Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Evan Kuo: AMPL - the Controversial Digital Currency With an Elastic Supply

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

Ampleforth is a cryptocurrency attempting to become an essential building block to an alternative financial ecosystem. The protocol’s native token, AMPL, is a non collateralized cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, but with a twist: It is supply elastic. This means the token and protocol will automatically increase or decrease the quantity of tokens held in user wallets based on 24 hour weighted volume price. AMPL operates as an ERC-20 token on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Some claim that the Ampleforth protocol’s implementation of “countercyclical” economic policy makes it a good complimentary collateral because they posit that this mechanism ought to give AMPL a low correlation to the likes of BTC and ETH. Others are not so sure: Does it really make a difference whether you have an inelastic supply without a target price, or an elastic supply with a target price of one? Is AMPL really not correlated to other types of collateral, and should this be so, does it even matter?There has been a lot of chatter about Ampleforth in recent months. Is it legit, or is it a scam, 'HEX with Stanford credentials', as one pundit commented? We spoke with the co-founder Evan Kuo, who attempts to explain how it all works and straighten out misconceptions surrounding the protocol.Topics covered in this episode:Evan’s backgroundWhat is Ampleforth and its missionWhat is Ampleforth’s value proposition and the rules based system it usesHow the rebasing worksSlow traders vs fast tradersWhere profits from fast traders come fromUsing Ampleforth as base moneyToken distributionThe integration hurdles with AMPLDoes the community truly understand the protocol?Episode links: Ampleforth websiteAMPL TalkAMPL Token DistributionAmpleforth White PaperAmpleforth TwitterEvan Kuo TwitterThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/351

Hi, I'm Sunny Agarwal. And I'm Frederike Ernst. And today we have on with us, Evan Kuo. He is the co-founder of Ampleforth. And so, you know, at Appresenter, we tried not to, like, get caught up in, like, you know, breaking projects on at, like, peak hype cycles because sometimes that's not very productive. But we actually reached out to the Ampleforth team a couple months ago and had this episode. scheduled and lined up and then it just so happened to sort of line up with this like massive hype cycle around ample fourth and these like crazy trading swings and stuff so you know this was

definitely you know very coincidental so and you know we just want to make a disclaimer like you know just because of the odd timing and stuff around it that you know we're not necessarily endorsing the project or anything here but you know we i think frederica and i both actually have some of our own concerns about it. But, and, you know, we, through the conversation with Evan, we, some of them were addressed. Some of them I still, I think I'm still a little bit skeptical on. But I think it's a good episode to just sort of get some understanding of what they're trying to do and what their goals are.

Yeah, what do you think, Bernica? I think it's good to get, to try to get some clarity on some things because basically, My feeling is that on Twitter and Fortune business and Telegram and, I mean, currently both groups, the pro and the contrasts are so loud. So basically there's the pros who go like, oh, this is this is the greatest investment ever and it's going to moon and it's gone up 4,000% this month alone, who are trying to get more people to buy. into this to actually keep this up. And then there's the other side, many of whom are very legit defy and Ethereum people

who say like, this is a scam. This is the next BitConnect. This is the worst idea ever. And I think basically hearing from someone, hearing from Evan Quo, who is kind of, as the founder, obviously, he's caught up in this from both sides. I think hearing from him directly to me was good.

I absolutely, I don't want to be seen endorsing this project. I thought the interview was interesting. I think both of us were somewhat more adversarial than we usually are. Yeah. I mean, usually we are all about how does this work and what's the mechanism behind the protocol and what's the game theory that goes into it and what's the technical standard and so on.

And we didn't do much of that today. We just want to see whether this story checks out. We did some of this today. But in actual fact, the protocol is not actually all that complicated. Yeah. It's actually almost like a very simple ERC 20 token, but then just with this, like, they just modified how the get balance function works, where it kind of, you know, multiplies by this number.

And, yeah, it's really what it's doing behind the scenes is sort of, you know, what I'd say, it's almost like this, like, UI magic where, like, it's the balance that, you know, your percentage ownership isn't changing, even within how the contract internally does its accounting, it's not changing. It's just that when you want to see your balance, it's just scaling it up or down. And so, you know, it's an interesting strategy for, I think the reality is somewhere in the middle. Like, you know, I don't think, I don't know, I think it's unfair to call it a scam or the next BitConnect in the sense that it's like, you know, it's not a Ponzi scheme in the sense that like it doesn't, you know, there's no hidden

information. All the information is public, fully auditable, the code's there. I think what it is, is, but I just don't think it's like the next big thing in monetary theory and it's going to be like that replace fiat or, you know, any of the stuff that they talk about on their website because I feel the protocol is almost like very well designed to be so bump, like super cyclical. Like, You know, they want to be countercyclical to other crypto stuff, but they make their own cycles by doing that. I think that really comes through, especially in the part where they do the 10% when the supply adjustment only happens 10% rather than the full 100%. And to me, that design decision really makes it like, okay, you're really actually not trying to create a stable coin here. you are trying to create a coin that's doing some weird price movements.

Yeah, so basically, I mean, what they do claim is that they are the best of both Bitcoin and stable coins, which to me is kind of an oxymoron just doesn't go together very well. And my concern is that, I mean, basically, if this were an academic experiment, and basically you want to know what the feedback cycles look like because it's a couple of, differential equations and it's difficult to actually say what exactly. I mean, you could model it out depending on the behavior of the participants and so on. But it's an interesting experiment. So basically where I, what I personally take issue with is that the people who buy into this, I mean, they don't know or they don't understand to the full extent that this is an experiment.

And I mean, yes, you can say if you get your investment advice from fortune business, you know, this really is on you. But I think as the founder, you do kind of have a responsibility towards the people who buy your tokens and basically what their expectation of this is, even if you could rationally say, well, clearly your expectation is stupid.

Yeah. So that's kind of my take. Cool. So let the listeners have their own take and enjoy the episode. Today we're on with Evan Kuo, who is the co-founder of Ampleforth. It's great to have you on, Evan. Could tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and where you're from, how you've gone involved with crypto?

Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here and to talk with you guys. I'm glad that you guys have taken the time. We're actually out in San Francisco. We used to have the whole team out here. But since the virus hit, we've scattered all across the country, some folks are in Connecticut, Seattle, New York, etc. My background was originally at UC Berkeley studying mechanical engineering,

but with a great deal of concentration in computer science as well as I got more and more into robotics. Thereafter, I got a little bit more into the startup world and came across my co-founder, Brandon along the way, who was a longtime Google search engineering at the time, he was working at Uber. and he and I just started to, I guess, think really deeply about cryptocurrencies. So we had both been introduced to Bitcoin early on. And I think he, like I, had reservations about the limitations of a fixed supply asset. But we thought it was interesting. And I also remember thinking that it was very inefficiently designed and then forgot about it for a while.

And really when Ethereum came out, that became an invitation to explore the limitations of what smart contract programming platform, could accomplish. And Brandon and I began our journey there. But just to set the context, I'd like to introduce to your audience what ampals are. So the foundation is called Ampleforth Foundation, and we have a protocol called the Ampleforth Protocol. But the Ample, AMPL, is actually a token. It is a non-collateralized cryptocurrency like Bitcoin with an important twist. It's supply elastic. And what this means is on a daily basis, the token and protocol will automatically, dramatically increase or decrease the quantity of tokens held in user wallets based on 24-hour weighted volume price.

What's the mission of Ampleforth? So what was the thing that drove you to start this? What needs did you see it fulfilling? So the mission of Ampleforth is to become an essential building block of an alternative financial ecosystem. And really, I think what's interesting is how we came to this really. that we even needed a building block or how we even decided that that would be an interesting thing to produce. And just kind of going back to the beginning of the journey with me and Brandon,

like I said, we were thinking very deeply about why Bitcoin was designed the way it was, because it was so obviously difficult to scale. And, you know, two things kind of emerged from that thought process. Number one, it was designed to counteract a sovereign monopoly. And that was very different in our minds from, say, a free market monopoly. And that was very different in our minds from, say, a free market monopoly. So say for example, you're not happy with how Google or Facebook function. You and I are free to go and create a search engine to our liking or a social network to our liking and compete on the open market. Now, they have a lot of advantages being incumbents, but nobody would tell us you cannot compete with Google. You cannot innovate upon Facebook. We're free to try. But in the case of money, it's not such the

case, right? So historically, people have tried to create their own currencies, like even things like Liberty Dollar, minting their own coins, started to use them in circulation, and then been stopped by the government. And that's the difference between a sovereign monopoly and a free market monopoly. And one thing that struck us is that the Bitcoin protocol went to great lengths to counteract the sovereign monopoly in being censorship-resistant and made huge concessions along the way. For this reason, we think that if the service that you're producing doesn't really require that level of censorship resistance, you might be handicapping yourself a great deal in attempting to, say, create a better search engine on a smart contract programming platform because of

scale and usability limitations and so on and so forth. How would you say the Bitcoin protocol has restricted itself? And basically, you said earlier that you think it's not scalable. What's behind that? Can you go a little bit into technical detail, what exactly you think is not scalable? I think as a layer one blockchain, it has a limited TPS, right? And as the ledger gets bigger and bigger, you run into all sorts of congestion issues. And let's say comparing it to something like Visa, it can't hear and handle nearly as many transactions per second. And again, this is thinking back to our interpretation of the original paper title, you know, a peer-to-peer digital cash. And of course, our naive understanding of money at the

was that cash is that which I use to purchase coffee. And there's something different about how Bitcoin is designed, right? But I also want to just move forward to the next point of realization that we came to, which is really important. And the Bitcoin protocol succeeded in articulating scarcity in a purely digital context. Right. So unlike gold and natural commodities, which are just naturally scarce by the physical limitations of the world, the Bitcoin protocol was able to define scarcity using just an algorithm.

And that's very unique in the digital world. Like not very many things are scarce in the digital world. Somebody takes a photo. It gets replicated. You can't really undo that. You can't say this is the only instance of that digital photo. So that was a really big idea. And the takeaway for me and Brandon was that the most salient opportunity to apply this sort of technology is money.

And then what happened was we began to wonder about what was wrong with money. So we saw that Bitcoin has succeeded in creating a censorship. ship-resistant fixed supply asset that's analogous to a digital gold. But what was even wrong with gold? Is there anything wrong with gold? And, you know, we really recruited a very helpful, and we're super grateful for this team of investors and advisors, you know, Pantara Capital, True Ventures, founder collective, even Brian Armstrong and folks from the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which is, you know, they've been thinking about money for a very long time. And we started to wonder collectively about what was wrong with gold. And it turns out.

out, there's nothing wrong with gold, but for when you start to use it as an essential building block as part of a financial ecosystem. And we've seen this happen multiple times. So under Bretton Woods, gold, if you'll recall, was redeemable for dollars by foreign governments and central banks. And at that time, just like as it is today, the dollar was already a global reserve currency. And the rate of which dollars were being demanded by the global economy was outpacing the rate at which we could obtain the gold to back it. And of course, one thing happens in a condition like this, and that's the price of gold starts to go up.

And what happens when the price of gold or a fixed supply asset starts to go up is people believe that, you know, well, my one nugget of gold today could buy one refrigerator, but my one nugget of gold today or tomorrow might be able to buy two refrigerators. So I'm not going to sell my gold. I'm going to hold it. And so just as the economy is requiring more and more gold to enter circulation, there's an incentive to hold gold for longer and longer.

And this risks entering into what they call a deflationary spiral. And it was kind of a big deal because, like, and this is just an interesting story, but the time Nixon was about to announce the cancellation of redeemability, there was a very popular show on television known as Bonanza, kind of a cowboy Western. And it was one of the shows that everybody tuned in to watch all the time. And one of his advisors came to him and said, Mr. President, we need to make the announcement tonight.

And he was like, oh, no, no, no, let's wait until tomorrow. Everybody's watching Bonanza tonight. And the advisor said, no, Mr. President, if we do not cancel tonight, there will be a run on gold. And so it was very much one of those moments, like we interrupt the scheduled programming for an important announcement by the United States president. And that's when he delivered his cancellation announcement. And thereafter, we've been on a Fiat monetary supply policy, which is elastic by nature, because at some point in the Industrial Revolution, it became viable to produce paper money that was cheap, but expensive to counterfeit. So cheap to print, but expensive to counterfeit. That was an important

innovation, and that allowed us to move into a Fiat monetary system, which is great because it's elastic. We've reaped many benefits from the central banking system, as we know it today. And the one kind of criticism of it is really that it's discretionary, so it's not a rule-bound system. The supply of money isn't just about printing money. It's about a complex system of accounting, but largely that's at the discretion of a group of really well-meaning people. And it turns out that even the most well-intentioned central banking efforts are vulnerable to at least two major problems, one of which is inflation, which hasn't been a huge problem in the prior decades, but is something that can be devastatingly bad if it gets out of control. And the second thing that central bank policy

It has a difficult time containing, no matter how well-intentioned their efforts are, is the cyclical nature of boom and bus cycles that kind of afflict the entire global economy. We're all in this together. We're in this hyper-interconnected world. And things tend to go up altogether and down altogether. Most of us are aware of the fractional reserve and the Bretton Woods and so on. What in your mind is Ampleforth's value proposition in all this? You said we have this Bitcoin system which doesn't scale in terms of transactions per second.

How does Ampleforth now come into this? Just to set the context, that wasn't my claim about the problem that Amples are solving. That was just part of an observation that led us to investigate the problems of money. But really, when you think about Bitcoin as a building block, it's very similar to gold. And were we to swap Bitcoin for gold at the end of Bretton Woods? No matter how liquid Bitcoin is, I don't think. think we'd been much better off. It's still vulnerable to that deflationary spiral problem. And so we went into an investigation about what sort of commodity like money could have been swapped

in the most ideal scenario where it's very liquid for gold under Bretton Woods and potentially function. And so that would have to be the type of money that could increase its supply in response to demand or decrease its supply in response to man, an elastic money. Essentially, the main goal here is to shift from a discretionary monetary policy to a rules-based system. How do you know that like the rules-based system that you guys have designed, sort of this contract, like simple contraction and expansion of the money supply is sufficient? And it definitely is a much simpler protocol than what's used, for example, at central banks around the world today. Is the complexity of central banks mostly just because of their discretionary

decision making, or is it, are they still following some more complex rules and protocols? I think fundamentally, I guess let me just re-articulate the value proposition here. It's to create a constructive building block for a decentralized finance ecosystem. And the nature of these decentralized finance ecosystems is because they're decentralized, you kind of need to apply rules-based methodology. I think that in the case of central banks, you're really talking about in apples to oranges situation, because things like the Federal Reserve have very specific mandates that are connected to the fact that they govern people. Like the Fed has this mandate to maintain employment, right, and to keep moderate long-term interest rates and to prevent, like, you know,

prices from increasing exorbitantly or in some uncontrolled manner. And therefore, they have to have this kind of way of checking against over-stimulating an economy such that prices inflate or making modifications that increase unemployment or decrease unemployment too much, right? And a government independent money really doesn't have any of those mandates. And so I think one of the great points of confusion that we experience out in this decentralized finance world is like, you know, often I see folks trying to recreate a central banking system in a decentralized context. but what you're moving from is a sovereign debt money to an independent money,

which doesn't really have any of those mandates. And so the goal, again, let me just reiterate, is to create a base money that's non-collateralized that can support a more sophisticated financial ecosystem. But that has a very different mandate. Sunny already kind of talked about this in passing. Sunny, you said it's a system that is kind of hallmarked by the contraction and expansion of its supply. So maybe let's talk about how it works before we go into why it should work or why it shouldn't work and so on.

So maybe that's just clear up terms. So basically, can you tell us about how many ampels are in existence and how their worth is determined and so on? I can. And I'd also just like to say really quickly that the main innovation here is that the ample fourth smart contract and system of smart contracts can increase and decrease the supply of ample without a transaction. between peers and without a bank. So typically when you think about supply increases or decreases, you're imagining some banker air dropping a bunch of money or buying back a bunch of money.

And because of this smart contract programming platform, we're able to actually increase and decrease the quantity of money in a systematic rules-based way without necessarily requiring a transfer between peers. And we do this by adjusting a global scalar variable that affects all wallets proportionally. So what I mean by that is, like, you know, think about a scalar variable like the gravitational constant.

Like, let's just imagine in this universe you increase the constant, the planets get slightly closer together. We decrease the constant and the planets get slightly further apart. It's more of that nature than throwing a tractor beam at a planet and dragging it towards you or shooting a rocket at one and pushing it away. So it's a very simple way of increasing and decreasing supply. My ERC 20 balance is never actually changing. It is changing.

The token that is in my wallet, like I'm not getting air dropped more of that or it's not being taken away. It's just my UI is multiplying the balance in my wallet multiplied by this like constant scalar variable somewhere. Almost. It's a little bit lower level than that. Right. So it kind of works in a seamless way. So imagine you have this ledger and you haven't plugged it in. It's run out of battery for a very long time. But supply has increased or decreased. The moment you let you plug this ledger in, what it's going to do is it's going to invoke a method called get balance, which is a public ERC 20 interface that's shared across all of these tokens. And we've overwritten this get balance method to take into consideration the global scalar variable, this coefficient of expansion. in returning the balance to you. And so by the definition of the token itself,

your balance is absolutely changing, even as we're not sending transactions to you and you're not sending transactions to me. And this is kind of an important, I guess, cognitive hurdle for people to overcome because as engineers, we look at lines of code, they all just look like more and more lines of code. But it's important to understand

that there's an important abstraction barrier where a token is defined by a specific standard that has very specific variables that can ask access and methods that it can invoke like get balance and transfer and transfer from and approve, right? And all of these interact privately with this global scalar variable, but all public interactions with these public interfaces are denominated and in ample and speak the language of ample. So effectively, you are gaining supply in no uncertain ways. You probably have some array in the smart contract that has numbers in it, but with

people associated with addresses. But what you're saying is like, you know, that is not your balance. That's just like some internal accounting tool used by the smart contract. Really, you should be thinking the result of get balance is your balance. That is true. The result of what get balance returns both in our system and in any ERC 20 token is your balance. That is the abstraction barrier that's important for people to understand because you can't get around it in a sense, right? So if there's an on-chain decentralized exchange and it's calling

get balance, that is what it is. Now, you could write some sort of wrapper on top of it that tries to undo this arithmetic, but that would not be the balance of the underlying asset, no matter what you hope to accomplish with this wrapper. So can you now talk a little bit about how this scalar value is determined and like, yeah, how does this like rebasing process work? I would love to tell you about that. So what happens is once every day at 7 p.m. Pacific, there is a window in time where this rebase occurs. And what it does is it accepts a 24-hour volume weighted average data input from an Oracle. And then it looks at the price difference between that 24-hour VWOP price and the target price.

So the target price in the ample fourth protocol is the CPI adjusted, $2019. So to give you an example, let's just say amples are trading it greater than a dollar. Say they're trading at $2. Right. So if the difference between the volume weighted average price is $1, so it's like it's trading at $2, but price target is one, right? And then that in theory, based on the quantity theory, money can be offset by a 100% supply increase. Now we take that number and divide that by 10. And as a result, there would be a 10% supply increase. And the reason why, we do this is because the quantity theory of money is not actually an end in itself. It's actually just a way of systematically applying supply pressure because that phenomenon doesn't really hold in the near term.

Merely offsetting supply does not result in a direct change in price in the near term. It's actually just buys and sells in the open market in response to those supply changes that modifies price. And so it would be a mistake to think that merely changing supply itself would modify price. Changing supply actually just applies a certain amount of incentive pressure one way or another, and what unfolds thereafter is more of a game theoretical analysis of what might happen, given that everyone else knows that this is going to happen. And so this is where the second interesting component of the Ample 4th protocol comes into play. So we designed this protocol to address the concerns of fixed supply assets.

we made something very simple and directly elastic that doesn't require the formation of a bank. But upon further analysis, we then hypothesize that this would introduce a fundamentally different set of incentives because now in the Ampleforth network, price is no longer the only proxy for gains and losses. Because your balance is changing and price is changing. It's actually the product of price and supply that is the proxy of gains and losses. and this would have a different effect on the behavior around the trading of the coin, which we suspected might cause the ample token to decouple from existing digital assets like Bitcoin. So that's just kind of the second interesting thing about the ample token.

You are trying to get the price of an ample as possible to a 2019 US dollar. If the price is above a dollar every day at 7 p.m., the supply, is increased and if the price is below a dollar, the supply is diminished. That is almost right. Just as the use of the quantity theory is merely a way of systematically determining how to increase or decrease supply, the presence of a price target in itself is not actually the goal. And this is something that I'm really glad I have the opportunity to share with you because a lot of people think that because a price target exists, that it itself is an end goal, but the way we think about a price target is you need some sort of goal post to tell you whether

there's more demand than supply or less demand than supply. And if you don't have a frame of reference at all, you simply cannot do that. And so we selected a price target such that we now know as a system whether there's more demand than supply or less demand than supply. And that allows the protocol to apply pressure one way or another. And so thinking about, again, Bretton Woods, what was missing was an incentive, I think, for people to increase the circulating supply of gold when there was more demand than supply. And, you know, what we've observed with the ample actually just in the recent year is that as it's expanding, you know, for example, in the past month, it spent a great little deal of time above the price target. And we've been

increasing the quantity of tokens in user wallets. And what has happened as a result is, the circulating volume of ample has increased quite a bit, and therefore, it suggests that that is functioning by design as well. The one thing I want to reiterate is that the price is not a goal in itself. It's a reference point by which the system can systematically infer whether there's more demand and supply or less demand than supply. By inflating or deflating the balances of all existing ample holders, what do you in effect doing is you're changing the denomination. You're not changing the worth in itself. You're changing the denomination, right? It's kind of like when countries decide that currency has debased too much and

basically they go from saying this is $1,000 to saying this is one new dollar, the existing value in circulation shouldn't change just because you're moving decimal point. Not quite. So this is where things get really interesting. yet again. So the other thing I'd want to kind of mention here is that these supply adjustments are completely proportional. In this sense, it's non-delusive. So if you owned 1% of the ampil network at a $10 million market cap, say you bought one ample for $1 to $10 million market cap, and it grew to a $100 million market cap, right, you would still have 1% of ample. And in an ideal scenario, you would have 10 times the number of ampals, so 10 amples at a $100 million market cap. And I think

what you might have been asking is, like, aren't we simply transferring price volatility into supply volatility? Is that the question you're asking? Or were you asking whether we're changing the denomination itself? Because those are kind of two different questions. I know you're not changing the nomination itself, but in fact, it's equivalent to changing the denomination. If you're, instead of saying the price is volatile, you're saying the supply is volatile, because basically one multiplied by the others, the total market cap, right? Interesting. Yeah, so this is where things get really fascinating as well. And I'm glad that you guys have done your homework, by the way. I thought I was going to have to start from the basics. But what's happening here? Because again, the quantity theory of money does not hold in the near term. When we increase the quantity of units in your balance, that does not immediately result in a price offset on traditional order books with bid ask spreads. Again, what I'm saying is the system algorithmically adjusts supply. But it's the behavioral incentives that propagate those changes back into price.

And they don't happen immediately. So AMMs and pools like Uniswop notwithstanding in a normal exchange, what happens, let's just say if Ampl is trading at $2 and you're currently holding, you know, a thousand amples or whatever. Say we increase the quantity of ampals in your wallet by 10%. So now you're holding 1,100 ampals. the moment we make that supply adjustment, you're holding 1,100 amples that are still priced at $2 per amp in a traditional order book system. And therefore, that is different than simply translating

price volatility into supply volatility. And I'm not saying that it is something that becomes immediately stable. I'm saying quite the opposite, that it just introduces a novel movement pattern and instead of incentives to this system. So this thing is a beast of its own. So it's a non-collateralize cryptocurrency, unlike what we see in traditional markets and unlike what we see currently in digital markets. But it is supply elastic and does have a novel movement pattern. And one other thing I would draw attention to in your analogy with the central banks, increasing or decreasing money, is like these kind of sovereign currencies, they also have this property that cryptocurrencies don't yet have, which is they have real exchange rates.

So because the government can force, I guess, in the United States, the ability, or they can enforce the requirement that we pay our taxes in dollars at least, right, and that merchants denominate goods and services in dollars. There's a stickiness, a nominal rigidity that exists by virtue of having this real exchange rate. In addition to having a nominal exchange rate, like an exchange between dollars in, you know, euro or yen in some Forex exchange. And that contributes to this phenomena where, you know, when central banks increase their money supply, it doesn't directly affect the value of the currency.

It kind of creates this weird time like. But that's not really present in the current cryptocurrency world. We've got primarily nominal exchange value. There's not a lot of things being denominated in cryptocurrencies, and these are trading on exchanges with matching engines and bid ask spreads. And the supply policy actually, it just creates a different incentive pattern, and that results in a different movement pattern. And that's very interesting to us as well.

Why is the price not basically immediately shifting with the, like, when the supply changes? I feel like I think I read that most exchanges shut off spot trading at the time of rebasing. Who's the schmuck that's keeping their orders open at a bad price? If I'm an ample user, shouldn't I know that like if I'm holding buy orders at something higher than $1? or when the rebase is coming, I'm going to get screwed. There are no schmucks. There are simply people who have placed orders on an order book. And because you have so much visibility into the predictable nature of this supply policy,

a lot of the smarter traders, right, we've seen these kind of strategies start to adjust where people waited until right after the rebase to make their move. And then we saw people start to understand that, well, they can do their own valuation on a market cap basis. of what amples are worth and place their bids long before a rebase occurs and those can persist until after. At the end of the day, a lot of the more sophisticated traders are just understanding what they think is an overvalued market cap or an undervalued market cap based on their knowledge of what's going on. And if you see this, for example, in the perpetual futures markets, even they have the notion of rebase and its ultimate effect on market cap as they understand it

today baked into these market index prices. And so I would actually say that there's no schbach. People can trade based on their expectation of what the market cap will be before and after and their prediction of what they think, you know, is over or undervalued or the position that they're attempting to accumulate as a percentage in the network long term, a near term. All of these strategies can work. But they do need to transition into thinking more about this from a market cap perspective than not.

In a lot of your documentations, you bring up this concept of fast traders and slow traders. So maybe you can explain that. But then my question for that is, as a slow trader, why would I be leaving orders open on a order book if I'm a slow trader of Ample? I think of a slow trader as somebody who's just more like a holder. So imagine somebody who enters their position in Ample like on January 1st. And they might think about exiting it if Ample does it huge. run up like six months from them there, right? And so they're really looking at market cap appreciation or losses. Let's just say they entered their position at a $10 million market cap. It grew to

a billion dollar market cap and then fell to a $500 million market cap and then grew to a $750 million market cap. And then one day they decided I'm interested in exiting my position and they'd make a sell. That's how I think of a slow. And honestly, that's how I trade things like Bitcoin. I don't have the time to be, you know, trading constantly. I don't have a quant fund. I love Bitcoin. And so I've taken a position in it. But I'm also aware of these more macro fundamental cycles. And sometimes I feel like I should exit my Bitcoin position. Sometimes I feel like there's an opportunity to accumulate more Bitcoin, but I'm not doing it 24 hours a day every time, you know, every day. A fast trader, I think of as more of a quant trader, right? So people who are looking to benefit from arbitrage and

inefficiencies across exchanges, across networks. And they're just always doing the calculus of like, what does the spread look like? What does the depth look like? What are the rates on this exchange versus that exchange and moving in and out? So that's what I think of as a fast trader. So where are the profits coming from from these fast traders then? So like let's talk to this example where let's say I owned one ample for ample and the price is a dollar when I bought it.

and the price somehow in the past day went up to $1.5. And then the rebase happened. So I now have 1.5 ampals each worth $1.5. And you're saying that there's a short gap of time where a fast trader can take advantage of that. Who's taking the other side of that trade? Are these people who are betting against the rebase being successful? It's a really good question.

And I guess we have to put time into perspective a little bit here. What's happening is people are betting on the network continuing to grow. So there is a rational bet still that just because Ample is trading above the price target doesn't mean that it will immediately correct after a rebase. Because as we discussed, price doesn't adjust immediately as a result of a rebase in a traditional exchange. And if people feel like there's an increasing number of new people who are willing to take a position in Ample at its current market cap and because they believe it'll go up, then they might very well rationally buy into the network even if it's trading above the price target. Just as they might do the same even as it's below the price target. And so that window of opportunity where you bought, you had one ample. It was trading at $2 per ample.

and now you have greater than one ample at $2 per ampel, if you believe that that will persist for yet another day, then you might wait. Or if you believe that it might increase to another day, you might wait, but you know eventually there will be a topping out. So let me put it in another way. You could think about it as a conditional probability statement. So given that the ample fourth protocol has three different states,

expansion, contraction, and equilibrium, right? So imagine you're in this expansion state. You might ask the question, given that amples are expanding, what is the likelihood of cell pressure kicking in in one, two, three, N days, right? And you might have some expectation that says like, okay, N is five. And in five days, I think that's when the cell pressure kicks in. So I might want to sell on day four. And similarly, if amples are contracting, you'd be saying something like, given that amples are contracting, what is the likelihood of by pressure kicking in in

one, two, three, N days. But as we go through more of these cycles, right, say last time, N was 90 days, right? And we're in round two of the similar cycle. This time, I'm going to sell at 89 because I know that everybody else saw that N was 90 last time. Right. And from there, you start to see this N, I would expect, decrease over time because that's just how I believe the game theory will play out. So once people have observed some of these cycles, it's like, okay, maybe Amples won't be trading at $3 and expanding for 30 days in a row this next cycle because that happened already. And, you know, I missed the top and this time I'm going to sell a little bit sooner.

That's just how I think the game theory will most likely play it, play out. Okay. So, again, none of this is... Can I just interject here? So basically, I'm kind of hearing a couple of very different things and I'm struggling to actually put them into the right order in my head. Maybe you can help me. What I heard earlier is that one of your issues with gold and digital gold is that basically if I have a gold nugget and I can buy a fridge today, I might want to wait a week and buy two fridges instead.

And I also heard as a criticism that basically the bitcoins are not used as a unit of account on behalf of their volatility. Well, I haven't volunteered that yet. So I didn't say that yet. I'm happy to get into that a little bit later. But yeah. Okay, so I'm hearing two different things now. So basically earlier I heard if I have a gold nugget and I can buy a fridge for today, I might wait until next month because I might be able to buy two fringes from the same

gold nugget. And that's bad. So basically it would be better to have like a duplication process where basically the amount of gold nuggets is increased to have a more stable supply. more stable denomination. You also said that one of the shortcomings of Bitcoin is that people are not using it as a unit of accountant that basically prices are typically denominated in something stable like the US dollar, and then you pay for it in Bitcoin.

And now the other thing that I'm hearing is that there's a whole different price dynamic because there's layers and layers of speculation layers. on top of each other. And I totally buy that. I think that happens. I mean, it's a system of couple differential equations and there'd be complex movements or movement patterns. But basically, my question is, to me, it seems like this should just be increasing the volatility and the bubbliness of the acid rather than decreasing it, which I think I heard earlier was kind of the intent. But maybe I miss that. Maybe you can clear that up. Yeah, I mean, there are a few things that I'm happy to clear up. So just to set the context, well, let's just start from the beginning, right? So you were kind of repeating back parts of what I said, which is that like one of the concerns with Bitcoin, you know, now that we've kind of articulated it is hoarding, right? At a time when the market requires an increasing circulation circulating supply of like gold by comparison under Bretton Woods, people were incentivized to hoard it.

and therefore the circulating supply of gold decreased at a time when we needed to increase. And one of the inconsistencies, inconsistencies, I think, that you were trying to point to is that, well, don't people have an incentive to hold Ample as well? Right. They do. But as we saw, as Ample was expanding and we were increasing the supply in these wallets, what happened? The circulating volume of Ample increased profoundly, and that wouldn't have happened.

under Bretton Woods with gold. Right. So just because not everybody sold, there are many strategies that I think many people will take on at any given time. Just because some people want to hold doesn't mean that the incentive isn't increasing the circulating supply of ample when demand is greater than supply. In fact, it has certainly done that. So the other thing that I want to talk about is just the unit of account function of, of money that is so important for how central banks work,

I really don't have a lot of criticisms for Bitcoin, I would say. I quite like Bitcoin. I think it's a very good asset, and I think it's very interesting. But I do think it would be very difficult for people to denominate with Bitcoin. It hasn't really seen that type of use thus far, and it will be difficult to denominate with Bitcoin, as it is difficult to denominate with gold, even in the long run. And with Ample, I think perhaps in the very long run, it could be used for denomination.

If the efficiencies of this game theory and markets started to really pick up, such that the price was correcting itself a little bit more quickly, yeah, perhaps that could happen. But, you know, I wouldn't say that is a goal in it of itself. Like I said, you know, the thesis of our paper was very straightforward here. It was, you know, can we create a non-deluded? digital asset with a different movement pattern, that that was a question that we asked. And can we create a better building block for a financial ecosystem?

That's another question that we asked. And so we introduced supply and elasticity, and we're observing a different movement pattern. And I think, like, one of the things people tend to get confused is, like, what do we consider to be success in this, you know, environment? And I do think that if the asset is offsetting price by increasing supply or offsetting price by decreasing supply, if it's countercyclical as a policy, and if it's moving differently from Bitcoin, then those are the two strongest indications that we're achieving what we sought to out the gate. Does that help?

Yeah. I mean, to put the question very blankly, would be like, do you think this is a good design for being a like standard medium of exchange unit of account. Like do you expect people to start to use this in the long term, let's say, in five years or 10 years, 20 years, as a transactional medium of account? What will I be able to, or will it sort of be sort of more of this base money? So I think you guys are missing one critical piece here, which is like, there's like the so-called holy grail of what we transact as a common medium of exchange that even today sits on top of a complex banking system right which uses a base money the stock of paper right and prior to that we had all sorts of other base monies like gold on there are folks

today who believe that bitcoin could be such a base money like the the folks who have authored books like the bitcoin standard right and that's kind of you know it's treated separately from the idea of a commonly used medium of exchange. And when I think about a base money, I really think of it as a building block or an infrastructural piece of a financial ecosystem that tends to be more complex. And maybe the ecosystem isn't entirely rule-based. And maybe the ecosystem isn't entirely decentralized. Maybe it's a hybrid of this and that. But those layers sit on top of these more primitive building blocks. And our goal here with Ample is to build another essential building block as part of this new ecosystem.

And so I don't know if that helps you, but there is this tendency to think that either something is the most commonly used media of exchange or it's not quite money. And as I talked to my academic advisors, it really just seems like money is a very poorly defined concept. Even Hayek used to lament that money itself was a noun. He would prefer if different things were described

as having different money-like properties to different degrees. And what we're talking about here is a base money and a building block. And so the more we can form this analogy in our minds, at least for the purpose of this conversation, where we're thinking about gold, not as a commonly used media of exchange, but as a building block. Where we're thinking about Bitcoin, not as a commonly used way of buying coffee, but as a building block, a component of a larger system. And where we're thinking about Ample as a building block, as a component of a larger system. and I can give you some more examples for reasons why I'm really excited about the design of ample. It has interesting synergies in how it interacts with other existing D5 platforms that we're working on right now.

So you're familiar with things like Uniswap, right? It's a constant product exchange where there are two balances, right, a pair, say one is Ample and one is E. And the product of those pairs is always an invariant constant. And the spot price is derived by swaps, right, when the best. balance a shift in quantity, it has an inferred spot price. One of the phenomenon that we're struggling with, I think, as an ecosystem is the phenomenon of an impermanent loss, where if one asset starts to appreciate or depreciate in a big way relative to the other, there's this loss that emerges from it. So say I just have two coins, red coin and blue coin. Red coin goes up 100%,

blue coin goes up only 10%, and that gap never gets bridged. That becomes punitive for the pooler in the form of impermanent. loss. There's a new kind of start of pooling system called Balancer, which I'm sure you're probably familiar with as well. We just had them on last week. They're fantastic because they generalize this constant product pooling concept where it's like now I can have red coin times a blue coin times green coin and have that equal and invariant. But what does that mean? That means that I could also have red coin times red coin times blue coin equals invariant. And that's the same thing as Red coin squared times Bluecoin to the one equals an invariant.

And so long as these exponents add up to one, they can be treated as a weighting parameter in a smart pool, a way of rebalancing a portfolio, so to speak, of N balances. It so happens that the way the ample supply policy interacts with balancer can be designed such that the supply changes perfectly offset these weighting parameters. and because Ample is cyclical in price, right? We know that it eventually will return to one, whether it's over or under. It can basically make impermanent loss truly impermanent. Where in the original example, where Red Coin grew up 10%, blue coin grew 100%,

and that gap never gets bridged, that can be eliminated through the interaction of this rules-based supply policy with the fact that Ample is cyclical and an interaction with the weighting parameters in a balancer smart pool. I'll give you another example of an ecosystem level. Maybe let's go into these ecosystem integrations later. I don't think I fully buy the balancer one, but let's talk about this later. I have a last protocol question, just as in how the protocol works, before I'd like to move on to the token distribution or the initial token distribution.

So basically, you need a price feed, right, in order to determine whether you increase or decrease the total token supply. Where does this price feed come from? So we actually have two oracles. So there is a CPI Oracle and there is a market Oracle. So the CPI Oracle, that's how we target the purchasing power of a 2019 CPI adjusted dollar. That comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis once a month and ChainLink is also a supplier to that Oracle input. The market Oracle provides 24-hour volume-weighted price, and we are a direct Oracle from, we receive information directly from Biffinx and Ku-Coin, but also from chain link, which aggregates price information on top of other aggregators. So we kind of just have a little bit of redundancy in terms of where

this price information comes from. But that is one of the more interesting questions here, like how how do we decentralize a price information oracle over time? But that is where it comes from. Things I have about the sort of rebasing stuff is why does it only rebase 10% of like the amount that like, you know, if it went up by 50% it doesn't actually increase the supply by 50%. It actually only increases it by 5%. So what's the reason? for sort of capping, capping that at the 10% amount?

Well, the underlying reason for that is that number one, the quantity theory of money doesn't work in the near term. So it wouldn't really fully offset price if we did it, you know, fully anyways. And it'll matter less and less, I believe, over time what that reaction lag parameter is. But that that is a smoothing parameter so that we don't overcorrect one way or another. So again, if you accept that the quantity theory of money doesn't really work in the near term, and you accept that these supply adjustments are just nudging the market one way or another, then this is a smoothing parameter to prevent things like overcorrection from occurring.

Just as like 24-hour volume weighted average price as opposed to spot price at a given moment, kind of starts to, you know, smooth things out a little bit. And this is already very fast by the standards of like, say, like a central bank, which might, you know, adjust supply to much, much, much lower rate. Can I follow up on the Oracle question? So basically, you said that you get the data from chain link, right? Yeah, we get the data from Biffinx and Kukoin and through ChainLink, which aggregates a great number of other aggregators.

Okay, so basically the ChainLink is the one that's hard-coded in the smart contract, or can that be updated? So that can be updated, right? So that is not hard-coded into the smart contract yet. So basically you guys have an admin key to the smart contract and you can reset how the factor of the supply is set. No. Well, so what we would like to introduce governance around in the longer term,

or actually just even in the near term, is two hyperparameters, one of which is that rebased reaction lag parameter that you were talking about, which is the number that we divide the supply offset by, right? That's a number. Another hyperparameter that we're going to decentralize the governance of is the deviation threshold. And this is actually, they're just, those are the two hyperamp parameters of the system.

The rebase reaction lag, which is that smoothing parameter and the deviation threshold, because right now it's set to 5% above or below the price target. And that's something we'd like to decentralize the governance of. Lastly, we'd also like to decentralize the governance of Oracle inputs, such that eventually it would be the community decides like when to add another data feed source or not. But there are also really promising things around the corner just because the ecosystem is evolving. While there is no generalized solution on chain for the Oracle problem at large, we're soon coming to a reality where there could be a decentralized solution to the price. oracle problem. For example, Uniswap provides a price oracle. We're not yet ready to take advantage of things like that, but it could be soon. There are also kind of a high throughput decentralized

exchanges that are being developed. And really what we want is to get a price Oracle input from an exchange with a matching engine. That would be wonderful. You look at what Sam and FDX is doing with serum and on Solana. These things are starting to become possible. So what I thought once would be a very very, very difficult problem to solve and that we would probably have to solve just through decentralized governance of what is a valid Oracle input or not could soon become a hybrid of like we're getting an on-chain decentralized Oracle feed. And in addition to that, we're also accepting off-chain Oracle inputs and gradually decentralizing that. But I'm not without hope that this price Oracle problem could theoretically be solved by some of our ecosystem partners. And I can't

say that that was the case. We wouldn't really originally watch this. Okay, cool. So that kind of clarifies my question. The next kind of area of topics I would like to talk about is the token distribution. So I know that you guys did a token sale about a year ago, where you sold $5 million of a then $50 million total supply. So what happened to the remaining 90% of the tokens at the time? Oh, I'm sure you can look up the pie chart. I'm not looking it right now, but some fraction of it is, was allocated for employees and advisors, some fraction for an ecosystem fund, some fraction for a treasury fund. And actually, what I'll do is,

I'll do you one better, we have an updated transparency report coming up with the current state of token distribution. It really looks quite different than what the original state was. There's far more amples in the wild than there appeared to be. We'll link to that in the show notes. Wonderful. So I actually have the numbers for initial distribution. So a quarter actually went to the team and the advisors. 23% or so went to investors.

20% is in the ample fourth foundation treasury. And 20% or so was set aside for the ecosystem incentivization. That we can also go into a little bit, I think the gazer that was launched recently, part of that. If you look at a token that is so little decentralized from the get-go, I mean, basically, you sold 10% in the token sale, 25% went to the team and advisors. So how do you expect that to gain the traction of a truly more less decentralized system like Bitcoin or Ethereum? I mean, basically, if you, if my personal opinion is, that if like some of the super old Satoshi coins would be moved today, that would be an enormous

amount of turbulence for the system just because it would be clear that like 10% or so is in effect still controlled by a single person or a group of people. And I think the fact that the Bitcoin price has moved the way it has is largely attributable to the fact that that never happened and these coins never moved. and basically people assume that they will never move. So how do you expect for a token distribution that is so lopsided to actually become a, what in effect is a speculative asset just like Bitcoin? Okay.

So again, Ample, just to set the context, is a decentralized building block. And I'm flattered that you're comparing us to Bitcoin. which is a beautiful design. A lot of those numbers that you're looking at right now don't represent the reality today. So, for example, the 25% that was dog-geared for employees and advisors, that's a pre-allocated amount. That doesn't mean it has all been distributed as such.

A great deal of investors have unlocked their tokens and have been trading them and they are in the wild. And a great deal of ecosystem funds have also been distributed. and we will continue to deploy them as systematically as possible. So the Geyser program was really just the beginning. And when we launched, you know, we were adhering largely to kind of the standards of a finance IEO and a Biffinx IEO. But we do have a plan for systematically distributing the ecosystem fund through Geiser

and Geyser-like programs. You know, we do have a forthcoming transparency report that I think you should just link to and see what the system actually looks like today. this will be an ongoing consideration for us. You know, how do we get the ownership of the coin into the hands of the market in a systematic way? And, you know, just look forward to an update on that because it's not quite what you're describing it to be that. Remember, that report is over a year old. So you mean a lot of the team and the advisors have already cashed out?

Or what's the argument exactly? So they already sold to the market? Not so much the team, but I know that the investors have moved a substantial amount of money. So they're unlocking on a monthly vesting schedule, some of them. Once they're no longer in the control of us, right, it's no longer a pool that's allocated for these people. It's constantly being unlocked. So what that pie chart was meant to represent was actually a release schedule. Right. So when we did the IEO, we all kind of subscribed on top of our four-year standard vesting to a gradual of release schedule so that even folks who had, you know, taken a position in the asset early days or had hit a vesting cliff would not be able to suddenly release their tokens. And since then, you know, almost a year has passed. And over time, things have kind of reconfigured themselves. So really the best way for me to help you here is to provide

you with a new transparency report. And it is forthcoming. Okay. Do you think that the investors who have already sold their ampos did so for the greater good of the ample ecosystem or because they wanted to cash out at an opportunity? I really can't speak for the investors. So, I mean, when you think about an IEO in a block round, for example, it is a moment in time where a lot of people are plowing in in a concentrated manner, right? I can say this that, like, our early stage investors, I'm very close with, they've been very supportive this whole time of our long-term vision.

And we did raise from people who have, you know, the bright mentality, I think, in terms of how to balance advising an early-stage product into, like, getting some amount of traction. And they have their own calculus for how to think about their portfolios and so on and so forth. But we managed from a mix of traditional VCs and also crypto funds. So some of them have the capacity to trade in real time, even provide liquidity. So one way of distributing tokens that's pretty responsible, I think, for the space is like by being a traditional liquidity providing market maker. And a lot of folks in my investor pool, they've kind of contributed to programs like the Geyser as well, or at least just like uniswap liquidity pools.

So if they don't have the ability to market make on a centralized, exchange as not every investor is a hedge fund. Some of them are welcome to participate and have participate in a uniswap liquidity pool. Some of them simply can't do that. I'm not sure if that helps you, but I do think that you'll appreciate in particular the transparency report that's coming out soon. So speaking of like the uniswap, liquidity pool and Geyser and stuff, so essentially, you know, what it is is it's like a way for, you know, sort of a liquidity mining for like, allow people

to earn ample tokens by providing liquidity to uniswap. What is sort of like the integration hurdles with Ample? Because I imagine that like one, both for centralized exchanges, but then also especially for like other smart contracts. I feel like it's many smart contracts probably aren't used to the paradigm of the, their own token balances changing without some interaction. happening with them. And so have you run into any integration challenges because of this? Less so with the things that are on chains, because Ample is kind of natively on chain and it

overrides things like get balance. Like in the case of Uniswap, there was very little. Like certainly with V1, I remember it just kind of worked automatically. Would V2, there is a sync call that, you know, can be that was like layered onto the rebase, but very light, very. Very light. very, very light. With compound, I know the team has done, you know, quite a bit of research on that. It seemed very light as well. It depends on whether the smart contract program or platform that we're dealing with, it really depends on what they do with it. But I will say that with centralized exchanges, there is an integration process. It's not a vanilla ERC20 token. It's not like, okay, we got basic attention token. That means we can have ample because they do need these exchanges, they pool wallets. Right. So, you know, they have wallets. The ampals in those wallets will automatically increase and decrease in supply. But they need to propagate those supply changes into the system of accounting that they have for their users, which is typically a database, you know, at the end of the day. And if they don't do that, then, you know, their users are going to be quite angry because it's kind of like the early

days of the Neo-Gas token where, you know, those, the supply increases weren't being shared with the customers and and finance was the first to actually do that to just actually make that database update and that gave them a lot of early days traction and so it is kind of one of those things where the exchange does need to be conscious of the fact that the ampals in their pooled wallets are going to automatically increase but they need to propagate those increases and decreases to the user accounts that they represent and they hold custody for and so we do have a generalized integration guide and increasingly now, you know, exchanges are trying to list us often without our, it's not that we give permission or not, but without, you know, asking for our feedback on whether

their integration is going to work or not. And sometimes they don't even know. And so we're trying to maintain a list of integrations that the team has run live test cases on that we believe are approved and that, like, accurately propagate supply changes in their pooled wallets to the user accounts that they represent. So there's been quite a lot of trading activity on Ampo over the past month or so. So the market cap has gone up many fold. I want to say like more than a hundredfold, but I don't know. I could look it up, but it's very, very significant.

And the price of Amper has traded well above $1 for all of July, sometimes at almost $4. Do you think the people who actually trade Amper's understand the underlying mechanisms of how the supply and the price change. I mean, there's quite a lot of marketing activity going on on Twitter and FawChair and business and so on. Do you think people actually understand what they're buying into? Given how quickly things have grown, one of the things I'm most excited by is how the community has mobilized around disseminating information about.

I can't even keep up with it all, to be honest, because this is not something that's really in our control. The community has taken a life of its own, and that's wonderful. The Telegram community is very, very lively. And I think that they are doing their best to communicate the principles of Ample to as many people as they think are interested in a short timeline. But I do think there are a few things that have been lost in communication along the way. I think for the most part, people understand the mechanism. Supply increases, supply decreases. That's cool. I don't think they understand, just as kind of, even in this conversation, there were some confusion around what the goal of a price target is, right? So to me, it's a proxy for determining

whether there's more demand than supply or more or less demand than supply as opposed to a goal in and of itself. And I think some things that are lost are, you know, the whole view of this particular cryptocurrency and a lot of these other more base cryptocurrencies as building blocks rather than anything else. And so, yeah, I got to say, I can't really speak for what people understand or don't understand, but I do think they understand the mechanics, but I do think there's a lot more education that we can do. And that's kind of why I'm excited to at least have this opportunity to talk with you guys in a live environment, answer some of these questions that, you know, I see here and there coming up from all angles.

I have kind of gotten past this moment where I can respond to every mention of Ample. There was a time not long ago where any time somebody asked a question about Ample, I could actually just answer it. But now we're kind of past that. And so we need to kind of provide more material for the community. And that's why we launched a new Discord community. That's a little bit more ordered. There's no trading talk aloud.

If they want to talk about trading, they can go to the telegram community, which is really fun for doing that. But in this community, it's going to be mostly about support, about education, about economics, about developer programs, and so on and so forth, and even just general questions. And that's starting to grow a little bit, maybe a thousand people in the last day or so. And I find it much easier as a medium for answering questions than Telegram, which, again, I think is really exciting and great.

it's just hard to have a longer form conversation there right now. But I would encourage anybody who has questions to join the Discord and ask them there. I've actually checked out the Telegram and some of the content on Fortune business, which is not my usual haunt online, to be honest. But I mean, I'm not going to speak to as to how you come to have this community, but you have this community that's very aggressive about marketing. And from the point of a diehard techie who believes in the ideology of decentralized technology rather than a speculator also seems irresponsible and opportunistic.

But if you look at your team as a whole, it's an incredibly solid team. So your team has fantastic backgrounds. you have great advisors like Jory Kruk and Brian Armstrong and a couple of people from the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which is this conservative think bank. You have VC backing by Pinterra by Slow Ventures, by True Ventures, etc. What do they make of this? Well, it's a phenomenon, right? So when I talk to those people, at first glance, would say that, like, wow, this community is very different from me.

you guys, right? Because you guys are so, well, I guess boring by comparison. But yeah, I think a lot of the attention we're getting is a result of the fervor that has emerged in this organic way on things like 4chan. So I'm not even sure how we got on their radar. I think, if I had to guess, it was because we did a chain link integration. We were very excited about that. And a lot of the chain link community also has a presence there. And so there was kind of a little. And so there was kind of a bit of a cross-pollination and then when we launched the geyser they just mobilized and it's to a lot of people who come into that channel it reminds them of like an early bitcoin or early chain link like vibe and really for me we just want to make sure that we have a voice in this and we have an opportunity to

actually answer the questions like the very good questions that you guys have asked me and so i'm kind of just grateful to be here but also, I'm glad that we're starting to really take the reins of the Discord community. And increasingly, there will always be other communities that we don't moderate and that are not our official channels. And so the official channel will be Discord. And that's what we'll have a different type of conversation that perhaps is easier for folks like you and me, but, you know, much less fun for other folks. And, you know, I think there should be something for everyone. But a lot, it was all organic, honestly. It was just organic. And yeah.

I think that's a pretty good closing statement. So Evan, thank you so much for coming on. We're interested in seeing how this goes. Yeah, I'll send you some follow-up materials, and if you have follow-up questions, drop me in line. We'll link to it. Thanks, guys. I hope you enjoyed the interview debrief,

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Thanks.