On April 16th, the remaining FORTH tokens from the claim period were recovered and became the seeding event for the DAO’s treasury. In its first week, the DAO became a top-50 DAO by AUM. Those who were looking closely also noticed the treasury taking control of some other assets.
In addition to the FORTH, the DAO also controls:
- 8.7M AMPL
- $1.1M of AMPL/ETH UniV2 Liquidity
- aAMPL/AMPL Mooniswap Liquidity (~180K AMPL)
These assets represent the Ampleforth Ecosystem Fund. Notice this also means there is currently ~$1.8M of protocol(i.e. DAO)-owned AMPL liquidity.
Other Chains
Additionally, the Ecofund controls some liquidity on other chains. Since governance does not yet extend control there, they are owned by Multisigs. We can look to evolve these over time, similar to Balancer’s Ballers community multisig. This includes:
BSC:
- $140K AMPL/WBNB on Pancake Swap
Avalanche:
- $120K AMPL/WAVAX on Trader Joe
- $30K AMPL/WAVAX on Pangolin
The Ecofund
When the Ampleforth network launched a special carveout was made to for the Ecosystem Fund. The Eco fund was meant to encourage liquidity, and generally create a mature market for AMPL to live in. It has so far been used to power the Geyser Liquidity Mining programs, which are also a rules-based way of distributing tokens out into the ecosystem to those who do work for the network.
When the geysers began, it was announced to be a 10 year program–eons in crypto time. They have now been running for nearly two years, creating liquidity out on DEXs and distributing to AMPL users. Up to now, the geyser emissions have roughly followed Bitcoin’s emission curve:
DAO control
If the DAO wishes, it may continue on this path with no functional changes. Periodically, it can decide to change or rebalance emissions onto new platforms (like DEXs, lending markets) as the space develops.
But now that the DAO is in control, it’s free to use alternate approaches if it chooses. One potential path is to instead pursue protocol owned liquidity–liquidity positions owned by the DAO itself. Aside from guaranteed long term liquidity, another benefit of this approach is that if the FORTH token controls enough AMPL, then it should create a tighter coupling between FORTH value and AMPL value. The biggest challenge here is the acquisition of the pair tokens to complete the LP positions, but there have already been discussions about potential ways to unlock DAO capital that might prove useful.
The DAO could also pursue a mix of these two approaches–LM and POL–or new ideas that haven’t been thought of yet. Perhaps, instead of the un-awarded Ecofund AMPL sitting idle, they could be deployed productively in the meantime similar to this proposal from Xiri.
I’m curious to hear the community’s thoughts on how best to apply the Ecosystem Fund. Would people like to continue the Geyser program as-is or pursue a different direction?
Next Refresh
The next geyser refresh is in 58 days. If no other changes are arrived at before then, then the default action will be to top up the existing programs as they are and continue the emission according to the existing curve.