I ignored Ampleforth for months. I wrote it off for a number of reasons: didn't like the name; thought it was a meme-coin; didn't think it had any use case.
But this week I started to pay more attention. I learnt about this German thing a week or two ago. It's called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which refers to that thing you've been following recently and now that you're following it, you suddenly start noticing it everywhere. Examples - white cars, daschunds, fjallraven kanken bags, etc. This week that 'thing' was Ampleforth. Here's what I noticed:
- It started with Quora. In the Inner Circle group there was a question "Why is Ampleforth going so viral right now, it increased by 50% again? Is it still a good time to buy?". Marius Kramer responded to the question with eight points, #6 stood out for me - "AMPL has managed to grow from a $5M to a $150M market cap within just 3 weeks. If it keeps going like that, it could go into the Top10 on coinmarketcap and then it would turn the entire crypto world upside down. There will be lots of FUD, lots of emotions and Bitcoin fans will feel very threatened and try to lash out against AMPL in every way they can." WOW!
- The next day I was listening to the Bankless podcast, with Joey Krug (creator of Augur and big cheese at Pantera Capital) on as the guest. He gave a really weird explanation for Ampleforth's use case (@1:10:37) - "sort of like Bitcoin ... trying to be this alternative asset. You might buy a little bit of it because it's interesting and you think it's not really correlated to anything else ... this weird thing that's really tough to explain what it is". Hmm. Still not convinced but more curious.
- This made me hungry for more so I sought out some more podcasts. Next I listened to an episode of Camilla Russo's The Defiant featuring Ampleforth CTO Brandon Iles. When Brandon was explaining the origins of Ampleforth (@6:55) he referenced Basis (https://www.basis.io/) as part of the inspiration for Ampleforth. Basis is a defunct stablecoin project that infamously shut down and refunded its high-profile investors after getting bogged down with red tape from regulators. I was pretty interested in Basis back in the day - it also had the feature of elastic supply based on demand. When I first read about Ampleforth a few months ago it reminded me a little of Basis, but when I went searching for comparisons there wasn't much out there so I my interest was piqued when Brandon mentioned this.
- Later that day I noticed the Ampleforth price had gone through the floor. It had gone as low as $0.62. So I jumped right in to an episode of Charlie Shrem's Untold Stories podcast, also featuring Brandon Iles. My favourite part (@35:01) went something like this:
Brandon: "The whole system relies on profit-seeking actors in the marketplace and that's what drives it."
Charlie: "Oh, I love that. Say that again."
Charlie's enthusiasm for Ampleforth was really the final nail. With the Ampleforth price looking 'cheap', I decided to buy a small bag of AMPL - you know what I mean, just play money that you wouldn't be too upset if you lost it (although I will be sad if I lose the ETH I put in to the Uniswap pool to stake UNI on the Geyser to earn more AMPL). At first it failed - not enough gas. Damn these scary-high gas prices!! I had to buy more ETH from my fiat to crypto on-ramp. In the meantime I noticed on Twitter that there was a lot of hate for Ampleforth after the price dump and imminent rebase. Perhaps it was a blessing that it failed. But I thought it's cheap so I'm just gonna go for it. I figured at these prices folks would want to buy back in which would drive it back up (rookie error, should have waited till it hit $1.05!!!). So I went for it.
For more than 24 hours, the price hovered around the 70 to 80 cent mark. 'I'm doomed', I thought. I've become an Ampleforth dummy, lured by FOMO. FML. But as I write this the AMPL price is flying high again at $1.28. Maybe it will work out after all. My plan now is to ride it for a while and if the price looks a bit high, sell out and maybe buy in again later. After that, who knows. Maybe I will become a long-term believer. I think as a speculative asset it has legs. In the long-term it needs to become a serious rival to Bitcoin but that's looking pretty unlikely at the moment.
PS, saw this on twitter today: "Honestly, Ampleforth is basically HEX with Stanford credentials. Too many people get blinded by these." LOL. Harsh but absolutely priceless! I disagree.
