Ampleforth’s $FORTH Airdrop Was the Wildest and Fairest in The History of Crypto
The team behind $AMPL took everyone by surprise on April 21, 2021, when Evan Kuo posted this at 9 AM SF time:
That’s right. Out of nowhere, Ampleforth announced the launch of the $FORTH governance token that was airdropped to anybody who had interacted with the $AMPL ecosystem on-chain.
Then, just an hour later Coinbase Pro announced it’s going to accept and allow $FORTH trading:
It was wild.
It was Wilder than $UNI
As I said, it took just 1 hour for Coinbase Pro to announce the $FORTH listing. In comparison, it took Coinbase Pro 6 hours to announce the $UNI listing, a similar type of governance token. Here’s proof 1 & 2
You see a 6 hr difference.
Also, in a lesser time span than $UNI, $FORTH was listed on Coinbase.
Oh, and not to mention a nearly instant addition to the Earn program. It was the quickest one in the history of Coinbase as well.
I wonder why…
Perhaps it’s because Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase is an early adopter and personal investor in $AMPL.
It was Fairer Than $UNI
The $UNI airdrop surely echoed with a greater impact among crypto users. A lot of crypto enthusiasts received the airdrop as Uniswap was back then, and still is today, the most popular DEX in crypto.
But not only that, the riches some people made from the $UNI airdrop, specifically liquidity providers, are astronomical. The $UNI airdropped rewarded the crypto wealthy (people who could provide liquidity) far more than the average joe.
This wasn’t the case with $FORTH. The $FORTH airdrop was much fairer.
I mean, sure, it had its weighting points when calculating the amount of $FORTH you could receive (ie. you received a point per day for participating in $AMPL Geysers, a point per day if you held $AMPL during negative rebase periods, and a max 1 point for interacting with $AMPL on-chain.)
BUT
The airdrop didn’t favor whales.
There is a top at around 1000 $FORTH tokens a whale could have gotten, regardless of how much $AMPL they held or liquidity they provided, unlike the $UNI airdrop. Even whales with $1M in $AMPL since the very beginning are not far off in $FORTH rewards as users with $1000 in $AMPL for a similar period of time.
The $FORTH airdrop wasn’t designed to get whales even richer, but rather create a wide distribution and give tens of thousands of holders a voice in the future of Ampleforth and to make it truly decentralized.
It was an airdrop that rewarded behavior, not balances:
In comparison, $UNI liquidity providers made millions from their airdrop.
$FORTH distribution, on the other hand, is more equal. A rich guy from the US gets a similar seat at the table as a $100 Philipino guy because Ampleforth values input, not balances.
What is $AMPL?
Yes, $AMPL.
$AMPL is still a relatively small project that has now hit headlines thanks to its governance token $FORTH getting listed on Coinbase.
You can think of it as $DAI and $MKR — it’s a similar correlation as to $AMPL and $FORTH. Where $DAI is a stablecoin and $MKR is its governance token, $AMPL is an algorithmic stablecoin and $FORTH is the governance token.
However, $AMPL is very different from $DAI.
$AMPL is the first rebasing currency and a key DeFi building block for denominating stable contracts. The Ampleforth protocol adjusts its total supply daily based on market conditions, trading price volatility for supply volatility to give $AMPL a relatively stable price.
$AMPL’s elastic supply policy is 100% driven by free-market incentives and does not rely on traditional banks or lenders of last resort, unlike stablecoin models. $AMPL is uncollateralized, non-dilutive, and decentralized and censorship-resistant, like Bitcoin.
Unlike Bitcoin, however, $AMPL can be used to denominate stable contracts and is a composable DeFi building block.
What is $FORTH?
$FORTH is the governance token of the Ampleforth protocol powering the $AMPL rebasing currency. It further decentralizes and completes the Ample ecosystem by putting control of the protocol in the hands of the community.
- Using the $FORTH token, Ample community members can vote on parameter changes to the core $AMPL protocol and help to steer the continued evolution of the Ampleforth ecosystem. $FORTH holders may vote with their tokens directly, or delegate to another address who may vote on their behalf.
- The $FORTH token model is an extension of Compound Finance’s $COMP governance token which has become a respected benchmark for governance tokens in the DeFi space.
- 15 million $FORTH have been minted at genesis and immediately made claimable by more than 75,000 $AMPL community members, participants, and key contributors. After 1 year, $FORTH inflation will be set at 2% annually and the newly minted tokens will be used to promote continued contribution for the Ampleforth community and support of the network.
- $FORTH distribution is as follows: 67% to the $AMPL community and 33% to early backers (the core development team, advisors, supporters, and the Ampleforth Foundation).
