Transcript of the Ampleforth office hours on 08.09.2021
Question 1:
What are the implications of SEC regulations for Ampleforth?
Evan:
It’s a bit hard to say right now. But we’ve always taken the position that regulation (however unfortunate) would be inevitable. My sense is the early Bitcoin community felt similarly. It could change the stablecoin landscape tho, which I think would favor us, both from a lending standpoint and from a collateral asset perspective (wrt prometheus).
Question 2:
Would it be possible to open source the ampleforth oracle? Currently it has a lot of sway in regards to the rebase target. It would be nice to know how it works/what values are currently being taken into account.
Brandon:
The onchain portion of the oracle is all available onchain and can be inspected. As far as what values get provided, we have published guidelines here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RFCApk1PznMhSRVhiyFl_vBDPA4mP2n1dTmfqjvuTNw/edit
However, the oracle is set up similar to Maker’s in the sense that it medianizes input from a multitude of sources. So >50% need to collude or be corrupted to influence the value, and there’s also the security delay. Ultimately, governance has the power to determine fitness for oracle provider inclusion.
Hope this helps. Oracles are a deep topic though, so we can continue the discussion later in the dev channel if you have more questions.
Question 3:
How do we stand with Aave at moment? was really disappointing to yet again see momentum fade. As great of a concept that AMPL is, the world (VC’s, Smart Money, and retail) don’t seem to care all that much in adopting. Also what is going on with Prometheus? will we have set dates when we can expect some working products?
Evan:
The main thing with Aave, as you guys probably know, is the rates are too sensitive everywhere past the utilization target. We expect the proposal to correct this to go live soon, after which we can start stimulating pools and educating folk.
For what it’s worth, my sense from the Aave guys, is they are kinda happy with how the continuous innovation has unfolded (as we discovered the issue with the rates in service of pushing forward something truly new).
The Prometheus timeline is something you’ll have to ask them about directly!
Question 4:
What challenges are you facing in order to enable AMPL as collateral?
Evan:
We’re taking it one step at a time. 1) fix the interest rate curve, 2) stimulate growth of the lending pool, 3) think about use as a collateral asset. At this point, we don’t consider Aave fully “launched” yet, but honestly I’m glad we’ve approached it in a measured way. The Aave integration should not be thought of as a flash in the pan.
Question 5:
Any updates on Polygon yet?
Richy:
Ball is still in polygon team’s court. I think we mentioned last office hours that we need a UI change to their bridge that only their team can do.
In the meantime, we are still pushing ahead on exploring other chain options, Avalanche is heavily under consideration and depending on our 3rd party partners, it could go live soon, but this one depends on our bridge partner mostly, we will share updates as they come but the avalanche DeFi projects in general have all been very welcoming and friendly to us in our discussions.
Question 6:
Can the team give some examples of how the rest of DeFi can benefit from what Prometheus is building?
Evan:
I think a functional decentralized stablecoin definitely benefits DeFi, as the space currently depends on dollar-collateralized stablecoins and things like DAI which failed by exposure to the underlying ETH asset and has resorted to using USDC as collateral.
On that note, the tranched collateral assets (that we expect buttonStable to use) will also be something other crypto-collateralized stablecoins (like DAI) could start rotating in as an alternative to USDC.
One other thing that’s exciting for us — and I don’t believe we’ve talked about it yet — is wrapped AMPL (WAMPL) which it can broaden platform access significantly with respect to integrations.
Also probably worth mentioning, because both AMPL and wAMPL are ETH native, wAMPL will be entirely smart-contract-based and won’t require centralized custody the way wBCT does. It’s more like WETH.
I think Aalavandhan has been working on this is a private repo, but we expect to see that made public shortly.
Brandon:
The wrapper code itself is pretty direct. The exciting parts will really come with the extra platform accessibility it offers. Hopefully we’ll see some of the first within a couple weeks (though again depends some on third party timelines…)
Question 7:
In general. communication is very very limited. We can use more tweets, updates. A new website. We still have elastic AMM on roadmap and nothing is being built like that apparently and we have other rebasing coins overtaking us 5 fold.
Evan:
Yes, we are working on some updated web materials right now, would love to get your feedback on that soon.
Question 8 (on SUSHI distribution):
Have AMPL agreed with sushi that the tokens received by the treasury would be the final distribution, if that is the case why was the sushi not evenly distributed amongst all LPs? Did AMPL agree that this sushi was the final amount or are you expecting another distribution? If so then. WEN?
If the team knowingly agreed to this being the ‘final distribution’ as is claimed by the mods in sushi, then why were so many LPs left out of the distribution and how do you plan to compensate them given they held their side of the deal up? It would have been fine if the team came out and said, ‘look guys this is all the sushi we are getting from this, we will evenly distribute it amongst everyone who has been in pescadero since November’ or something to the like… I would take this financial hit but be happy knowing the saga can be over.
If that is NOT the final distribution… Where are the rewards Lp’s have now been waiting almost a month and a half for AFTER unlock? At this point it is starting to look a bit silly you must admit. We were distributed 1/3 of our farming rewards over 7 months ago with the promise of the 2/3 being released after a 6 month vesting period, this was frustrating but we patiently waited for this vesting period to be over and still nothing.
Some SUSHI mods are also claiming that the SUSHI you received WAS in fact THE vested sushi. If that’s the case then you distributed it to the wrong people. The numbers don’t entirely add up but we have multiple problems here.
We need clarity on what’s happening. So it’s one of a few circumstances, which is it? Scenario 1, in which you made a deal with SUSHI, expect no more sushi and rug pulled LP’s who were early contributors to the ecosystem and plan to not distribute any sushi further. Scenario 2, in which you still expect more sushi, but sushi mods are correct in stating the recent sushi sent was the vested sushi and you distributed the vested sushi to the wrong people? Scenario 3, For some reason the vested sushi from over 7 months ago still hasn’t come through yet and because we live in clown world it makes more sense to distribute sushi to people who have been farming it recently instead of chronologically pay out people in increments settling debts as you go.
Brandon:
For the SUSHI distribution, though I see how much passion is behind this and I totally understand and can appreciate that, there’s really not much to say. The geyser gets sushi and distributes it according to the same rules it always has, described way back in AIP-2 from two years ago. Every distribution followed the same rules — it sees a stream of tokens and LP staking activity, then allocates accordingly.
SUSHI emission is something we don’t have any control over, since SushiSwap is a separate project. If there are any questions about amounts, that can only be answered by them.
I don’t recall or see any mention of the agreement you talk about it so I can’t comment on that. The contacts we had with that team changed so many times, I don’t think they had very good internal alignment (but I don’t want to speak to much for an external group). I think we all assumed that this would be the last time this distribution mechanism is used though, since v1 has ended already. V2 geyser users maintain control over their LP tokens so this isn’t needed anymore.
If you think the amounts were incorrect, you’ll have to take that up with the project that controls it. (That’s sushi!) As much as we’d like to be able to create sushi tokens, we can’t.
Question 9:
At a high level, how is the decentralized stablecoin created? Is it just over collaterizing AMPL? How will the decentralized stablecoin handle negative rebases?
Evan:
At a high level AMPL -> Junior / Senior Tranches -> Senior Tranches are safe-asset collateral for a stablecoin.
Imagine you 1) deposit AMPL into a contract, 2) the contract distributes supply changes by tranche and each tranche is represented by a token (ie: most of the supply changes go to junior tranches which are similar to a leverage instrument, very few supply changes get distributed to senior tranches which are similar to safe-assets) 3) at the time of maturity senior tranches are redeemed first after which junior tranches are redeemed.
One of the cool things about this is there’s no need for liquidations ever.
Question 10:
Any news on the NFT front? Badge utility, folks not being able to get it and what not.
Richy:
the NFT claims should wrapping up in about 5 days or so, you can see the timer on the DeFine website. I have heard there are a lot of concerns around the calculation for the NFT — the snapshot was taken 2 weeks before the drop and utilized the exact same scripts for FORTH, but only focused on rebase days. We realize this left out some folks (like geyser participants), but this was meant as a trial launch and supposed to just be a fun community effort, there was not the time and bandwidth to calculate for everything (badges on focused on rebase anyways). To give you an idea of timeline, FORTH required almost 4–5 months of preparation. Anyhow, thanks for your NFT submission btw (and to all others who submitted), once DeFine has the bandwidth we will plan to airdrop folks who submitted a special Evan-drawn NFT (remember we are working with a partner here).
In the future we would like these sorts of initiatives to be completely community incepted and run. DeFine has expressed interest in doing more badge series in the future. As such, my suggestion is for those community members who feel strongly about this topic, to propose a badge series, the parameters, the snapshot block time and to even pull the data themselves and to put it on snapshot labs for voting. If we can achieve consensus there, we can ask DeFine to monitor that progress and to simply launch badges based on what the community decides. Our primary role as a team is to help facilitate community activities like this but our primary goal/focus is not to be a NFT project.
Question 11:
Can anyone expand on wAMPL? Does it rebase or is it a plain ERC20 token? when would we able to wrap and unwrap AMPL?
Evan:
It’s a floating price (non-rebasing) ERC20 token that is redeemable for AMPL proper. You should be able to wrap/unwrap whenever you want!
Question 12:
Any word on wen Matic btw? Trying to buy more but literally cannot sometimes because of gas.
Brandon:
Has anyone here used any layer 2s? How do people feel about, e.g. Arbitrum and other rollups? I like the sequencing of Arbitrum (though it adds some centralization at least right now). Also allows more specific challenging of transactions. But it’s so hard to know what will last, with zk-style rollups still developing.
Question 13:
Could the team provide a brief updated roadmap here?
Evan:
We def need that.
Question 14:
Was the V1 geyser SUSHI was distributed to V2 geyser?
Brandon:
Hey I do need to call this out. This is incorrect — it only used activity from v1. (However, if you do have an example to shows a bug please send it to us).
Question 15:
Is there a good contact point with them for discussing the technical options for future NFTs? eg. the minutiae on who’s eligible for them, whether holding one confers any sort of effect, etc
Richy:
Let me talk to their team and see if i can get a contact point, what we can do is invite them onto our next office hours in two weeks so you can directly ask them questions and initiate contact that way.
For who is eligible, as I mentioned above you guys can propose parameters and even pull a csv file of the metrics and who is eligible and have that be voted on (to be totally transparent) and DeFine can simply take that csv and execute.
Holding them for effects… I know DeFine has some ideas in store but I don’t want to steal their thunder, in the future the badges could be used as signalling for other partner projects who want to do airdrops to our community to target users with badges as it signals a certain OG-ness or holder attitude. That’s just my personal speculation though.
