Transcript of the Ampleforth office hours on 14.07.2021
Brandon:
Here’s the latest Aave development update, copied from the recent forum post:
— After some recommendations from Aave devs, we made small updates to the implementation. This included no behavioral changes–different math library, method of initializing configuration, etc.
— We ran a second round of audits with Peckshield, which raised no new issues.
— We still have the full test coverage of all the borrow/repay/rebase flows as before.
— Internal testing was done using a mainnet fork.
— We launched an Immunefi Bug Bounty for the aToken with a competitive $100K reward for critical vulnerabilities. Special thanks to ArmorFi for the generous $50K bounty match!
If you’re an AAVE holder and you’d like to see this proposal move forward, please re-delegate Proposition power to the same address as before: 0x32a9d6A550C3D89284D5700F7d7758dBc6f0fB2C We plan to submit as soon as we re-reach the threshold. You can do that here! https://app.aave.com/governance/delegation
Simon:
Today we have the Prometheus Research Labs (PRL) team here joining us. Please say hello Mark @todamark and Chris @Fantasea @Socks&Flops of PRL.
Mark:
Hi again everyone — we are a team building some exciting financial products on top of AMPL, using the rebasing qualities as a core design component of our protocols!
Question 1:
What kind of financial products is PRL building with AMPL?
Mark:
Specifically, our first application will be a way to borrow against your AMPL — looking forward to discussing this and seeing what would be most useful for the community.
Follow-up question:
Wasn’t that the point of AAVE?
Mark:
Our design (and user experience) will be quite a bit different from AAVE, and actually most all popular DeFi lending apps available currently. Fixed-rate, fixed-term and it was built intentionally to support rebasing tokens well.
Evan replying to Mark:
Also, it’s not just random lending, the output of the activity is itself a useful financial building block
Question 2:
Why does the AAVE implementation of AMPL use a different math library? That seems odd.
Brandon:
They use a library with different rounding characteristics
Aalavandhan:
They use this library called ‘ray’ math. Which pretty much rounds up/down on division based on the last digit. https://github.com/aave/aave-protocol/blob/master/contracts/libraries/WadRayMath.sol
Question 3:
Any date for the Geyser v2?
Aalavandhan:
The current round of geysers are expiring in a week. If everything goes well the we should be able to deploy and execute the next round on V2. The v2 contracts have been battle tested by the Alchemist folks and the UI to interact with the universal vaults is also now functionally complete.
Question 4:
I remember from last office hours talk of lending without liquidations, is that what PRL is planning to build? and if so, how would you do it?
Mark:
Liquidations are a means to compensate lenders for non-repayment of loans, right? One can imagine a system where lenders are compensated in other ways, i.e. some value exchange that leaves lenders happy no matter what the borrower does.
Evan replying to Mark:
Also a means of maintaining a certain collateralization ratio
Follow-up question:
‘One ‘ can, but i can’t. Is there a high level explanation?
Mark:
Sorry for the vagueness :).
When borrowers lock up capital as collateral in a loan, they are mostly interested in maintaining exposure to the upside of the collateral. On the other hand, lenders mostly want a (nearly) guaranteed value return on their loan capital. So, at a high level if there was a way to separate the upside of the collateral from the value of the collateral, each party could get what they want from the outset of the loan.
Chris:
The ideas and concepts that Mark mentioned are a part of the work PRL (Prometheus Research Labs) is doing for the Buttonwood Foundation https://button.foundation/
The Buttonwood Foundation will post announcements and upcoming news on its twitter page, please drop a follow at https://twitter.com/ButtonDeFi.
Question 5:
Any updates on Polygon?
Aalavandhan:
Its “functionally” live. AMPL exists on Polygon. It rebases through their POS bridge. And you can send AMPL from the Ethreum to Polygon and back. https://polygonscan.com/token/0xc67238827da94B15F6bA10F3d35f690809919F75
We don’t have a UI for this yet though. We’ll try to work with them to add the custom logic for transferring AMPL to their native UI .. https://wallet.matic.network/bridge
You can do it through CLI following instructions here: https://github.com/ampleforth/cross-chain-ample/wiki/Matic-prod-deployment
Simon:
https://ampltools.com/ has been tracking it a bit have you seen the site?
Question 6:
Is this implementation that PLR is doing similar to what Pendle are doing (if you’re familiar with their project)?
Mark:
Not familiar with them specifically but from a cursory search it looks similar to BarnBridge and Ondo in that it is separating the yield of an LP position from the value of an LP position, right? The idea I mentioned above is similar, but rather is separating the price risk of an asset on its own instead.
Evan replying to Mark:
In this sense it’s more fundamental
Question 7:
What’s the purpose of creating of an elastic price stable token based on Ethereum, BTC? How will that be beneficial for DeFi/EFi?
Mark:
In addition to what Eelie said (to provide liquidity with truly impermanent loss) there are many benefits to building on top of rebasing assets. When there is a large suite of DeFi protocols that work natively (or best) with rebasing assets, it would be useful to have a rebasing version of these assets that have high value / liquidity.
Put simply, rebasing assets allow DeFi protocols to (somewhat) shirk oracle risk / responsibility to the asset layer which lets them be much more simple and flexible. The PRL team thinks this could be a new paradigm in DeFi protocol architecture.
We chatted about this at length in last office hours: https://ampleforthx.medium.com/transcript-of-the-ampleforth-office-hours-on-30-06-2021-ffd4332f7c00.
Question 8:
Have you ever pondered on adding a geyser like liquidity incentive to AAVE lending? For example a geyser that rewards the depositor for staked aAMPL in it?
Brandon:
We’ve definitely thought about this! We want to see the organic activity of the Aave ecosystem before we layer any incentives on top of it.
Question 9:
Will Geyser v2 start all over with 1x? I’m assuming we will have to migrate our liquidity tokens to v2?
Aalavandhan:
Yea. You’ll have to create a universal vault and migrate your LP tokens into the vault. This is a one time operation. After that for successive geyser programs no migration will be required. You will also be able to participate in multiple programs at once.
Follow-up question:
When will we get a ‘how to use the uni vault’ on the v2 geysers so we can understand exactly how it works? Similar to a Medium article or something?
Aalavandhan:
The UI should hopefully guide you through it and answer all your questions
Question 10:
What is there beyond lending? Can I trade AMPL supply futures?
Aalavandhan:
YES! It can be done.
Question 11:
Any major differences between the PRL lending app vs Aave or Yield.credit?
Aalavandhan:
The team can correct me if I’m wrong .. I’dd say it’s closer to ~ DAI.
Question 12:
A stablecoin collateralized with AMPL? When are we getting this?
Simon:
Wait, don’t you like it when centralized stablecoins with custodial risks are collateralized with… centralized stablecoins with custodial risks? It appears to be all the rage.
