Transcript of the Ampleforth office hours on 19.01.2022

Ampleforthx
4 min readJan 20, 2022

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Simon:
This past week the Geyser top ups along with a brand new Avalanche Geyser launched- it’s been great to see what looks like a lot more new people joining the AMPL community. Thanks to all of you in the discord and across social media who answered questions and helped people participate in the Geyser program.

Question 1:
Will any of the wAMPL LP’s ever have a geyser?

Brandon:
Yeah I think there’s a good chance for one, especially once we have to new routing features deployed on Balancer. In that case, since the router will automatically wrap and unwrap tokens, it effectively stimulates both AMPL and wAMPL liquidity at the same time. Hoping that gets deployed soon.

Question 2:
I got a question regarding the crystal geyser. Is there a way to claim the PNG rewards to the vault? I noticed that the vault view has PNG listed as a withdraw option, but my gut feeling is that claiming PNG to the vault wouldn’t be possible. But maybe Pangolin returns the PNG rewards at the point of breaking the LP tokens back to its raw AMPL and AVAX anyway?

Brandon:
Not yet… but keep watching that space 🙂

Question 3:
What will be the responsibilities of the new marketing hire? What are his OKR’s?

Simon:
Quite a lot! Since AMPL is entering the utility era there is so much more to educate people on and there is a big opportunity to grow awareness of the project and what it can do for the space. Think about all the different elements AMPL has now: AMPL, wAMPL, aAMPL, tranched AMPL, xchain AMPL… FORTH 1 year is coming up soon too.

There is a lot of work to be done to share what each of these components does and what utility they offer and of course there is a lot more being worked on as well. The work load is large but exciting, and you’ll be seeing a lot on these fronts. You’ll also be seeing Matt here in office hours, last week was a pretty good intro and there will be more of that to come.

Question 4:
Any other chains on the horizon? Moonbeam is spun up with some decentralized exchanges and Polygon has the contract live but no liquidity.

Brandon:
Yes we’re planning on expanding to more chains. We view this are pretty core to the DNA of the project — our first post on this was in the beginning of 2019. The cool thing about AMPL is that, since it’s not tied to a particular L1, it can be a first class citizen no matter where it is. There are a number that look interesting right now, and thankfully the tech is mostly the same as long as they’re EVM compatible. L2s sometime take some special consideration but we’re keeping a close eye on Arbitrum and StarkNet.

Continued by Simon:
Here is that first post: https://blog.ampleforth.org/independent-currency-in-a-multi-chain-world-67032dce8296

Question 5:
Why did you kill the Sushiswap geyser?

Brandon:
I think the Geyser programs are a great chance to show off the breadth of what the Ampleforth ecosystem is growing into. There are geysers for basic AMMs (Uniswap), smart AMMs (Balancer), Lending (Aave), Collateral Baskets (Trinity) and Multichain (Avalanche). That’s a lot of ground to cover.

Question 6:
Are there any ideas around having one singular web app that contains all of AMPL’s functionalities, i.e. geysers, dashboard, other apps like MoonCake, etc. ?

Evan:
Yes we will be grouping dapps a bit more thoughtfully in the coming update.

Brandon:
That’s definitely possible to build, but given the choice I’d rather spend the time growing the ecosystem underneath it. (Bitcoin doesn’t need to host every Bitcoin app, for instance).

Question 7:
What’s the next milestone the team is going to hit in the immediate future?

Brandon:
A lot of our work depends on shared timeline with third parties, so it’s hard to predict. We often try not to announce any work until we know exactly what the timeline’s going to be and it’s been derisked.

Question 8:
Are PRL/Button the only other people who you know to be working on AMPL products?

Brandon:
AMPL is an open and permissionless protocol, so anyone can build on top of it without asking first. Off the top of my head there’s also Demox, Hourglass, at least one ohm-fork, Balancer, Alchemist (if you count geyser), Pangolin, …

Question 9:
is AMPL more geared towards personal finance like currently borrow/lending or is there a wider scope that would like to target?

Evan:
AMPL is a decentralized unit of account — initially that’s a more finance-forward use case (ie: lending, borrowing).

wAMPL can be used for retail speculation.

Derivatives of AMPL like safeAMPL (that’s what we’ve been calling the internal derivative of AMPL that separates the asset’s price volatility from its stock volatility) can be used both by retail users for value storage and by financial applications as collateral.

The core asset is more financial in nature, but it’s derivatives can be more wide-reaching.

Question 10:
If there was a Geyser for a boosted pool for Balancer -> Aave how will that work? Would someone just need to stake their Balancer LP tokens in the Geyser?

Brandon:
Yeah, exactly. LPs don’t need to worry about depositing into Aave or wrapping into WAMPL, since that happens under the hood. From that point, there’s only LP tokens like any other pool.

Question 11:
How’s AIP-5 coming along btw?

Brandon:
Hoping for a fresh proposed update soon (like this week).

Question 12:
Would you consider another news piece elaborating the fact, that AMPL is able to produce a unique 87k APY on lending platforms, like Aave (preferably while there is 87k going on Aave)? Something like: “87k APY! How Ampleforth is able to produce the highest yield in Defi”.

Evan:
That’s a great idea!

Link to the start of the office hours on Discord

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