In this week’s interview, I spoke with Brandon Iles, the CTO of Ampleforth. Brandon  is a former Google and Uber software engineer, and built his first crypto app together with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. Today, he’s trying to rebuild the way money works.
For its huge ambitions, Ampleforth is a relatively little-known project. It wants to create an entirely new category of monetary assets — one that doesn’t have Bitcoin’s gold-like fixed supply, it doesn’t have Ether’s oil-like utility, it’s not fiat-backed like USDC, and it’s not collateralized like Dai. So what is it? It’s a token — AMPL— whose value comes from having a price which moves in a predetermined band, thanks to a smart contract which automatically contracts or expands its supply. The end result is a token that trades at close to $1, the 2019 US dollar, to be precise, but Ampleforth doesn’t like to be called a stablecoin —you're about to find out why.
We also talked about the project’s recent liquidity mining program called Geyser, where traders can earn AMPL by supplying liquidity on Uniswap, and how for Brandon, the dizzying activity around these schemes is proof of DeFi’s success. Brandon also discussed the project’s roadmap, from being used as a way to diversify collateral in lending platforms like Maker and Compound, to denominating debt obligations, to very far out into the future, replacing central bank issued currencies.