Ampleforth (AMPL + FORTH)

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## Basics

* Based in:
* Founded in: 2017
* Mainnet release:
* A digital-asset-protocol for synthetic smart commodity-money.

## History

* From The Defiant (27-6-2020):

"*We initially started with a project that we called Fragments. So, Fragments was fairly complicated, much more complicated than Ampleforth. And it also had multiple coins, had a bond market in there and we had a reserve. But over time, as we worked with the system more and more, we started to lose faith in a lot of the mechanisms that we were sort of piling on, probably it seems increasingly fragile and risky. It had a lot of dependencies on markets that we didn't like and that sort of thing. We iteratively started taking these pieces out one by one and eventually, we ended up with a system, Ampleforth, that is so simple and sort of straightforward. We decided this just deserves its own name and so we came up with the Ampleforth name instead of the other name."*

* Sam Kazemian has claimed AMPL stole the idea from Hayek Money and never mentioned it as the source of their specifications. (27-7-2020).

## Audits & Exploits

* Ampleforth has a Bug Bounty program with Immunefi that is live and rewards participating users with up to 100k in rewards (26-8-2021). None according to Blockchain Security DB (29-6-2020), which does show 1 audit (10-2018).
* Scored a 87% on DeFi Safety (26-8-2021):

*"Ampleforth has had multiple audits pre and post-deployment of their multiple smart contracts. The full list of audit reports can be found here, and include reports from QuantStamp, Certik, Slowmist and Trail of Bits."*

With the comment: *"Excellent code and team, security, access controls and testing. Good job guys."*

* Previously scored a 93% (15-10-2020).

### Bugs/Exploits

* When KuCoin got hacked (28-9-2020), Ampleforth replied with "*A contract upgrade was quickly deployed to disable transfers from the attacker."*. This shows centralized powers.

## Governance

### Admin Keys

* From Crypto Briefing (5-3-2021) keep in mind Ampleforth was a former sponsor of Crypto Briefing:

*"Is removing upgradeability from the protocol’s token smart contract. Ampleforth is officially censorship-resistant and cannot be changed without the community’s approval. Like many popular DeFi protocols and the Ethereum network, Ampleforth also has public proposals called AIPs and ACCPs. So far, there have a total of six proposals. Each proposal suggests different changes to the protocol as part of a broader governance scheme.*

*Still, discussions around these proposals are akin to Reddit upvotes and commentary; anyone, not just AMPL token holders, could participate and vote. For Iles, this has been enough as he wrote in the above-mentioned post that Ampleforth had no “plans to release a separate governance token.”*

*According to the AmpleforthMedia team: “Future protocol maintenance and upgrades will only be achievable through on-chain governance by the Ampleforth community. Further information on this will be announced by the Foundation in the near future.”*

* From DeFi Safety (26-8-2021):

*"Ampleforth's community governance section can easily be found in their documentation here.*

*a) Ampleforth clearly outlines the immutability of the governance contract and the upgradeability of the policy contracts.*

*b) The defined voting roles are clearly outline in governance documentation.*

*c) The scope of available upgrade propositions are all outline in governance documentation.*

*According to the Ampleforth roadmap and GitHub commits, the pause function was removed in 2020."*

## Token

### Token allocation

* From The Defiant (24-6-2020):

"*AMPL is a digital asset whose supply automatically adjusts according to market demand to trade at its peg of the 2019 US dollar (the specific year is to avoid devaluing effects of inflation). The stablecoin has climbed to $1.12 from $1.02 on Monday, before the program started. The token is programmed to trade within a band of the target price, so supply should contract to bring it closer to $1."*

* From their FORTH announcement (13-4-2021):

*"15 million `**FORTH**` have been minted at genesis and are available to be claimed by the community, participants and key contributors. The initial supply will be available immediately, and future inflation will be set at 2 percent annually. Allocation of the `**FORTH**` token to the existing Ampleforth ecosystem will be as follows:*

1. *67% of `**FORTH**` to the `**AMPL**` community**\****
2. *33% of `**FORTH**` to early backers (e.g., the core development team, advisors, supporters and the Ampleforth Foundation)*
3. *2.5% will be carved out of the community allocation to fund a public community education program, with further details to be announced."*

### Utility

#### AMPL

* From The Defiant (27-6-2020):

"*It’s a token — AMPL— whose value comes from having a price which moves in a predetermined band, thanks to a smart contract which automatically contracts or expands its supply. The end result is a token that trades at close to $1, the 2019 US dollar, to be precise, but Ampleforth doesn’t like to be called a stablecoin."*

* Liquidity mining program, from The Defiant (24-6-2020):

*"Ampleforth yesterday started distributing its token AMPL to users who provide liquidity to the ETH/AMPL pool on Uniswap V2, and then stake their Uniswap LP tokens in Ampleforth’s interface for the program, called Geyser."*

#### FORTH

* The governance token, was released on 21-4-2021. To mixed reactions, some called it a cash grab, others pointed out that this dual token system has been around for some time.

*"FORTH is an inflationary token that can be directly utilized or delegated to propose and vote on changes to the Ampleforth protocol. Its model is an extension of Compound Finance’s COMP. To ensure a fair system that offers proper incentives for all network participants, initial governance parameters will be set when the on-chain governance is deployed. Additionally, you will be able to delegate your `**FORTH**` to “representatives” who will then be able to utilize your voting power to propose changes or vote on your behalf."*

## Tech

* Whitepaper can be found here (20-5-2019).
* Code can be viewed here.
* Built on: Ethereum; *"Potentially, we could be also on other blockchains in the future as a sort of cross chain asset."* Update (2-12-2020): *"Ampleforth is set to launch on Polkadot, NEAR, and TRON* *within the next few months".* Deployed on BSC (14-6-2021). Got deployed on Avalanche (26-10-2021).
* Programming language used:

### How it works

* From The Defiant (27-6-2020):

"*So, the AMPL token has what we call a long run price circuit. So, we say that it’s not pegged per se, because there's no underlying redeemability for the US dollar the way there is for Tether or TrueUSD or anything like that. AMPL is non-collateralized the same way that Bitcoin or Ethereum is non-collateralized.*

*When the price of the AMPL token in the marketplace is higher than the price target, then it means we need to increase the overall supply of AMPL to help bring the price back down to the target. And then when the price of the AMPL token is below the target price, then it means we need to reduce the supply of AMPL token to bring the price back up.*

*So, those are the two core rules. If we're above the price, we expand; if we're below the price, we contract. Now, the way the protocol does this is rather unique; in the sense that when there's a supply adjustment, it happens universally to all parties in the system. It happens proportionally to what you own. So, what this means is that the number of tokens you own in your wallet can change day to day.*

*CR: The number or the value?*

*BI: Both, right. The protocol adjusts the supply tokens, but its actors in the marketplace incorporate the supply back into price. So, this is the feedback loop. In a perfect world, if we could control the price of something in the marketplace, that'd be great. But you know, history has shown when governors try to ignore market forces, bad things happen. So, all we can do is let the market play out, but make supply adjustments to help it reach back into the equilibrium point where one token has the price target."*

### Interoperability

* The project has integrated the Meter Passport bridge to bring AMPL cross-chain to BSC (14-6-2021).

## Oracle Method

* From The Defiant (27-6-2020):

"*So, we have two oracles. The first one provides the 24-hour volume weighted average price of AMPL versus the US dollar. The second oracle provides the PCE, the Personal Consumption Expenditures. So, this is a measure of consumer price index that’s published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. And what this does is it allows us to target the 2019 US dollar. So, AMPL doesn't even target the US dollar, it targets the US dollar at a particular point in time..."*

## Pros and Cons

### Cons

* Sam Kazemian has written a twitter thread on why AMPL seems ludicrous.
* When KuCoin got hacked (28-9-2020), Ampleforth replied with "*A contract upgrade was quickly deployed to disable transfers from the attacker."*. This shows centralized powers.
* From DeFi Weekly (28-1-2021):

*"One of the major problems with AMPL is that it breaks anything it integrates into. Why? Because they modify the supply of the ERC20 token in a non-compliant way. As a result, AMPL isn’t very useful throughout DeFi and can cause a lot of problems to be used as anything beyond speculative games. Furthermore, AMPL has a set of early investors that purchased AMPL at much lower valuations than the intended $1 which means that the stablecoin itself is a wealth game for early adopters."*

* An insider trader of the team or investors who did airdrop farming got found:

*"this address gaming $**FORTH** airdrop prob also needs public attention: 1. receives 200 eth from tornado cash 2. sends small amounts of ampl and eth to over 5000 addresses 3. claim $FORTH airdrop 100 days later and profit ~28 million at the time of airdrop"*

## Team, Funding, Partners

### Team

* Full team can be found here (as of 9-2019 on the website).
* *"We are a team of computer scientists, academics, investors, and enthusiasts."*
* Evan Kuo; Engineer / Product *"Evan holds a BS from UC Berkeley, where he studied a mix of ME & CS with research focused in Robotics."*
* Brandon Iles; CTO
* Joey Krug; advisor
* Noah Jessop; advisor
* Paul Veradittakit; advisor
* Manuel Rincon Cruz; advisor
* Sam Lessin; advisor
* Nial Ferguson; advisor
* Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Thiel Fellowship, Oxford and Hoover Institute are among the advisor list.

### Funding

* From The Defiant (27-6-2020):

*"We went the traditional VC route. We raised a seed fund from some very high quality folks like True Ventures, Founders Collective, and Pantera. We did think an ICO, that was definitely an option to us. But given the choice between getting just funds or funds with the advice of very smart, respected people, I think we chose a second one, which is the traditional VC route, which thankfully we had access to just given location where we were. I think that was definitely the right move."*

Investors

* True Ventures
* Pantera Capital
* Founder Collective
* Slow Ventures
* Brian Armstrong
* FBG Capital
* Huobi Capital
* Spartan Group
* Nima Capital
* Skunk Capital
* Part of (9-3-2020) the portfolio of Arrington XRP Capital.

### Partners

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