Geyser Refresh for Q3 2023

Ampleforth Governance
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The current geyser programs are ending soon, let’s talk about the next rounds!

About the Geysers

The Geyser program was created as a way to distribute AMPL out into the world in a sensible, permissionless, and predictable way. It did this by directing to those who contributed to the health of the AMPL ecosystem by providing liquidity on DEXs.

You can learn more here. However, it’s always been within the DAO’s control to change or modify this program as it sees fit to keep up with the evolution of the marketplace.

History and Future

The first geyser was launched in the Summer of 2020. At the time, AMPL was a young project. One of the big issues then was the question of how AMPL could achieve broad and diverse distribution. However, considerable time has passed since then, and the project has matured in many ways.

DeFi Summer saw an influx of attention and new users. AMPL is now tradable on exchanges like Coinbase, KuCoin, Bitfinex, and others, in addition to various decentralization exchanges. FORTH governance is live, along with an associated treasury under its control. The Spot flatcoin is a promising future demand sink for AMPL and has the potential to reach an even larger audience because the value proposition is easier to understand and appreciate.

Now that SPOT is moving from a “soft-launched” phase to a “launched” phase, it’s a good time to revisit the Geyser configurations and ensure they’re doing as much as possible for the success of the ecosystem. There has been a general consensus building that a small number of deep pools, combined with liquidity owned directly by the DAO is the best direction to move toward long term.

AMPL is, at its core, a scarce commodity. In order for the DAO to own liquidity, mint SPOT, support Spot rotations via the rotation vault, or support the ecosystem in currently unforeseen ways, it will need to maintain a sizable enough portion of AMPL to perform these duties. I don’t think the original goal for the ecosystem fund to give out all the AMPL into the market continues to matches the needs of the ecosystem today and going forward. Instead, I propose shifting the geyser reward token to FORTH.

It makes sense for those who are supporting the health of the ecosystem to continue to get a stake in its governance. Allocating FORTH for liquidity providers can help deepen community ownership and increase governance among the most active stakeholders.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that, for those who still value single-sided AMPL staking, this is now available in the recently rolled out >> Rotation Vault <<!

Proposed Configuration

The Forth DAO Treasury owns 3,715,664 FORTH directly and 147,928 FORTH in the Arrakis PALM Vault

I propose moving from 3 month cycles to 4 month cycles to minimize governance overhead. If we imagine devoting half of a hypothetical 2% inflation to geyser rewards for a year, then that would equate to 50K forth for this four month period. This could be broken down as follows:

Geyser Platform Pair Chain FORTH Amount
Beehive v5 Uniswap v2 ETH/AMPL Ethereum 35,000 FORTH
Fly Uniswap v3 SPOT/USDC Ethereum 15,000 FORTH
Total 50,000 FORTH
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I liked the idea of the Geysers receiving “real yield” in Spot.

But I guess technically, with the rollover vault, it is now able to return real yield based on user interactions with the vault, which is even more “real”.

The rollover vault seems to be an evolution of the geysers, the geysers are more risky because you may miss out of on rebase exposure when providing lp.

The rollover vault will provide stakers woth rewards without sacrificing the rebase exposure, so with that said, it makes the vault a better option for those wanting to increase their ampl holdings over the geyser.

It is also a lower barrier of entry, as opposed to the geysers.

I also agree with using Ampl to support Spot as much as possible, I think the rollover vault is a bit more critical than Spot liquidity in its young life.

Forth is like a renewable energy source, especially with the potential 2% inflation each year, while Ampl in the treasury is finite.

I am in favor of this proposal

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I appreciate your thoughtful proposal to shift the Geyser reward token to FORTH. The idea of giving liquidity providers (LPs) more stake in the governance of the ecosystem is commendable and certainly aligns with the principles of decentralization and community participation.

However, I’d like to raise a few considerations. A significant portion of LPs might be what we could term “mercenary” - those primarily interested in yield rather than governance. If FORTH is distributed as a reward, these LPs could potentially sell off their tokens until the yield becomes too low to justify their continued provision of liquidity. This could lead to volatility and instability in the liquidity pools, and potentially also depress the value of FORTH.

Moreover, even among the LPs who support the Ampleforth project, there might be little incentive for them to hold FORTH. If the token holdings are highly concentrated, the influence of individual token holders in governance decisions might be marginal, reducing their incentive to participate. Also, governance participation demands time, expertise, and commitment that not all LPs may be able or willing to provide.

So, before we proceed with using FORTH as an LP reward, I suggest that we put more thought into how we can make holding FORTH more enticing over the long term, especially compared to AMPL and SPOT. This could involve enhancing the utility of FORTH or devising strategies for it to accrue value over the long term. We need to ensure that FORTH is not merely a symbol of governance participation but also holds tangible benefits for its holders.

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Hey all, I am appreciative of everyone’s thoughtful input to this very important new direction the DAO is taking into consideration.

What if we were to reward Rollover Vault depositors with FORTH? This would distribute the governance stake to those who are comparatively more aligned with the DAO’s best interests, as these actors are driven by the desire to increase their % ownership of AMPL.

Maintaining SPOT as the geyser reward token is likely to mitigate mercenary capitalists, attract & sustain reliable liquidity for AMPL & SPOT, and continue to showcase the “real yield” of SPOT to the world.

Or a combination of dual SPOT/FORTH rewards for Geyser LPs might do the trick.

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I like the idea of distributing FORTH ownership.

But without solid use cases, governance tokens are often dumped to infinity as we’ve all witnessed since DeFi Summer 2020. Locked up “x” versions or -ve tokenomics are only marginally successful. Alongside the SPOT-like perpetual version of ETH, I am tempted to suggest that FORTH should be included in such a basket of assets - if only to antagonize sell pressure. Perhaps there’s also an angle here for an app like HourGlass, or the Public Good proposal from earlier.

In any case, I support trying this out. Aye for the proposal.

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Thanks for the thoughts so far, everyone

True in a strict sense, but I do want to caution that there is a cost to that 2%, as others in the thread have pointed out.

@Greg Not much more to add, I agree with your points and they should always be under consideration. The DAO does make some revenue from the LP positions it holds (about 1/3rd of the AMPL Uniswap liquidity, which is strangely profitable). Liquidity on Buttonswap could be similar, but without impermanent loss. SPOT has the possibility of enabling a protocol fee on mints and burns, similar to uniswap. They are currently off, to avoid any extractive qualities. It’s not clear under what circumstances this would change, but it’s possible to enable at some point. The DAO may also deploy its AMPL into the rollover vault to get some yield there as well. Other options for deploying capital may arise in the future, as the ecosystem evolves.

This is definitely something to consider. I’m partial to first observing the activity of the system without outside bias. This gives the DAO valuable insight into the effectiveness of the rotation configuration, and would inform how bands should be set in the future. I’m ok with being outvoted on this, though. It could help spur initial growth of SPOT, which also has concrete value.

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I strongly oppose changing the reward tokens from SPOT to FORTH!

I myself am about to provide liquidity for the SPOT-USDC pool and I’ve decided to do so because of the “real yield” in SPOT. Providing liquidity for a Flatcoin-Stablecoin pool and receiving rewards in SPOT is a dream come true for liqudity providers.

It’s very low risk, because one is not being exposed to any token that might fluctuate in value (as it’s usually the case when providing Liquidity). As it is now with SPOT as rewards, there is very low inventory risk for LPers and in my opinion, this is a huge plus point that should not be dropped.

I would not be interested in receiving a governance token. As a liquidity provider, I would only be interested in yield on my stablecoins.

By giving SPOT as rewards, in my opinion, we will be able attract to attract more SPOT-USDC liqudity from LPers than with FORTH as the reward token. Most likely, LPers will just dump the token immediately to convert it into “real” yield.

Please keep it as SPOT

That being said, I do like the $ value set aside for this round of rewards. 15,000 FORTH equals to around 49.000$. I think thats a good move, and ideally, I wish it would be in SPOT.

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I wanna link this post from the January Geyser discussions about positive aspects for SPOT as rewards:

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Togenkyo, I appreciate at least how you value AMPL and SPOT! It shows the project is still going in the right direction and building something of value. And if you don’t yet value FORTH to the same degree, I might point out that your opinions on this topic are, in effect, manifest through FORTH voting :sweat_smile: So I hope you’ll come around as well eventually.

In the spirit of “rough consensus and running code,” and given the discussions here and in Discord, I submitted a signal check here:
https://signal.ampleforth.org/#/proposal/0xdb30761644bdb32b6d89cb77826aa960d45fe41c4f67c047a0e3e396d183066c

Voting will go live in about 1 day

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How about incentivising FORTH rewards via an increased multiplier range? Or a % of rewards in FORTH & SPOT?

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