiple reward tokens.

To your other point I’m on the same page too. Over time I think the Forth DAO should have a stake in other large DeFi protocols where AMPL operates. (Aave, Balancer etc).

Question 3:
Did the team ever do a Twitter spaces with Pangolin?

Simon:
No, that is looking more likely to be next week depending on schedules.

Question 4:
Anything to say about how the boosted pool initiatives are coming along? Ithink some members have seen some testnet activity.

Brandon:
The boosted pool is in development and pretty close actually. The implementation is very straightforward once wAMPL routing is in place, but it does rely on the routing component. For this, we need Balancer to update their router, which we don’t have a definite timeline on yet.

Aalavandhan:
We’ve built all the necessary pieces. I just completed the last piece today 😅. The next step will be to work with them to get it merged into the codebase and support it on their UI.

Follow-up question:
Ah i was wondering about this so their router is done for coins like USDC/USDT but the open source version for any other token pool is yet to be done.

Brandon:
The routing addition for wAMPL is that it can transparently convert AMPL back and forth to wAMPL, so traders to trade with each transparently. This can also be used with wrapped tokens like Lido’s staked ETH (which keeps 1:1 like Aave’s atokens).

Question 5:
wAMPL holders will be able participate in the Balancer boosted pool correct?

Brandon:
LPs should be able to deposit bare AMPL as well, is my understanding. It will get turned into WAMPL and aAMPL automatically as needed.

Question 6:
Do you guys think the meltdown of $TIME negatively affects AMPL? It’s a separate project but it has a rebasing component that some may associate with ponzis now.

Brandon:
I’ve so far not really commented on TIME or any of the other forks out there. I see them as sufficiently different projects from AMPL that they’re not really in the same space.

AMPL uses rebase to get a unit of account, and that UoA is the most important part (rather than the tool we use to get there). Similar to how Aave’s aTokens also “rebase”, but the important part is they have 1:1 redeemability with the underlying assets.

If other Olympus forks wanted to use AMPL as collateral, I think that’d be a great idea. I’ve talked with a couple projects who are interested in doing so, some with interesting modifications as well.

Aalavandhan:
I think mooncake/btn stable will make rebase great again.

Question 7:
Can AMPL boosted pool live in any other weighted pool? The plan is for WETH/ bb-a-AMPL right?

Brandon:
The boosted pool can exist as a sub-pool anywhere on Balancer. Ideally, anyone who would normally use AMPL would use the boosted pool in its place instead.

Aalavandhan:
The base linear pool is (wAMPL-ubaAMPL). It can be paired with other linear pools or nested into weighted pools. You could imagine a (wETH-wstETH)/ (wAMPL-ubaAMPL) pool which is essentially a wETH-wAMPL pool but a majority portion of the liquidity is put to use on Aave and Lido.

Users can then create any portfolio they want really with the (wAMPL-ubaAMPL) pool as one of the elements.

Follow-up question to Aalavandhan:
And someone else can enter this pool just holding wAMPL correct?

Aalavandhan:
Yea you should be able to enter the pool with either ampl or wampl and eth. (The balancer ui should take care of the rest)

Question 8:
Will the Balancer boosted pool be proposed for BAL rewards?

Brandon:
This is something we’d definitely welcome. It’s a matter for Balancer governance to decide. I think it does showcase how powerful and extensible their platform is, so it could make a lot of sense.

Question 9:
Speaking of btnStable/safeAMPL. Going back to Manny’s essay, it seems like the last component is DeFi’s native fiat. Any thoughts on whether this could be fulfilled by a custom Aave pool for a “perpetual” A-tranche?

There could be an interest rate curve that’s proportional to (utilisation * collateral value). When collateral value drops, it decreases interest rates to incentivize borrowing of Ampl-A, (borrowers can profit by shorting it). This sounds like it’d be comparable to how TradFi Fiat operates.

Brandon:
I’d have to think about this for a bit… I’m not sure I see how the pieces fit together at the moment.

Part of how fiat controls work is that interest rates affect how much money is borrowed. However, these loans result in “the money supply” increasing during the loan term as a result. Aave’s loans are collateralized, so it’s the same pool of asset that changes hands.

Link to the start of the office hours on Discord