Transcript of the Ampleforth office hours on 03.11.2021
Simon:
There have been a lot of new people joining up and digging into AMPL lately, which is great! I’d suggest once people get their feet under them and understand the AMPL basics, check out this report: https://faq.ampleforth.org/durability/.
Evan:
It’s basically written so that a person who is smart (technically) but struggles to understand what a unit of account is (economically) can still grok AMPL as a building block by understanding its use cases.
Simon:
With regards to AMPL and elastic assets, I often tell this story about a software company. It was new and ground breaking. So when it was presented, people were really unsure if they should take the plunge into this new software. It was a Yes use this new stuff that I haven’t seen before or No don’t use it.
Then a competitor came out ($AMPL as a unit of account and building block doesn’t really compete, it plays nice with others and can be used to advance them — look at Aave for example — a win win). It was tricky going with most people afraid to take a look at something new, but when the competitive software came out it changed everything.
The conversation shifted- it was no longer a Yes/No decision it was then an A/B decision — Do i want to go with software A or software B.
Now this isnt apples to apples in anyway because AMPL as a building block and primitive is able to be used everywhere but the idea that additional elastic assets and as of right now that would be the things we are seeing coming out of PRL and Buttonwood specifically — those types of applications, platforms and additional assets can help to highlight a lot of the use and utility for AMPL and elastic finance.
AMPL is the elastic asset and now folks can build up vertically with it- Evan has had a few great ways of saying this of building up the stack now with AMPL as the decentralized unit of account
Question 1:
Thoughts on the new AAVE ARC that was submitted to halt the AMPL pool? https://governance.aave.com/t/arc-disable-ampl-borrowing/5996
Evan:
People are free post on forums as they see fit. Doesn’t look like there’s huge traction behind that post. We obviously disagree.
Follow-up question 1:
What do you see as a solution (or is there one?) for lenders being locked in?
Evan:
I don’t think everyone yet realizes, when they first go into the pool, that they might want to just hold naked AMPL. Aside from that the yields are pretty compelling. We’re expecting to do an AMA soon with the Aave community to help clear things up.
Follow-up question 2:
Start an aAMPL /USDC pool and see if you get traction. Maybe people will sell in to your pool.
Brandon:
I like that idea! How about an aAMPL/AMPL pool though?
Question 2:
Last week in the ampltheater we talked about integrating Tellor Oracles. The snapshot mentioned both Price Oracles AND CPI Oracle. the Tellor folks mentioned on their call on Monday that the official vote would first be for Price Oracle and then later down the line for CPI Oracle. Is that your guys’ alignment as well? Also we didn’t talk much about CPI Oracles last week — do you guys think AMPL should be equally robust to that as it is to Price Oracles?
Brandon:
Right, the Tellor proposal is for both the market and CPI oracle. Here’s the ACCP text, for reference: https://aips.ampleforth.org/ACCP/accp-4
Since the CPI data comes from one centralized source, the question of data quality is much more straightforward — it either matches the published values or it doesn’t.
Since both are inputs to the supply policy’s calculations, I’d say they have equal potential impact on the protocol in terms of changing supply values.
Question 3:
Have any other lending platforms reached out since AMPLs recent success on Aave?
Evan:
We’ve been in conversation with Benqi, actually a lot of old-skool ampl-heads there. Also Aave is on Avalanche.
Question 4:
Im assuming that these super high APY rates will also be possible on the mooncake dapp?
Evan:
it’s a pretty different type of lending, fixed tenure, no liquidations, i think it will be different
Question 5:
What do you think about just raising the max rates on Aave? Infinite APY at max utilization.
Aalavandhan:
The current lending curve is a piecewise linear function (with 2 lines). Making the 2nd line too steep causes the interest rate to fluctuate wildly ..
The issue IMO is that this is a new paradigm in lending and it will take time for people to fully understand the implications (this pool is one of many to follow).
Conventionally the supplier expects to hold on all the volatility exposure of the underlying asset (ie user lends 1BTC, expects to get 1BTC back with interest). There’s really no borrower demand for these lending pools.
The AMPL pool is fundamentally different. Lenders give up some of their AMPL volatility exposure to borrowers and are able to tap into huge borrower demand to speculate on AMPL during expansions resulting in these high APYs.
Question 6:
On BSC since PancakeSwap reduced the farming incentive for AMPL-BUSD we have seen a drop of 90% in liquidity from 10m to roughly 1m. Is the team planning to try to recover it maybe on lending/borrowing platform like Venus or similar?
Brandon:
Ideally AMPL is brought to new platforms to integrate into the ecosystem there, not just for another place to hold. It seemed like at one point there’d be a vibrant DeFi ecosystem, but I’m not sure that developed quite like we’d hoped. I think Venus folded? Are there any other platforms there we should target as a community?
Evan:
I think our general thought is, take the fastest path to lending possible on new platforms. So that’s a consideration
Question 7:
How was the Chainlink Hackathon?
Brandon:
It’s still going! If there are any devs here, definitely consider taking part. It goes through the 28th. https://chain.link/hackathon
Here’s our workshop video, also feature todamark from PRL
https://youtu.be/-0ht_sUZ84I
Some good AMPL prizes for top entries.
Question 8:
Are you guys thinking about using Arbitrum or Optimism? When can we expect it to happen
Aalavandhan:
Yes. Arbitrum is next. You will see when it happens https://github.com/ampleforth/cross-chain-ample/pull/57
Question 9:
Any news on the Rari Capital’s Fuse pools?
Brandon:
I think go here for the latest: https://forum.ampleforth.org/t/rari-fuse-pool-for-lending/259/5.
I think it should be relatively easy once we figure out what assets we want. But we do need to think about the parameters and curves too.
Question 10:
Is there any thought to education/marketing — through YouTube? It seems you can latch onto the 87K% APY to get folks attention and leverage to educate and bring more liquidity to the platform.
Evan:
Working on a suite of snack sized videos to break down the latest white paper. There’s definitely an opportunity to leverage Aave traction and educate people on what can be done with a decentralized unit of account (particularly in the wake of stablecoin regulation).
Question 11:
How’s the Balancer stuff coming along for wAMPL btw?
Brandon:
I try not to say much about timelines we don’t control. Still on it’s way!
Question 12:
Is the team excited about button tokens? I’m imagining bBTC and bETH could become drivers for elastic currency focused platform development.
Evan:
Been excited about that for about 1-year. The button protocol has this effect of empowering others to tell their communities what they want to hear. Bitcoin maxis, ETH maxis, etc .. all while educating them about AMPL and elastic finance.
Simon:
Losing my mind.
Brandon:
A rising tide of elastic finance would lift all boats, definitely
Question 12:
I’m a bit surprised there isn’t more hype around AMPL over “social media” considering you can deposit to Aave with 87k APY.
Brandon:
I think a lot of initial reactions are that it’s dilutive, a UI bug, or incentivized to be that way, something like that. Once people see it exist that way for long enough, people look at it again.
Simon:
Brandon also highlighted another interesting component about this in a tweet thread- here is the pertinent section: https://twitter.com/brandoniles/status/1451674746307944449?s=20
Question 13:
Hey guys, what bridge should i use? Avax has lower fees.
Aalavandhan:
https://bridge.ampleforth.org/
Question 14:
How is the team deciding what coins are chosen for Rari Capitals Fuse pools? Is there a forum post? Could this be a FORTH vote?
Brandon:
Yep: https://forum.ampleforth.org/t/rari-fuse-pool-for-lending/259/5. I was also thinking about a FORTH vote for it.
