Proposal - Ampli Grant

Ampleforth Governance
1

Summary

Ampli Technologies is proposing that the Forth DAO provides the ampli team with a grant of $100.000 in USDC in order to support the development of a consumer facing app enabling users to earn inflation-beating interest rates through DeFi and the Ampleforth and Spot ecosystem.

Ampli Technologies Introduction

Onboarding the next wave of users to DeFi remains difficult and blockchain UX is still a challenge to many. At ampli we are focusing on onboarding the next wave of money instead: Our app Maze greets the user with a familiar and welcoming experience while a swarm of AI agents connects their savings to the most attractive sources of yield. When it comes to our audience, we are opinionated and we are hyper focused: The users out there that have not found DeFi and are unlikely to ever find it.

Ampleforth’s low-volatility commodity-money is going to be a cornerstone of our yield generation. We believe that the general public noticed inflation as a pressing and lasting issue. Consumers feel their buying power dwindle. They notice how the costs of housing and the basic necessities of living are creeping upwards - with seemingly no ceiling. We also know that Ampleforth has created protocol economics that allow us to counteract these inflationary pressures. But instead of teaching users about CPI data, Spot LPing and USDaf arbitrage, we are going to offer our users a straightforward fix: interest on their deposits that beats other options in the market and allows them to outpace even elevated levels of inflation.

We are partnered with the leader in financial agents development (Giza) who are creating tailor-made instances of their agents for our app’s backend.

Ampleforth’s Evan and Brandon agreed to join us as advisors in order to optimize our engine’s operations within the ecosystem.

Forth DAO Benefits

  1. Scaling the Low-Volatility Asset ecosystem

Ampli is going to onboard a new wave of capital to DeFi as a whole, with a strategic focus on the Ampleforth ecosystem. Specifically, the Maze app is going to allow users that have never interacted with a blockchain to onboard from their bank account and immediately start earning. Our agent swarm is going to allow our platform to rebalance funds in real time, allowing us to grow alongside the LVA ecosystem.

  1. $AMPL, $SPOT and $FORTH treasury

While user funds are not going to be exposed to the volatile side of Ampleforth’s economy, we as a company are going to invest part of our treasury in $AMPL. By strengthening the foundation of the protocol, we are both creating an additional flywheel (since our profits are going to come from yield in the ecosystem and from sources in the broader DeFi landscape we can reflect that value back into the $AMPL-token) and allowing us to interact with and facilitate the evergreen cycle. We are also going to dedicate a portion of our treasury to gradually accumulate $FORTH and participate in governance.

Purpose of Grant

We have been bootstrapping Maze development out of our own pockets since last October, and we have now reached a point where we have hired several engineers and are pushing toward completing our MVP. The grant is going to allow us to fund the remaining MVP-development which is going to lead to further fundraising on the way to launch Maze on iOS and Android and market it to non-cryptonative retail users.

Grant Breakdown

Proposed Grant amount: $100,000 in USDC

  • $62,000 to support our engineering team (1x Smart Contract engineer, 2x Full Stack Engineer, 1x React Native Engineer)
  • $15,000 to fund additional design and UX development
  • $8,000 for inhouse Smart Contract Auditing
  • $3,000 for infrastructure
  • $2,000 for gas sponsorships
  • $10,000 for partnership and vendor costs

Deliverables

With the grant, we expect to deliver the first iteration of Maze in Q3 of this year. The functionality is going to be focusing on the core use-case at first:

  • Generating yield across curated sources
  • Auto-balancing and risk-management through our agent swarm
  • Simple fiat on-ramping
  • Abstracted chain interactions using account abstraction and gas sponsoring
  • Built-in referral program

Beyond the MVP

Future iterations of Maze are going to offer a more comprehensive experience when interacting with your money: Aside from seeing their money work for them, users are going to be able to send funds to other Maze users and spend their money at vendors or through in-app booking integrations.

About the Team

Ampli’s team consists of long-time Ampleforth supporters and investors with talent from Google, Microsoft and leading Web 3 teams. We combine years of experience in DeFi with the ability to design and ship apps to a global retail audience. We strongly believe in Ampleforth’s potential to grow into a major part of a future on-chain economy. Ampli or the Maze app will never have a token because that token is $AMPL.

Contact Info

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Exciting stuff here! And pumped to read that your team plans on holding $AMPL in its treasury.

Could you expand on how the app will expose end users to holding or interacting with the Ampleforth ecosystem? Didn’t see much of that mentioned in the proposal (only a brief sentence regarding yield generation)

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Great proposal! I personally met members on this team at ETH Denver, and am very excited about what they are building! The founders are long time AMPL community members and are aligned with the Ampleforth vision.

Good question @Guz_MassAdoption. While in Denver we were hashing out delta neutral strategies with the team utilizing SPOT as a yield source. The agents can optimize allocation by pooling funds from many users mitigating losses from fees and slippage while optimizing across different SPOT yield sources. This makes it so the user can easily get access to the high yields driven by these assets without having to worry about proper balancing.

As an example, an agent may wait for SPOT to go below FMV in addition to having enough pending user deposits into Maze before executing the entry into the SPOT/USDC pool. It can also evaluate how much of the funds should be allocated to bill broker vs charm vs USDaf based on real time yield numbers.

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As @kbambridge mentioned, LPing SPOT is going to play a major role and we are planning to eventually engage with SPOT derivatives like USDaf.

We are glad to have Evan’s and Brandon’s support in reviewing our strategies to make sure that both Maze users and the Ampleforth economy benefit from our system’s activities.

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That makes sense, thank you @kbambridge / @ampli for the clarification. I’ve re-read the proposal a few more times and to make sure we steel man this, I’ve come up with a few more questions to ensure alignment for both Maze and the long-term sustainability of the Ampleforth protocol:

  1. How much $AMPL and $FORTH does the team intend to accumulate, and will there be transparency/reporting into their treasury activity (aside from simply monitoring the blockchain)?

  2. Why is $100k the right amount - could a smaller milestone-based disbursement model be more appropriate? Could $50k be used for MVP completion and another $50k tied to post-launch user acquisition, usage metrics, protocol integrations, etc.?

  3. Can there be a bit more elaboration on which networks and account abstraction standards will be used (from a network standpoint, might be safe to assume only Ethereum L1 to start)? How will gas sponsorship be funded post-MVP, and will it introduce any scalability or UX constraints for future usage?

  4. (this is not a knock on the project whatsoever) What happens if the MVP is delayed or fails to meet adoption benchmarks? Will any unused grant funds be returned to the DAO or rolled into public goods supporting Ampleforth?

  5. Will the team pursue third-party firms to independently verify the results of their in-house smart contract audits?

  6. What specific KPIs (if any) will the team commit to in order to measure successful onboarding into the Ampleforth ecosystem - e.g. # of new $AMPL holders, % of TVL allocated to SPOT LPs, or treasury-held $FORTH voting activity?

Looking forward to hearing the team’s thoughts on these points - I’m pumped about the potential here and just want to ensure we set things up for long-term alignment and mutual success between this project and the broader Ampleforth ecosystem.

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First, I awant to preface that this is GREAT to hear that! It’s very rare to see people that don’t just get AMPL, but also understand what it needs and DO the work!

I have a few questions and suggestions that I hope can further strengthen the alignment with Ampleforth and clarify the technical approach (some of it might also be drawn from @Guz_MassAdoption):

  1. Maze users won’t be directly exposed to AMPL’s volatility​, which is great for user confidence (I know I have been burnt). In parallel, the Ampli team plans to hold AMPL in its treasury and accumulate FORTH for governance​. Could you share more about how this will work in practice For example, do you have targets or a policy for how much AMPL/FORTH to hold (or general guidance?), and will you report these holdings over time for transparency (perhaps on chain)? Actively participating in governance (with FORTH) and reinforcing AMPL’s “additional flywheel” with your profits is a fantastic alignment move, and I’m curious how it will be executed and communicated to the community (I almost smell a bribe system, but I do imagine a lot of things lol).

  2. The proposal highlights that users can onboard from their bank account and immediately start earning​! That’s a huge draw for non-crypto natives! Can you elaborate on how the fiat on-ramping is implemented under the hood? For instance, are you integrating with a licensed third-party provider (or some API that is widly used in the industry) to handle ACH/credit card to stablecoin conversion? Or will Maze itself custody fiat deposits until they’re converted on-chain? Understanding if this flow is non-custodial or involves a custodial partner will help gauge compliance and security, especially with the new laws coming up (I didn’t see a budget for compliance, but I guess that is a future question). Additionally, will Maze educate users (even at a high level) about Ampleforth’s role in generating the yield at all? It might build trust if users know their money is earning yield via decentralized low-volatility assets like SPOT, ect. I am a big fan of still knowing risks and complexities even if I don’t understand them at first.

  3. Maze strategy focused on Ampleforth’s low-volatility asset ecosystem for yield makes perfect sense to me, and I am already very sold, but what happens if Ampleforth-related yield sources (SPOT LPs, USDaf, etc.) become less attractive at some point? Is the plan to always prioritize Ampleforth yields, or would the agent swarm pivot to other DeFi sources if needed? In other words, how tightly coupled is Maze’s success to the Ampleforth ecosystem performance? It would be reassuring to know that Maze has contingency plans if, say, SPOT liquidity dries up or an Ampleforth strategy underperforms, can Maze can still deliver competitive yields without introducing undue risk to the protocol (or perhaps negative yields are ok as long as they are controlled and predictable without going all the way to zero. On the flip side, if Maze brings in new capital or strategies, could large Maze-driven inflows or outflows impact the stability of SPOT pools or the broader Ampleforth system? Coordinating with the core Ampleforth team on these scenarios (this is very great to have Brandon and Evan in your corner ;)) might help mitigate any unintended side-effects as both Maze and the LVA ecosystem scale together.

  4. Could you shed more light on how these AI agents operate and make decisions? For example, are the agents running on-chain (as smart contracts) or off-chain servers that execute trades on-chain when conditions meet? Giza’s platform was mentioned as providing these financial agents - does this mean Maze’s strategy logic uses machine learning models that are verifiable on-chain (perhaps using something like Giza’s ZK-powered ML framework? Understanding this will help the community gauge the trust model: whether the yield decisions are fully autonomous and transparent, or if there’s any centralized control or override. Also, how do the agents coordinate as a “swarm”? If one agent manages SPOT LP timing and another handles, say, arbitrage, is there a master controller, or do they independently act on different opportunities? Clarity on this architecture can highlight any potential single points of failure or attack surfaces in the automation. Also, for existing models, are there any benchmarks or graphs? I think it would be good to illustrate market vs agents. It will give more confidence.

  5. Abstracting blockchain interactions is really what this industry needs to survive. You mention using account abstraction with gas fees sponsored by the platform​. From a security/engineering standpoint, which account abstraction standard or approach are you leveraging – for example, ERC-4337 smart contract wallets on Ethereum? And how will gas sponsoring be sustained beyond the MVP (where ~$2k is earmarked for gas costs​ )? It would be helpful to know if gas fees are covered via a relayer or if Maze maintains meta-transaction infrastructure. Importantly, how do you prevent abuse of gas sponsorship? (e.g. ensuring one user can’t spam costly operations since they aren’t paying.) Some platforms impose limits or require users to hold a certain token for gasless transactions - what’s Maze’s strategy to keep this feature scalable and economically viable as the user base grows? Discussing these details will reassure us that the slick UX (no gas for users) won’t compromise the system’s security or sustainability.

  6. It’s encouraging to see a budget for smart contract auditing​, but from personal experience, 8k is a rather small budget. Are there plans to have external security audits for Maze’s smart contracts before launch? Given that Maze will be handling potentially significant funds, an independent audit (or even formal verification of critical components) would go a long way to ensure there are no lurking vulnerabilities. That being said, will any of Maze’s code be open-sourced? I understand the front-end/app might remain proprietary, but the smart contracts will be most likely publicly facing. What about the agent code? How will that be tested and reviewed?

Having met you, I am really excited about what you are doing, and I am looking forward to your replies and development! LFG!

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Hi @ampli thanks for the proposal! I would like to weigh in with my support as well.

As I’m sure everyone in this community who’s interacted with the protocol is aware, using a native blockchain application is extremely hard. Especially for normal people who aren’t tech experts. Self custody, managing private keys, and verifying signatures can each be dangerous if done incorrectly.

The ecosystem protocols can operate as the perfect self-serve base layer for users who care about self-custody and know what they’re doing, and for protocols who build on top, but to bring in the next wave of users, we need an application that’s suitable for everyone else. There’s is a high-value a place for this application to live.

I’ve met members of the team and can say that this is the right group of people to build and bring a product like this to market. They have the background in economics and the technical knowhow to build something that can make use of the Ampleforth ecosystem. The founders have been in the Ampleforth community since before Ampli was started, after all.

If executed well, this could have a large positive impact on the ecosystem. So I view it inline with the Forth DAO charter, and worthy of a grant to get started.

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Thank you for the thorough questions @Guz_MassAdoption and @RomanPope. And thank you for the support to the two of you and Brandon.

Regarding our treasury, since we are a private company we are not planning to report final numbers to the Forth DAO. What we can say is that our vision for the treasury buying $AMPL was that we want to be the first company accumulating the asset, similar to how Microstrategy spearheaded that practice for Bitcoin. Since we are planning to facilitate the Evergreen Cycle the ratio of $AMPL and $SPOT is going to be fluctuating. The $100k covers our engineering costs for the MVP as detailed in the proposal so we can’t split that up. It is also what Ampleforth suggested the DAO could provide in order to show alignment and to support a product that is going to bring value to the ecosystem. Since the funds are going to be used for engineering, they are going to be used up once adoption metrics start to play a role. Furthermore, regarding the suggested KPIs, the proposal already made clear that Maze is not going to result in an increase in the number of $AMPL-holders. The % of TVL allocated to SPOT LPs is highly dependent on how much the system can support. The question about “contingency plans” ties into this: Our agent framework can swiftly move funds into the ecosystem whenever there is opportunity. It can also sustain high yields across other yield sources in DeFi though. A more mature DeFi market and deep liquidity was one of the prerequisites for creating Maze and why we think the timing for such an app is now.

Figuring out the backend for a system like this is a non-trivial endeavor so we are not going to disclose too many details on that topic. We can confirm that the gas sponsorship is self-sustaining once the product is live and we are implementing Sybil protection measures. We plan to use ERC-7579 with Modular Smart Accounts to ensure flexibility, security, and long-term interoperability across networks. Initially, we’ll support both Ethereum Mainnet (L1) and Base (L2), with a strong product focus on Base (We would like to see spot liquidity back on Aerodrome which is going to be an ongoing conversation with the team). Base provides the scalability and cost-efficiency needed to sponsor user gas fees at scale, which is central to our onboarding and UX strategy. By adopting ERC-7579 early, we also position ourselves to integrate seamlessly with evolving smart account ecosystems and standards across the broader Ethereum landscape.

We can’t disclose more about the inner workings of Giza’s architecture than what is publicly available at https://docs.arma.xyz/docs/overview. The decision-making of the agents happens within boundaries set by us and they operate on a playing field of pre-curated yield sources. Discussing more details here could harm Giza’s and our own IP but the fact that we are talking about a customized version of a product that is live and running with a proven track record should offer a level of reassurance. Giza have been the talk of the town for a while and we are proud and happy that they decided to partner with us.

About on-ramping, regulations and compliance budgets: We are going to use a battle-tested onramping solution that allows for deposits through ACH and various other channels. Credit Card deposits are possible through this infrastructure but they are highly unpractical for yield-related deposits as the Credit Card fees are very prohibitive. Compliance indeed does not show up in the breakdown for the grant despite being a considerable position on the budget. As mentioned, we have been working on this for a while now and bootstrapped the costs, one of which was working with our legal council who is one of the founding members of the International Blockchain Lawyers Group and very experienced in navigating regulatory environments for Fintech, AI and Blockchain businesses.
Another item that does not show up on the proposal is indeed the external smart contracts. The $8,000 mentioned in the proposal are going to cover the cost for inhouse revisions of the code base. We are going to work with well-known auditors for the final review before launch (we had good experiences on other projects with Halborn for example). The grant won’t cover these additional costs.

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Thanks for the detailed response!
Overall, the DAO has 2.55M of USDC in its treasury (that is just sitting idle, we should probably look to park it somewhere to make some yield, but I digress), and despite, yes, a lot of unknowns, I think 100k is a VERY small price to pay for possible outsized rewards!

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Sounds great, I agree with funding, not a big amount. and like the idea have a product facing retail users.

Here are some of my concerns:

a. This app will launch on appstore it seems, do you have enough resources to marketing it? You know there are thousands of apps online every day, its a red sea there.

b. Sort of related to the first one, do you have vc funding plan? Because this plan sounds like going to burn a lot of marketing budget in future.

Good luck Ampli!

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Hi Richard, thx for the support! Regarding your questions:

a. We have a couple ideas up our sleeves that haven’t been done before and that would make very efficient use of our marketing budget. This is going to be important in the beginning in particular. Later when expanding the user base, more traditional (and expensive) marketing tools are going to be necessary but we have a plan on how to get there.

b. We are pretty well connected in both crypto focused VCs and investors that are rooted in tradfi. I am not going to sugarcoat that the crypto VC world is in bad shape right now, both related to the more recent developments in global markets but also because projects have been delaying their TGEs for years now and many funds are desperate for some liquidity. As a company that is not going to issue a token we are in an interesting position here as we are an alternative to extractive token plays that are lacking a business model and revenue. The tldr on the crypto VCs is we have ongoing conversations but it’s going to take some time.

The more tradfi minded VCs that regularly fund tech startups are a different kind of player altogether and need to be approached differently. We have direct connections to some major ones but we can’t approach them too early: They usually write larger checks and our chances improve greatly the more we have to show. This is why the DAO grant would come at a very opportune time in order to get us ready for that next step.

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