Saturday, February 13, 2021

Ampleforth is a primitive. What does that mean?

Well, Ampleforth is not created to be used inside some specific ecosystem or pool (most cryptocurrency), it acts more like Bitcoin or Ethereum. It wants to be a base currency - a currency that is not correlated with the price movements of any of the other cryptocurrencies.

When Satoshi envisioned a ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash’ he seems to have not considered the implications of giving Bitcoin a fixed supply - you have probably heard before, that “there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin” - this makes Bitcoin valuable, and unfortunately, it also makes it’s price very volatile, since people use it as digital gold. People hoard Bitcoin, because it’s deflationary nature incentivizes them to do so. One year, one BTC might be 10k - the next, 15k. Because of this Bitcoin is not a good medium of exchange either, and it is not a good financial vehicle to be used as collateral. In other words, it is not the “electronic cash” that Satoshi was trying to create. He even said in a forum post, that if there was some way his protocol could know data from the outside world, he could have made a better currency, by dynamically adjust the quantities of it.

Well, now we have a solution to this “getting data” problem - oracles.

Ampleforth is a currency that is trying to be the ‘electronic cash’ that Satoshi was trying to create. How is Ampleforth trying to achieve this? The main thing that makes the AMPL different, is that its supply is elastic. This means, that the price of the currency has a target zone which it is always trying to be inside - and it will adjust the distribution of it’s supply to get there.

The target zone is between 0.96 - 1.06 2019 USD (This value is CPI adjusted and gotten with an oracle - and will also climb higher over time, as the current year dollar devaluates relatively to the 2019 dollar).

To get to this target zone, every 24 hours, Ampleforth undergoes a “Rebase” event, where the entire supply of the currency is readjusted and redistributed. This means, that if the AMPL has had a 24 hour avg. price, higher than 1.06 - the currency is inflated, and everyone gets more AMPL. If the avg. price is under 0.96, the currency is deflated - and everyone has less AMPL. Both of these types of adjustments move the price towards it’s target zone by doing this. By making the currency less or more scarce, depending on the demand of it.

This is genius! Because of this mechanism, you now have a currency - that at a high market cap - will always have a stable price at around 1 USD, that cannot be inflated. Imagine if the US Fed prints a couple of trillion dollars today - and you hold USD. Well, now your USD is worth less, because there is more of it in circulation. If the USD worked like Ampleforth, then part of those trillions of dollars would be deposited straight into your account to reflect, that you own a certain percentage of the USD - and since there is now more of it in existence, you get more, so that your ownership percentage of the network isn’t diminished.

This is great. Because of this - and because the opposite happens when the price falls under a dollar - we now have a currency that is neither inflationary or deflationary - it is both! And at a stable price, when the market cap finds its supply/demand equilibrium.

This effectively means, that Ampleforth now becomes a currency with units that aren’t as volatile as the BTC - you are not incentivized to hoard them - the value of a single unit is relatively fixed.

Here, we now have a currency that has managed to move its volatility into its supply - and therefore it can be used as collateral in DeFi applications - and eventually, we can perhaps even use it as a base medium of exchange, like the USD. The AMPL is the next step in the natural evolution of money.

Just note, that the price of AMPL is supposed to be volatile right now, because it hasn’t found its supply/demand equilibrium yet. If you throw money into this now as a speculative investment, you are essentially betting that the market cap will be higher (it has to be, for it to work) and you will reap the rewards because you will own a percentage of the network on the way towards this MC appreciation - you will be distributed more AMPL, if the MC grows.


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