Transcript of the Ampleforth office hours on 11.08.2021
Aalavandhan:
Just throwing a random thought out there.
aAMPL is here. Here’s an example of why rebasing is cool and mind-bending.
1 AMPL = 1 aAMPL ~= 2019 usd. But holding AMPL and aAMPL individually gives you fundamentally different kinds of risk/return trade offs. aAMPL gives you dampened exposure to AMPL market cap movement. When the utilisation rate is at 75%, aAMPL is like a 0.25x AMPL.
When you throw aAMPL into a liquidity pool like Mooniswap things start to get interesting. At the time of transacting, one can consider aAMPL as just a wrapped representation of AMPL (similar to ETH and wETH). Thus for traders aAMPL liquidity pools essentially gives AMPL liquidity. For LPs it gives an interest accruing, risk adjusted AMPL which also collects trading fees.
The issue right now is that rebasing assets incur a lot of IL on liquidity pools (just after they rebase). But I can imagine a future where there does exist a elastic AMM which doesn’t not have this problem.
Question 1:
Following some discussion earlier today, some of us dug into it a bit and found that the Balancer pools that two of the geysers reward AMPL for participation don’t appear to be eligible for Balancer’s own liquidity mining anymore — that is to say, participants no longer receive BAL for staking in them. Is this within the expectations of the team (and if so https://www.ampleforth.org/dapps/ could use some descriptions updating) or will there be a plan to talk to Balancer about the steps required to reinstate it?
Brandon:
Yeah, how platforms choose to distribute their platform tokens is always up to their own processes. Sometimes this means through governance actions, sometimes it’s just up to the discretion of some multisig holders. For out part, we do the best we can for the geysers to pass through whatever is distributed. Thanks for the note on the geyser page though, we’ll figure out what’s most accurate and get it updated.
We’d all love for Balancer to continue including these pools though! Definitely worth talking to them about it. However, with decentralized system this power doesn’t depend on anyone in particular — as in it doesn’t have to be us. We will if we can, but sometimes we run into time constraints and have to make choices what to focus on in the immediate day-to-day.
Question 2:
Do you feel like the Aave integration has made AMPL price more stable? Is there any noticeable/verifiable data of this already?
Naguib:
In theory that should be true but it hasn’t been long enough time to conclude that yet.
Question 3:
Sushiswap Discord mods are asking AMPL devs to contact them regarding SUSHI rewards, seems to be some missing info. Can the team comment on the missing rewards and what they are doing to get them released?
Brandon:
Funny, I’ve been asking them to respond… We’ll look into it and see what’s going on.
Question 4:
What steps are necessary now to get more people to lend in the AAVE protocol? There seems to be a constant shifting of utilisation between 60%-80%, but the reserve size is remaining pretty much the same.
Brandon:
We still like the idea of creating a geyser to encourage deposits, and are looking at a couple different ways to do it. We wanted to wait a bit after launch and see it operate organically before we poured any fuel on it first.
The promising thing about this pool is that I think a lot of the growth could come from people who are not currently AMPL holders. Lenders typically have a different risk profile where they’re in the market for stable yield. Depositing AMPL is not exactly the same, but close to this.
If you look at the markets on Aave, you can see that there is a huge pool of capital in this mindset. USDC alone in in the ballpark of ~5.5B.
Question 5:
You can’t go long on AAVE, we are being shorted to death. What are your thoughts on this?
Brandon:
Well, you long an asset by holding the asset directly. If you want to leverage another asset to long AMPL, you can borrow something like USDC against it and then buy AMPL with that. (That’s what most activity on these lending platforms are, I think)
Since AMPL isn’t a collateral asset yet, you can’t borrow against AMPL to buy more AMPL, true. But… it’s too early to have AMPL be a collateral asset. We need to show AMPL behaving correctly and healthily first.
Question 6:
How much of the FORTH air drop has been claimed? What will happen with any unclaimed tokens?
Richy:
Unclaimed FORTH tokens will be reclaimed into a DAO that will be community controlled (through FORTH). There is a deadline to FORTH claiming which is mentioned in the blog post below (about 1 year after launch).You can read more about it here: https://medium.com/ampleforth/ampl-forth-realizing-the-full-ecosystem-e2d88ca01691.
You can track how much FORTH was claimed by viewing the claim contract on Etherscan or check this Dune Analytics page: https://dune.xyz/hildobby/FORTH-airdropped-token-claims.
Question 7:
Another user was pondering updating the top banner, currently advertising the FORTH airdrop, to instead promote the recent AAVE integration on the Ampleforth homepage: https://www.ampleforth.org/.
Thoughts?
Evan:
Yah we definitely need to update this. We’ll also be doing a broader update of the site altogether. There’s so much more to do with AMPL and more material to work with.
Question 8:
The Ampleforth NFTs, as far as potential utility goes, could there be retroactive effects for being awarded one? For example, access to private pools, a geyser buffer, or even something as simple as access to some sort of hidden content, or a role with unique perks.
To be more specific, is this possible? i understand it’s up to the community itself. I’m curious of the limitations.
Richy:
I guess it depends on if the community can get the ball rolling on self-organizing and creating NFTs etc. Simon and Iwere talking about some additional ideas on how to jump start this, maybe we can discuss in the Discord NFT channel later.
Question 9:
Could we see Forth staking or incorporated into a pool to incentivize a bit more for hodlers?
Simon:
Here’s something Brandon said about it before which might be helpful: https://discord.com/channels/613841245969580143/613841246607376405/859892249205669900
I like what he said at the end :
Brandon:
So I’m open to any FORTH staking idea that can answer that question above.
Question 10:
Who are you going to use to formulate the DAO?
Brandon:
In the most simplest formulation, the FORTH governor is the DAO. Most likely, the unclaimed forth will be placed into the timelock so it’s controlled by FORTH holders directly.
If there’s demand for it, we could look into other platforms, though. I don’t think there are any hard constraints keeping us from using, say, Aragon or something like that.
