Transcript of the Ampleforth office hours on 23.02.2022
Simon:
Today we have Evan and Brandon from the Ampleforth team and we are joined Xiaohan Zhu of Meter for today’s session.
Brandon:
Shout out to deviant.finance, for those who haven’t seen it yet. They’re an interesting take on the Olympus DAO model on Avalanche with many modifications (drastically simplified), and AMPL is one of the three reserve assets. (The others being AVAX and DAI.e).
Question 1:
Xiaohan, for our new AMPL members who may not know about meter.io, can you give a brief description of your background and Meter?
Xiaohan:
Meter is a DeFi infrastructure with a built-in, crypto-native, metastable currency, MTR. It uses HotStuff-based PoS consensus with MTRG (Meter Governance Token) to manage the blockchain ledger. Meter aims to address three things:
- Highly decentralized high performance HotStuff consensus to scale Ethereum.
- Interconnect with different blockchains to support both asset transfer and smart contract call across blockchains.
- Complete Satoshi’s original vision and create a metastable sound money independent of the fiat system. (similar to AMPL but based on PoW).
Official Website: https://www.meter.io/
White Paper: https://docsend.com/view/6gebiph
Follow Meter on
Twitter: Twitter.com/Meter_IO
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/WPjTpMG
Question 2:
Are we really going meta?
Evan:
lol, that’s a good question.
Honestly a “cash of the internet” will always be strictly bigger than a “cash of the metaverse”. Fundamentally we’ve always been in this to build a politically independent financial system but we should be open to acquiring new users through whatever position resonates at the top funnel.
Question 3:
Will we see a geyser on Meter Chain?
Xiaohan:
Actually https://voltswap.finance/ staking contract and UI is based on Geyser v2.
We are launching liquidity mining incentives for AMPL-MTRG pair tomorrow on https://voltswap.finance/ at 10am PST Feb 24(tomorrow). It is based on Geyser v2 design with multiplier goes up to 10x over 70 days. Pools are refilled every 30 days.
Brandon:
This will be the third chain that GeyserV2 and Universal Vaults are deployed on, if you count Ethereum and Avalanche
Follow-up question:
It sounds like these geyser rewards are in MTRG or AMPL? or both?
Xiaohan:
It starts from LP for AMPL-MTRG will earn VOLT, voltswap’s governance token. VOLT staking holders will earn AMPL which we did a token swap with the AMPL team after the community vote a few weeks ago.
Follow-up question 2:
I noticed on Volt-Swap liquidity mining it mentions the “Rewards Never End”. How is this possible?
Xiaohan:
There is governance vote with VOLT tokens on how to allocate the rewards every 30 days. As long as there are enough votes to support AMPL pairs, there will be rewards allocated to the pool. The VOLT token releases over 4 year and halves every year.
Follow-up question 3:
I see the pool is already listed on Voltswap — so can we deposit our AMPL and MTRG already — to not miss the start?
Xiaohan:
Correct, you could already started depositing on the pool, but make sure the price is correct before you add liquidity. Currently the price may still be skewed due to low liquidity.
Question 4:
Where do you guys see Meter Chain in the long run in contrast to other L2s such as Arbitrum, etc?
Xiaohan:
Rollups are just temporary fixes for ETH. Remember all the transactions still have to be sent to ETH, just a succinct format. At the end of the day, they are all fighting for common resource on ETH 1. This is exactly the local area network model. ETH=Ethernet However we all know the internet scales out through connecting heterogeneous networks.
Question 5:
I’ve been wanting to test out some mooncake tranche strategies but with limited liquidity it’s hard to craft the position I want. When do we expect to incentivize or bootstrap some more liquidity in tranches?
Brandon:
I think this is best answered by the PRL team, since it’s tied closer to their roadmap. Mooncake is still considered to be in beta afaik.
Question 6:
How do you personally find the performance on AMPL on other chains? Has it met/exceeded expectations in terms of adoption?
Evan:
I’m not super pleased with the performance on other chains to be honest.
Follow-up question:
What do you think we can do to add more value and use?
Evan:
I think at the end of the day we need people to buy AMPL because they believe it will go up in value or be used in some understandable way.
To that end, an AMPL collateralized stablecoin is a pretty understandable proposition that locks AMPL.
Follow-up comment by Xiaohan:
Glad to know you guys are thinking about that. Our upcoming synthetic asset protocol could definitely look into use AMPL as collaterals. https://discord.com/invite/HwfsmQdYYh
Follow-up question 2:
Is there a set definitive date. I know difficult to predict these things and challenges.
Evan:
no date yet, but I can tell you this is the biggest single development initiative we’re focused on internally — we’re pretty excited about the design so far and it’s very different. This is a problem that Brandon, Aalavandhan and I have been thinking about for 3 years.
Follow-up comments by Brandon:
My biggest challenge right now is, how can we carve out as much time as possible to focus on it.
Question 7:
There’s been several complaints about rebases occasionally not propagating to other chains? i haven’t had time to deep dive into the specific root cause, but it seems like this is related to the bridge. Is the AMPL-bridge to meter-chain expected to be more reliable on this front?
Xiaohan:
I believe it was due to AMPL team fixing an issue in rebasing in a multichain environment. That was the reason rebasing was turned off for a few days. Brandon and Aalavandhan should have more details.
Brandon:
The latest downtime on rebases was related to maintenance being done on our side. We saw some unexpected behavior that we wanted to explore fully
Question 8:
I’m a little confused (about the AMPL collateralized stablecoin). I thought PRL were the ones working on the stable coins too?
Evan:
We’re making one that uses AMPL as collateral and separates AMPL’s price volatility entirely from its supply volatility.
The design takes full advantage of utilizing only AMPL as collateral, and being one connected piece of the ecosystem.
Question 9:
AMPL collateralized stablecoin，you mean something like AMPL version of DAI that can be listed on CEXs to replace trading pairs such as BTC—DAI/ BTC—USDT?
Evan:
Yah.
Question 10:
What does the team think about the idea of AMPL becoming the sponsor for Week in Ethereum? It’s a huge newsletter that many Ethereum OGs read.
Brandon:
Don’t know right now but thanks for the suggestion, I’ll pass it along.
Question 11:
Any updates on the snapshot vote for the Aave Avalanche proposal?
Brandon:
Unfortunately, not right now. We’re also in a holding pattern until we hear more ourselves.
Question 12:
Is it possible to use Forth as a way to vote for governance on other platforms? I.E delegate Forth for an Aave or Balancer feature and it will represent a vote by their respective governance tokens(maybe a swap happens underneath the hood)?
Brandon:
These systems aren’t directly compatible at the code level. I think the best way to approach this is through a token swap or collective DAO model. There’s potential for pursuing activities like these once the ForthDAO is launched next April when the unclaimed tokens are recovered.
Question 13:
Why 2019 USD (for the AMPL target price) instead of value of something like 1 gram of Gold or Silver ?
Evan:
It was just based on the time we launched, wanted to freeze purchasing power. Could be adjusted to a basket of commodities frozen in time tho eventually.
Final notes from Xiaohan:
we would like invite the AMPL community to check out https://voltswap.finance/ on Meter for AMPL-MTRG liquidity mining starting tomorrow at 10am PST.
AMPL-MTRG LP providers earn VOLT tokens and VOLT stakers will earn AMPL from the token swap we did a few weeks back. The staking design is based on geyser v2 with multiplier goes from 1x to 10x over 70 days. You could transfer AMPL or other assets to Meter through https://passport.meter.io/ and start trading on voltswap, which is the first front running resistant Uni v2 fork due to the design of Meter blockchain.
