Ampleforth

Ampleforth (AMPL) is a cryptocurrency built on Ethereum that features an algorithmically managed circulating supply. It aims to serve as foundational money for the emerging decentralized economy by offering an asset immune to dilution from supply inflation and largely independent of the price movements of other cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin (BTC).

Holders of Ampleforth possess a set share of the total AMPL supply instead of a static quantity of tokens. The protocol expands the circulating supply when it identifies the AMPL price as excessively high and contracts it when the price is deemed too low.

These adjustments are applied across all Ampleforth wallets, modifying balances proportionally. Despite these changes, each holder maintains their original percentage of the total token supply.

This automated mechanism, called a “rebase,” takes place once daily. A positive rebase occurs if the price exceeds $1.06, while a negative rebase happens if it falls below $0.96. The system’s primary objective is to establish incentives that guide the market price of AMPL back toward approximately $1.

Evan Kuo established Ampleforth. He is a serial entrepreneur and product manager with a bachelor of science (BS) in mechatronics, robotics and automation engineering from UC Berkeley. Described as someone who loves art and math, Kuo has experience building predictive auction products. He formerly served as CEO of Pythagoras Pizza, a San Francisco-based pizza delivery service, and currently acts as CEO of the Ampleforth Foundation, the firm responsible for developing and managing the Ampleforth protocol.

Brandon Iles, a senior software engineer with past experience at Uber and Google, is also listed as a co-founder. The Ampleforth Foundation team consists almost entirely of engineers. According to its LinkedIn page, Ampleforth currently lists just over a dozen team members, most of whom are based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Ampleforth stands out by striving to offer a genuinely non-correlated asset. It is designed for diversifying crypto holdings, serving as reserve collateral in decentralized finance (DeFi), and potentially acting as a shock-resistant alternative to central-bank currency.

The protocol employs a novel mechanism where the circulating supply grows or shrinks based on consumer demand, ensuring no individual stakeholder is diluted. The team posits that this characteristic makes AMPL suitable as foundational money for the digital economy, akin to the role gold played for many fiat currencies before the Bretton Woods agreement ended.

Since the Ampleforth supply is not subject to inflation or other dilutive influences, it is uniquely placed to preserve purchasing power relative to other assets. This quality renders it appealing as a hedge and a substitute for fiat currencies experiencing severe devaluation.

Ampleforth (AMPL) differs from most cryptocurrencies because it lacks a fixed minimum or maximum supply. The circulating token count expands when the price remains above $1 and contracts when it falls below $1.

The project secured $4.9 million through an initial exchange offering (IEO) on Tokinex, in addition to various private funding rounds. During this sale, AMPL tokens were priced at $0.98 each.

At launch, the circulating supply stood at 50 million tokens. The original transparency report detailed the following allocation: 23.2% to the ecosystem; 18.5% to seed investors; 3.3% to series A investors; 10% to Tokinex IEO participants; 25% to the Ampleforth team and advisors; and 20% to the treasury.

A later report from August 2020 highlighted significant shifts in distribution, noting that approximately 42.5% of AMPL is now held by the community, with 23.5% designated for liquidity mining programs.

Ampleforth operates as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, relying on the security provided by Ethereum’s vast network of miners and nodes.

The protocol’s integrity is further upheld by a decentralized oracle system that supplies the price information necessary to calculate positive or negative rebases.

Before December 2019, Ampleforth served as the sole source for this market data. To prevent centralization, the project has since incorporated Chainlink oracles. Currently, the rebase logic draws upon data from several different aggregators.

Ampleforth tokens, also referred to as amples, are available for purchase and trading on more than a dozen cryptocurrency exchanges. These platforms support trades against both fiat currencies and other digital assets. Currently, KuCoin serves as the leading centralized exchange for AMPL, while Uniswap is the top choice among decentralized exchanges.