Talk about Bitfinex’s first IEO project, Ampleforth, how to use “man-made” commodity currency?
Produced by Odaily
Author | Wang Ye
Editor | Lu Xiaoming
Produced by Odaily
Author | Wang Ye
You may have heard of commodity money, but you have never heard of "artificial" commodity money.white paperAt 14:00 on June 12th, Bitfinex’s first IEO project, Ampleforth (token name AMPL), was a guest on the Odaily Chaohua community. Ampleforth was formerly named Frgments. Maybe some early users in the currency circle have heard the name of this project, and often interact with some stablecoin projects. appear together, so some self-media often regard it as a stable currency project, but the project team firmly denies that it is a stable currency project, saying that it is a cryptocurrency with less volatility, and its positioning in the white paper is a " Man-made” commodity currency, later renamed Ampleforth because of trademark and copyright issues.In fact, when Bitfinex officially announced the first IEO project as Ampleforth on May 23, Odaily had already。
white paper
The project has been reported, and interested users can click
"One article to understand B network's first IEO project Ampleforth"
As we all know, gold and silver, as well as the currency (US dollar) under the gold standard, this kind of currency backed by physical objects can be called commodity currency. Why is Ampleforth said to be an "artificial" commodity currency?
So how is the concept of "artificial" commodity currency reflected in the currency price?
The following is the community Q&A session:
Unlike Basis, which adjusts the supply of tokens by issuing bonds, the Ampleforth team has developed a system to increase the supply of tokens called Global Scaler, which determines whether tokens should increase or decrease by adjusting this variable.
Evan Kuo：secondary title
The following is the community Q&A session:
Q1: According to public information, Ampleforth was previously named Frgments. Why did it suddenly change its name to Ampleforth?
Evan Kuo：That's a good question, but the answer might surprise you. At the time we were filing a trademark application for the name Fragments, but our legal team advised us to choose a more enforceable and protective name.
In the end we were more comfortable with the name Ampleforth because it was a more meaningful name and the foundation also owned the copyright to the name.
Q2: Why do you position Ampleforth as "A New Synthetic Commodity"?
Evan Kuo：Man-made commodity money actually uses a monetary economics taxonomy that is also used for Bitcoin, and our academic advisors advised us to do so. Artificial commodity currency is a currency that has the attributes of legal tender and natural commodity currency, especially artificial commodity currency, which is absolutely scarce (a bit like a scarce commodity) and has no non-monetary uses (this is somewhat similar to legal tender) .
AMPL is a brand-new artificial commodity currency, specifically, the currency has a non-zero long-run equilibrium price and high elasticity.
Q3: After reading the white paper of Ampleforth, it is easy to understand Ampleforth as an algorithmic stable currency. The price of AMPL is kept stable by adjusting the supply of tokens. However, you deny in the white paper that you are a stable currency project. Can you explain Ampleforth? Is it different from stable coins, such as USDT, USDC, GUSD, etc.? Why does it say in the white paper that "in the long run, with the development of Ampleforth, it is very likely that it will become more and more stable currency in the future"?
We expect AMPL to be very unstable. Although the protocol has a function of balancing prices, the number of AMPL tokens owned by each holder will be adjusted proportionally according to the specific demand situation.
I think when people think of stablecoins, they're usually talking about a non-volatile asset that works for an underlying trading pair or payment use case, but we're not like that.
Evan Kuo：I can understand people getting confused about our man-made commodity currencies because whenever something new is introduced it is often difficult to categorize it, and the only cryptocurrencies with dynamic supply policies today are stablecoins. I would also add that many of the current stablecoins are what we think of as more like decentralized banks or centralized private banks.
AMPL is not a bank, it is a special commodity.
Q4: In your opinion, is Ampleforth more like a stable currency or an investment product? How do early investors carry out speculative arbitrage?
Evan Kuo：It might be best to start off thinking of AMPL as a speculative asset with macroeconomic-friendly features, but what makes AMPL unique is that they don't move like other cryptocurrencies in the market today, so they're different from those cryptocurrencies. Assets are not very connected.
AMPL will be very useful for building investment portfolios, especially in the current cryptocurrency industry where the correlation of various digital assets is too high.
Q5: Where is the long-term investment value of Ampleforth reflected? How do you convince investors to hold AMPL for the long term?
Richy Qiao：One more thing to note about AMPL is that this man-made commodity currency is not scarce, but more like an asset with a fixed supply. For example, if you own 1% of the entire network assets when the market value of the network is 10 million US dollars, then when the market value reaches 100 million US dollars, you still own 1% of the entire network assets, and the value is only reflected in the quantity and price superior.
The following questions were answered by Ampleforth CBO (Chief Brand Officer) Richy Qiao. Richy worked as a consultant in New York for 4 years and was responsible for more than a dozen major client projects such as Morgan Stanley, DTCC and Visa. Richy is currently Venture Partner at FBG Capital.
Q6: How did you stabilize the price of AMPL at $1? For example, if the price of AMPL is too high, how should you adjust the supply? How do you maintain AMPL price stability by adjusting the token supply?
This is a good question, if the AMPL exchange price is greater than $1.05, we will expand the supply, and if the AMPL exchange price is less than $0.95, we will shrink the supply.
We use a global scalar variable called "expansion factor" to adjust the token supply, and then use functions such as get_balance() transfer() transferFrom() to override the default ERC20 interface, these functions are related to the expansion factor Relevant, especially when returning a value or accepting a value.
Richy Qiao：You can think of the whole system as thermal expansion, which adjusts the volume of material transferred to heat energy according to the coefficient of expansion.
When the price goes up, we increase the total token supply, which naturally creates some market pressure, which also causes the market price to fall back (and vice versa).
Q7: What are the application scenarios of Ampleforth?
In today's cryptocurrency market, various encrypted assets are highly correlated, and they mainly fluctuate with the price fluctuations of Bitcoin. However, assets like Amples bring about a completely different pattern of price fluctuations, as you can refer to the following examples:
1. Short-term: AMPL token is like a diversified crypto investment portfolio;
2. Mid-term: Can be used as a reserve collateral in a decentralized bank, just like MakerDAO;
3. Long-term: It can be seen as a central bank currency substitute, similar to Bitcoin, and a macroeconomically friendly currency.
Q8: Can you briefly introduce the total amount of AMPL tokens, token distribution ratio, the ratio of private placement and public placement to the total amount of tokens, the price of private placement and public placement, and the time of private placement and public placement? ?
Richy Qiao lays out some data to illustrate the problem:
Total Supply: 50,000,000 AMPL
Initial circulating supply: 10% of total supply
Public Sale Token Price: 1 AMPL = $0.98
Public offering: 10% of total supply (6% for public offering, 4% for pre-sale)
Private placement token price: 1 AMPL = $1.00
Private distribution: 3.3% of total supply
Private placement release period: 30% issued before listing, released monthly within one year from the fourth month
Seed round token price: 1 AMPL = $0.33
Richy Qiao：Seed round distribution: 18.5% of total supply
Seed round release rules: 6 months before lock-up, and then gradually released monthly within 1 year
Q9: What are the thresholds and conditions for Chinese investors to participate in AMPL ieo? How should Chinese investors carry out kyc certification?
Richy Qiao：Mainland Chinese citizens can register and participate in projects on Tokinex, and the maximum payment limit for individuals is US$10,000. You need a passport, and use an ID card to specify address information. If the Tokinex registration time expires, you can try to register an account that supports currency trading on Bitfinex or Ethfinex. The entire registration process only takes 2 minutes to complete, and there is no need for anti-money laundering and KYC (know your customer) requirements.
On the Bitfinex and Ethfinex exchanges, we have a lot to offer traders that are exciting, and we think participation in the secondary market remains an interesting and potentially lucrative opportunity.
Q10: Finally, can you briefly introduce the team situation of Ampleforth (how many people are in the current team, the division of labor of the founding team, etc.) and the financing situation?
Richy Qiao：We have a team of eight people, and the technical team is led by CTO and co-founder Brandon, who has been working on the Google search algorithm team for about five years, which is the smallest and most elite team at Google. He then moved to Uber, where he worked for about three years before coming to Ampleforth. Not only that, but Brando brought many of his old colleagues to Ampleforth! Including engineers also from Google's search algorithm team, and even an early engineer who was ranked 30th at Uber, so the background of our technical team will be very impressive.
