As decentralized finance moves across chains, so too will the core monetary assets. We have seen that with Tether (USDT). Ampleforth Foundation yesterday announced its intention to expand to 3 new blockchains: NEAR, Polkadot and Tron.
Ampleforth is currently an Ethereum-based cryptocurrency with an algorithmically adjusted circulating supply. It is designed to be a programmable currency for a decentralized economy, by providing an asset that is less volatile to market up/downs and speculation.
Ampleforth token holders own a fixed fraction of the total AMPL circulating supply, rather than a fixed number of tokens. When the protocol detects that the price of AMPL is too high, it increases the circulating supply, whereas the supply is decreased if the price is too low. This change is propagated automatically to all Ampleforth wallets, which have their wallet balance adjusted proportionally. Irrespective of this change, AMPL holders still retain the same percentage of the token supply.
Because the Ampleforth supply is unaffected by inflation or any other dilutive factors, it is uniquely positioned as an asset that is able to maintain its purchasing power against other assets. This makes it attractive as a hedge and as an alternative to fiat currencies suffering from rampant devaluation, an interesting proposition for DeFi products.
Why NEAR:
NEAR is a developer platform for the Open Web. This means that NEAR has a set of protocols and tools that enable people to build a new wave of community-owned applications. The main protocol, NEAR Protocol, is a blockchain to power the security, economy, and incentives of NEAR’s developer platform. Last month, Balancer shared their intention to migrate to NEAR protocol.
Since the main net launch of NEAR, the project has been increasingly seeing attention from blockchain developers. It is the future version of ETH 2.0 and has a 10,000 times lower gas fee than Ethereum. It also has Ethereum - NEAR bridge which makes any ERC-20 token to be moved to NEAR without any need for centralized authorities.
“NEAR is excited to be a part of Ampleforth’s vision of a multichain future, especially in DeFi,” said Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR. “We focus on empowering the NEAR developer community to build robust, scalable projects across a range of use cases, so collaborating with Ampleforth is a natural fit. As we continue to support more well-known DeFi projects in bridging to NEAR, we expect increasing demand for building blocks like AMPL."
