Evan Kuo: AMPL - the Controversial Digital Currency With an Elastic Supply

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Ampleforth is a cryptocurrency attempting to become an essential building block to an alternative financial ecosystem. The protocol’s native token, AMPL, is a non collateralized cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, but with a twist: It is supply elastic. This means the token and protocol will automatically increase or decrease the quantity of tokens held in user wallets based on 24 hour weighted volume price. AMPL operates as an ERC-20 token on top of the Ethereum blockchain.

Some claim that the Ampleforth protocol’s implementation of “countercyclical” economic policy makes it a good complimentary collateral because they posit that this mechanism ought to give AMPL a low correlation to the likes of BTC and ETH. Others are not so sure: Does it really make a difference whether you have an inelastic supply without a target price, or an elastic supply with a target price of one? Is AMPL really not correlated to other types of collateral, and should this be so, does it even matter?

There has been a lot of chatter about Ampleforth in recent months. Is it legit, or is it a scam, 'HEX with Stanford credentials', as one pundit commented? We spoke with the co-founder Evan Kuo, who attempts to explain how it all works and straighten out misconceptions surrounding the protocol.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Evan’s background
• What is Ampleforth and its mission
• What is Ampleforth’s value proposition and the rules based system it uses
• How the rebasing works
• Slow traders vs fast traders
• Where profits from fast traders come from
• Using Ampleforth as base money
• Token distribution
• The integration hurdles with AMPL
• Does the community truly understand the protocol?

Episode links:

• Ampleforth website
• AMPL Talk
• AMPL Token Distribution
• Ampleforth White Paper
• Ampleforth Twitter
• Evan Kuo Twitter

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/351