[Proposal] FORTH Wintermute Liquidity Provision Partnership

Ampleforth Governance
1

Hi Ampleforth DAO community!

Wintermute is excited to put forward our FORTH liquidity provision partnership proposal to the community!

Description

This proposal outlines the motivation, background, terms and commitments of FORTH liquidity provision services to the Ampleforth DAO community. Specifically, to approve Wintermute Trading as an official liquidity provider for FORTH and to authorise the transfer of 750,000 FORTH from the DAO’s treasury to Wintermute in the form of a loan over 12 months.

In return, Wintermute endeavours to actively guide discussions with centralized exchanges from day one, provide efficient and liquid markets on centralized exchanges that are supported by Wintermute, and promote FORTH’s accessibility through institutional channels.

Motivation

Wintermute is the leading DeFi liquidity provider across multiple chains, and instrument types and aims to steer market accessibility throughout both DeFi and CeFi. As such, we pride ourselves in fostering long-term relationships and value-creation, partner-protocol alignment, and welcome the opportunity to support innovative, DeFi-leading protocols such as Ampleforth, ensuring sufficient liquidity for FORTH across all relevant CEX markets.

Wintermute believes DAO/governance participation is integral to the adoption and success of decentralized protocols, and therefore, the ability of an individual to participate with minimal transaction costs. Thus, It’s important to ensure potential demand is not bottlenecked by insufficient liquidity, and that valuable community members are not discouraged by large spreads. Wintermute would like to lead the liquidity efforts and eliminate $FORTH market inefficiencies across CeFi and DeFi, by committing a significant part of our resources and doing what we do best.

Wintermute’s Basic Background:

Wintermute is a leading crypto-native algorithmic trading firm, specializing in creating efficient markets across centralized and decentralized exchanges. Wintermute was founded in July 2017 by three Optiver veterans. Evgeny Gaevoy, founder and CEO, was previously head of ETFs (screen and OTC) at Optiver Europe, one of the largest ETF market-making desks. Since our inception, we have traded over $3T and expanded our presence across 80+ (de)centralized exchanges and various (non)EVM chains, continuously supporting and providing liquidity throughout the ecosystem for our partners and their communities.

Alongside our trading arm are Wintermute Ventures and Wintermute Governance, both enabling us to directly support projects where we know we can be true value-adding, develop a partnership, and help influence a positive outcome. Importantly, we do not target large ownership stakes; decentralized ownership is an important prerequisite to transitioning to a robust future.

Specification

Wintermute’s commitment to Ampleforth and its community:

  • Provide liquid markets across major centralized exchanges.
  • Proactively guide discussions and support listings of FORTH on key exchanges on day one and going forward.
  • Wintermute also commits to being the go-to liquidity provider for any OTC institutional flow, providing competitive prices for tickets starting from 100k USD and beyond.
  • Borrowed FORTH will be used exclusively for liquidity provision purposes. No farming, lending etc.

Our Ask:

Wintermute is requesting approval for a 12-month loan of 750,000 FORTH from the DAO’s treasury for liquidity provision services.

Repayment Option:

Wintermute Trading agrees to return the full 750,000 FORTH loan amount to the DAO’s treasury at the end of the 12-month contract period OR exercise the repayment option below. The repayment option allows Wintermute Trading to purchase the full 750,000 FORTH loan amount on the respective option expiry date at a strike price specified below.

The Strike Price:

  • P + 25% where P = the spot price of FORTH token once the liquidity provision agreement commences.
  • The price of FORTH will be sourced from CoinGecko

Should Wintermute Trading choose to exercise our repayment option, the loan balance will be returned to the Ampleforth DAO treasury in the form of BTC, ETH or USDC assuming a USDC price of $1, and using BTC or ETH CoinGecko price at 23:59:59 UTC on the expiration date of the agreement.

Implementation

If approved by governance, 750,000 FORTH will be sent from the DAO’s treasury to Wintermute’s address:

  • 0xc655bBB603d041DB35Cde2296248ED551dF32698

Next Steps

Following community discussion and feedback after 7 days, I will look to initiate a Snapshot Vote with voting options:

  1. Yes - Approve Wintermute Trading as a liquidity provider for FORTH subject to proposal specifications
  2. No - Reject Wintermute Trading as a liquidity provider for FORTH
2 Likes
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Hi @Callen_Wintermute!
Thanks for the thoughtful proposal.

I have quite a lot of questions regarding the proposal, even though not all of them are directly directed towards Wintermute.

First an obvious one: How can we verify the address actually belongs to Wintermute? Could you provide proof that Wintermute controls the address, e.g. via posting a signature and having Wintermute confirm your account? If it is not an EOA (e.g. precomputed contract address), would it be possible to send a dust amount of some token from a publicly known Wintermute address to it?

I assume this proposal does not come of out nowhere. The FORTH token is listed on cexs, such as Coinbase, since its inception and so far there is no publicly known agreement of mm’ing FORTH.
This pressures some questions - which I would also love some input from the genesis team (@Brandon @evankuo):

  • Would this actually be the first agreement of Wintermute to mm FORTH and/or AMPL?
  • If so, could you provide data as to why Wintermute (and/or the genesis team) thinks now mm is necessary?
  • If not, does the proposal reflect the conditions of the prior agreement?

As I understand correctly this would be an unsecured loan. What kind of guarantees does the ForthDAO have of repayment? How did Wintermute handle such concerns in the past?

About the repayment token:

  • The ForthDAO does not have any infrastructure on Bitcoin, so I assume you mean WBTC as the possible repayment token?
  • Would the repayment token be decided by Wintermute or is it in the hands of the ForthDAO to decide the repayment token?

About the Strike Price:
Seeing this proposal from Wintermute about mm’ing MKR, Wintermute agreed to have a strike price of 10,000$ per MKR at a price (on the 28’th October 21) of 2,242$. The option from that proposal is only in the money at a price increase of nearly 350%. How do you avow the difference of nearly 1,300% compared to this proposal?

About mm’ing AMPL:

we pride ourselves in fostering long-term relationships and value-creation, partner-protocol alignment

If this is indeed a motivation, could you elaborate as to why the proposal only aims to mm FORTH and not AMPL itself? Referring back to the MKR agreement once more - via which you mm’ed MKR and DAI, why does this proposal only concentrate on the governance token? Isn’t it in the ForthDAO’s, and therefore also Wintermute’s protocol alignments, best interest of first and foremost concentrate on the protocol’s actual “product”?

About the FORTH token amount:
The ForthDAO currently holds around 3,7MM FORTH tokens with a total supply of ~15MM.

So Wintermute receives cheap call options for ~5% of the total FORTH supply… on top of receiving free mm inventory for a year… This seems like a hell of a deal for Wintermute, doesn’t it?

4 Likes
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I can totally get behind all these questions.
Interested to see how the questions of @pascal-merkleplant are answered.
Also interesting to see an unsecured loan is requested. Are we not here for DeFi?
Can hourglass be used to secure the loan?

2 Likes
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I’d like to see Wintermute provide AMPL liquidity instead. Why would someone want to govern AMPL if they have no AMPL?

2 Likes
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I think this a common practice for projects that wish to provide CEX liquidity. Wintermute is one of the top, if not the top CEX liquidity providers in the space, so I feel confudent that the 750k Forth will be paid back in full.I am in support of this proposal.

1 Like
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My Autist sense is tingling. Why attempt dispersing FORTH liquidity across CEXes? If anything, this might fragment liquidity unless it is concentrated on a single platform. FORTH is already listed on Coinbase.

If liquidity for AMPL & SPOT increases on DEXes, then ecosystem interest and DeFi liquidity for FORTH should organically follow. I’m with @Ampltools and @coldpress on this one. We’re here for DeFi.

2 Likes
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I don’t see any benefit to the DAO for this proposal. Forth is already listed on major exchanges like Coinbase, we don’t need more market making for it. We need market making for AMPL and SPOT. Seems like Wintermute just wants to play an option on Forth where they have to pay no fees.

2 Likes
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Thought it was common knowledge wintermute already provides liquidity for WAMPL…

With that out the way, I think there may be something coming on the horizon, where there may be a need to have more Forth liquidity easily accessible on CEX’s (lets face it, DEX’s aren’t mainstream yet).

So I think that theres more upside than downside with this proposal if that means institutions and larger players can have access to Forth.

2 Likes
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+1

Any publicity is good publicity

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I think as of now, FORTH doesn’t necessarily need more liquidity on CEXs, so I wouldn’t say this is pressing. There is some natural benefit to deeper liquidity, because it does bring some volume along with it.

A different lens that makes this proposal interesting is that, should the options indeed be exercised, it does have some upside in capitalizing the DAO treasury with some ETH/USDC/etc without needing to sell into the market or sell at a discount through some bonding/vesting mechanism. As others have mentioned, there is some risk is any entity holding that much percentage of the supply. Wintermute is at least well known in the space, have so far shown themselves to be good stewards in other projects, and also have a reputation that future their business relies on. Thank you Wintermute for interacting with the DAO.

If this isn’t something we move forward with now, we could consider a similar option in the future, if the liquidity landscape did change and we needed to move forward with something else.

3 Likes
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Would @Callen_Wintermute consider market making $SPOT? This is really where the DAO needs help. More markets for FORTH doesn’t really help the protocol.

$SPOT on Coinbase or Binance would be a huge add for Ampleforth.

1 Like