5 Bits From the Early Days of Ampleforth
1. Fragments
Prior to founding Ampleforth, Evan Kuo was the CEO of a San Francisco venture-backed pizza-on-demand startup called Pythagoras Pizza.
And oh boy did Kuo love pizza:
Not only did Kuo love pizza, but he was also a huge advocate for Bitcoin, digital currency, and the cryptoeconomic systems that blockchains and digital currencies could enable.
So, as a bright, young, and valorous entrepreneur who is passionate about pizza and cryptocurrency, Kuo combined his passions to create a new digital currency called “Fragments” — a type of stablecoin that would be linked to the valuation of Pythagoras Pizza itself.
His plan was to use Fragments to align his workers' interests and entice customers to remain loyal. He planned to reward Pythagoras drivers with Fragments every time they delivered a pizza, and every time a chef cooked up a pizza some Fragments would be created. As for his customers, he planned to reward them with Fragments for every referral they had.
With this plan, Kuo envisioned that the better Pythagoras performed, the more each Fragment would be worth. And his workers would be incentivized to help it succeed as they would be earning some kind of stake in the company’s performance via Fragments.
However, as Kuo and Iles began building out and testing the Fragments protocol, they lost confidence in its ability to function correctly in the marketplace.
Fragments was a very large and complicated protocol that had various mechanisms such as a rebase mechanic, a fractional reserve system, and bonds.
Unfortunately, Kuo and Iles never did end up launching Fragments. However, the project was not a waste of time. It served as the testing grounds and inspiration for Ampleforth, which is a much simpler digital currency that actually works as intended.
2. Brandon Iles & Brian Armstrong
Ampleforth’s other co-founder, Brandon Iles, may not have an interesting history with pizza, but sure is notable nonetheless.
Iles is a highly educated and driven individual with an immense amount of experience at pronounced companies. He has over 5 years of experience at Google’s Search Ranking and Machine Intelligence groups, he worked in Uber’s Ranking and Relevance team, and he worked as a software engineer at both ESI and Language Computer Corporation.
In addition to his professional career, Iles attended Rice University in 2001–2006 where he obtained his BS and MS in Computer Science.
Do you know who else attended Rice University and obtained the same degrees during the same time?
Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase:
That’s right. Iles and Armstrong took the same classes at the same university in the same year and became good friends and business associates.
How do I know?
Because Armstrong is an early investor in Ampleforth. He made two personal investments, in Ampleforth’s seed round in 2018 and later that year in the VC round:
3. Ampleforth x Bitfinex
When Ampleforth’s $AMPL token first launched in June 2019, Bitfinex chose Ampleforth to host the first-ever token sale on their new Initial Exchange Offering (IEO) platform at the time, Tokinex.
The $AMPL token sale was a huge success as Ampleforth raised $4.9 million in just 11 seconds!
Following the $AMPL token sale, Bitfinex’s Tokenix platform became one of the leading token sale platforms during the IEO boom of 2019, and to this day, $AMPL holds the title for being Tokenix’s most successful token offering.
About Bitfinex and Tokenix
Bitfinex is an industry-leading cryptocurrency exchange that was founded in 2012. It has become widely known as the go-to place for professional digital asset traders and institutions to trade. Bitfinex’s Tokenix is a premier IEO platform with carefully curated and pre-vetted token sales for some of the best projects in the crypto space.
4. Transparency of Upgradeability
Something with which you may not be familiar is that Ampleforth was NOT always decentralized and censorship-resistant from the very beginning.
Shocking, I know. But they had good reasons and were 100% transparent about it.
In a blog post published on June 10, 2019, Brandon Iles clearly stated that the $AMPL token and supply policy were upgradeable via OpenZeppelin’s AdminUpgradeabilityProxy to allow for further development, integrations, and security fixes for any potential bugs not found in its three independent security audits.
Explaining the reasoning for this upgradeability function, Iles said:
“We felt that upgradeability is something we needed to include in the beginning, given how quickly the crypto landscape changes. If it were ever possible, and safe to do so, we’d also prefer to remove this mechanism. However, we believe it’s unrealistic to think we can design a system today that will last our lifetimes without needing any changes ever.”
Moreover, some months later in September 2020, Ampleforth’s upgradeability function was unexpectedly put to use in light of the KuCoin Exchange hack where a thief got his hands on various tokens, including 14M $AMPL accounting for about 10% of the circulating supply.
The fact that 10% of the $AMPL supply was in the hands of this hacker was sort of detrimental and would have haunted the Ampleforth project forever as it was still early days.
Therefore, Ampleforth devs made the hard decision to deploy this upgradeability contract and freeze the hacker's $AMPL funds. And as you might have guessed, people raised concerns over this:
However, as described above, Ampleforth was transparent with this before the launch of the $AMPL token so these concerns weren’t really warranted.
Nonetheless, the Ampleforth team recognized these concerns, and on March 5, 2021, they removed Ampleforth’s token upgradeability function forever.
With that, $AMPL is now completely censorship-resistant and decentralized like $BTC or $ETH. Also, it means that $AMPL has been sufficiently battle-tested and is ready to take that final step towards full maturity.
5. Ampleforth’s Debut on Cointelegraph
In May 2019, Ampleforth’s $AMPL token debuted on Cointelegraph where it was described as “a new synthetic commodity designed to diversify risk”.
The article cited quotes from the Ampleforth whitepaper and highlighted key aspects of the protocol’s unique design and supply policy.
Additionally, Cointelegraph specifically highlighted that Niall Ferguson, a British economic and financial historian, was a member of Ampleforth’s advisory board; and made special note that Ampleforth had raised $4.75 million in funding to finalize the development of its protocol from investors that include Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, True Ventures, Founder Collective, Slow Ventures, Pantera and FBG.
All in all, Ampleforth’s debut article by Cointelegraph was well received with 2884 views and 118 shares and it highlighted many of its unique characteristics and key players involved.
