Ampleforth, a DeFi Building Block, Brings Rebasing Currency and Elastic Finance to Acala and Polkadot

Ampleforth will likely launch on Acala (Polkadot) early next year

Bette Chen
Acala
4 min readDec 10, 2020

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The Independent, Multichain Money

AMPL by the Ampleforth team is a truly independent cryptocurrency that brings chain-agnostic, non-dilutive money to decentralized finance. Soon it will be available across the Acala network.

Ampleforth introduced the world to the rebase, a unique mechanism which ensures price-supply equilibrium. Ampleforth is like Bitcoin, except it can be used to denominate stable contracts. Like Bitcoin, AMPL is uncollateralized. Unlike Bitcoin, AMPL has an elastic supply policy. The Ampleforth currency automatically ‘rebases’ its supply in a proportional and non-dilutive way in response to price volatility. This approach is key to realizing stable contracts, a critical hedge against the price volatility associated with smart contracts today. This capability makes AMPL a key building block for DeFi ecosystems.

Ampleforth Everywhere has been a long term vision of the Ampleforth team to bring AMPL to multiple blockchains and execute its monetary policy to regulate its supply with market demand.

Ampleforth will likely launch on Acala (Polkadot) early next year, making it the first multichain independent money to serve the wider cross-chain crypto and DeFi community.

Polkadot enables a network of interconnected blockchains, offers inter-chain communication and shared security to bridge existing chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin with many parachains that are connected to it. Polkadot has a hub-and-spoke architecture, where its current live network is the hub aka the Relay Chain that offers Proof-of-Stake network security and will be an anchor for cross-chain communication. However, it does not have any application-level implementations, nor smart contract capability, which is realized by individual parachains and parathreads.

Acala is one of the leading parachains in the Polkadot ecosystem that is optimized for DeFi, often serves as a landing pad and DeFi hub of Polkadot. DApps deploying on Acala not only gain immediate access to Polkadot’s multi-chain ecosystem via cross-chain message passing mechanism (XCMP), but also have full access to Acala’s existing DeFi primitives such as DeX, user base, and liquidity.

AMPL on Acala (Polkadot)

We’re pleased to welcome Ampleforth to Acala’s Ecosystem Program, as well as the ever-growing Polkadot ecosystem.

Ampleforth Everywhere will have a single monetary policy that automatically adjusts supply based on demand (called ‘rebase’) on multiple blockchains. The user flow looks like this:

  • Value-transfer: A user is able to transfer AMPLs from their wallet on one chain to another wallet on a different chain.
  • State Transfer: The monetary policy is able to call rebase() on the token contract of a different chain, or otherwise sync its state to the other chain to adjust supply.

Specifically, Ampleforth’s deployment on Acala will bring these benefits to the users

  1. Enable Ample money on Polkadot via Acala network
  2. Ample will become a 1st-class fee token on Acala, meaning users can pay AMPLs as fees when transferring AMPLs
  3. Ampleforth contracts will be deployed on Acala’s EVM with minimal changes while enjoying seamless integration with Acala’s DeFi primitives e.g. list directly on Acala Swap DeX.
  4. Transfer AMPL between Ethereum and Acala/Polkadot: RenVM will initially provide an Ethereum to Acala (Polkadot) bridge that will be used for value transfer and state transfer. Meanwhile, ChainBridge is considered as an alternative solution, while Snowfork’s trustless Ethereum bridge is also considered as a fully decentralized bridge option once it becomes available.

Technically Acala EVM is powered by Project Bodhi — a composable and innovative EVM stack on Substrate — a customizable blockchain framework used for building Polkadot, Kusama, Acala, and various types of blockchains. Project Bodhi has recently been awarded Web3 Foundation Open Grant to deliver full-stack composability between EVM and runtimes for developers, and a single-wallet cross-chain experience for users. More details will be revealed in an upcoming post.

What’s Next

We are also collaborating with Ren to make RenVM Ethereum to Acala (Polkadot) bridge available in early 2021. Then Ampleforth contracts can be deployed on Acala mainnet, making AMPLs one of the first cross-chain assets available on Polkadot, and help realize the vision of Ampleforth Everywhere. Together with Polkadot and other ecosystem collaborators, Acala is poised to bring the cross-chain DeFi ecosystem and liquidity together, and empower more open finance innovations.

Click here to learn more about Ampleforth.

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About Ampleforth

Ample is a new base-money cryptocurrency with elastic supply and rules-based governance. Ample naturally adapts to changes in demand by universally expanding or contracting supply, these changes affect all wallets equally, ensuring AMPL remains non-dilutive like Bitcoin. Ample supply expands or contracts by smart contract according to a rules-based monetary policy. Ample is not correlated with or derived from any other asset. Ample is a new base-money primitive for building the future of decentralized finance.

About Acala

Acala is the decentralized financial hub of Polkadot, making it fast and easy to use financial applications available to everyone. The platform offers a suite of financial primitives: a multi-collateralized stablecoin backed by cross-chain assets like Bitcoin, a trustless staking derivative, and a decentralized exchange to unleash liquidity and power financial innovations. Acala is the de-facto open platform for finance applications to use smart contracts or built-in protocols with out-of-the-box cross-chain capabilities, security and financial optimizations.

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Bette Chen
Acala

COO & Co-Founder @Laminar & @AcalaNetwork. Full-stack Product Manager. Budling for a decentralized future.