To start off, I was never really a fan of the FORTH token. I liked that AMPL was this very simple unique crypto asset that scaled brilliantly and could potentially be the first true decentralized unit of account. I liked the simplicity of it being one token and no other complications. You didn’t need to stake or do anything. It just did what it was designed to do.
Anyways here we are and we have FORTH token. I don’t really see purpose of its use as a governance token. Anyone who actually thinks they have actual ability to meaningfully amend the protocol without team backing is naive. Also governance tokens or so boring. We can do better then that. Especially with the giga brain and creativity of evan and brandon.
Anyways, I propose we turn FORTH into the Revenue/Governance token of an actual product. People want to actually go and do something with there assets, not just sit in a wallet. I would like to see a lending platform or an AMM or something cool unique with FORTH. Perhaps even a derivative yield product like PENDLE. We should create an app.ampleforth.org which leads to a financial product page where we can do everything. One stop shop for ampleforth ecosystem. AND GUESS WHAT everything will be denominated in??? YOU GUESSED IT… AMPL
Now we have the first real mega use case that folks can use there AMPL daily. You can create your own lending and derivatives markets without being held hostage from lack of effort from other teams and now we actually build the future of France together as fricken chads.
Now with this I can see an actual meaning of the FORTH token. And i think we end up creating the most bad ass ecosystem ever. Lets go!
I recently proposed a similar structure / incentive mechanism in the Ampleforth #governance chat - so I’m happy to see someone else that shares the same forethought.
Like the concept of giving an incentive to hold FORTH other than pure governance.
I think the challenge here is actually building a use case for AMPL. Right now it’s just an asset you can buy/sell/hold (maybe do LP) so not many places for revenue.
I think the FORTH token is necessary for voting on protocol parameters if we truly want it to be a decentralized unit of account. One of the critiques of AMPL being used as a stable currency is how the threshold is ±5%. As volatility decreases this will have to be tightened. Relying on the team for that I think is bad practice at this point, we want the Ampleforth Protocol to be as decentralized and censorship resistant going forward. If we rely on a centralized entity to tune protocol parameters that’s a big red flag compared to governance structure. You could argue that governance isn’t that decentralized but it’s better than centralized control.
I get it, there hasn’t been great price action because there isn’t much that can be done right now but I think it is necessary.
I think what I would like to see FORTH become is something like BANK for Bankless which is a token to represent stake in a community and took for us to organize and incentivize participation. I think it would be good to put all the unclaimed FORTH into a DAO treasury and proposals could be made to incentivize building of said products. Without funding I don’t think new things will be built. We could even vote to mint FORTH if needed.
On the one stop AMPL shop I explicitly don’t like that framing because AMPL is supposed to be modular and built in to defi. We need a heterogeneous ecosystem that’s a mix of elastic finance specific use cases like Amplesense elastic vault and other defi protocols like Balancer and AAVE. If the community likes Pendle we could work together to try and integrate and leverage what they have, engage with them to include rebasing tokens like AMPL. This could be an initiative voted on and incentivized by the Forth DAO.
So summing it all up… Forth token is necessary for voting on protocol parameters in my opinion. I look at Forth as the tool we can use to organize the community into a decentralized organization. I agree with adding more use cases to the Forth token, but first and foremost I think we need an incentive structure to work with to facilitate participation, which can be bootstrapped with unclaimed FORTH and possibly a minting event.
I’m also very curious what other people in the community think and how this jives with the Ampleforth team’s vision of the Forth token. @Brandon@evankuo
First of all, thanks for bringing up the discussion
With this said, I do not think we should build a revenue token or similar out of FORTH.
AMPL itself is designed as base money and less a product with revenue. After all, I think AMPL itself should not have any revenue at all. It should be as natural as possible and the more incentives we provide for FORTH holders to do something with their tokens, the less natural AMPL will become.
To put it another way, I think FORTH is a necessary evil. There should be as few votes as possible to not disrupt trust in the algorithm AMPL runs on. IMHO FORTH should just be used to make sure the protocol runs as intended, e.g. make sure the oracle infrastructure runs smoothly.
About building product on top of AMPL, aka elastic finance:
Sure thing! DEXes with elastic support, derivates on top of AMPL, etc are things we need to build this ecosystem. But should FORTH really govern these products?
If we want to build elastic finance with the same composability (i.e. lego moneys) as the current Defi system offers, we should not embrace “one-stop shops” but rather independent products.
I’ve made similar comments recently in the official discord server, but all in all I’m not in favour of FORTH gaining reasons to exist beyond controlling how AMPL operates.
As you stated in your opening paragraph, the beauty of AMPL is in its simplicity. I think the same applies to FORTH. By adding use cases for it, you risk introducing incentives for people to use it in a way that’s not beneficial to the oversight of AMPL.
Moreover, I don’t believe FORTH requires additional functionality for it to have or maintain value. If you believe AMPL itself has value, you must implicitly believe the token that governs it does too. If you believe that AMPL will ultimately reach its end goal, then you should recognise that when it does FORTH will have significant value too.
Those who wish to alter how AMPL works will place demand on FORTH. Those who wish to avoid alterations to how AMPL works will also place demand on FORTH, as they require it to stonewall proposed changes.
If there was a way to put FORTH to work, then perhaps it would be using it as collateral for loans, enabling users to retain their control but freeing up that value for other investments.
As for the idea of having an app that provides a nice interface for using AMPL in various ways, I think that it would be more beneficial than detrimental but I do think it’s lower in priority than actually establishing those third party integrations and use cases. A page that advertises existing use cases and links to third party platforms makes more sense to me than a webapp that allows you to use your AMPL portfolio in various third party products.
Thanks or kicking off this great discussion @AMPLWHALEGOD.
@kbambridge, thanks for all the solid contributions lately! As far as what you said here, I pretty much agree with each point you make. You said it better than I could have, even.
To add just a little more detail–
The FORTH announcement post does say that the remaining unclaimed tokens after the year mark will go into a community controlled wallet. This means, most likely, the voter-controlled Timelock once the remaining governance contracts are deployed. These deployments should happen very soon.
Minting will initially be handed over to the governor voting contract, unless/until we all decide to reassign this duty (through governance). However, minting is capped by the token code to be no more than 2% per year. This is to set scarcity bounds that everyone can rely on.
I agree. The use-case of a pure governance token is not a very valuable on it’s own & opens the door for large VC’s & CEX’s to have too much power overall. Some sort of utility case like @ AMPLWHALEGOD proposed will add long term value.
Hello
Great discution we know Ample has to Mature… but as a Forth holder too. I would support a use case for Forth vote & usecases
We can start supporting 1 usecase and see how it goes… then the success of the first usecase Will give the experience And open the door for the 2nd AND other use cases. Like doing things step by step…
