Proposal: Activate LM rewards for AMP-BNT pool with an Eight Week Duration + 2M BNT Co-investment Limit

This proposal is expected to appear on Snapshot for voting on 2021-08-08T12:00:00Z. Make sure to stake your vBNT for voting before this date and time to participate in the DAO decision.

In collaboration with @kk182 from the AMP community and @issabobissa (who brought up the original LM campaign proposal a few months ago)

Proposal to add mid cap LM rewards to the AMP-BNT pool with an eight week duration and increase the co-investment limit to 2M BNT. Reward rates should be at similar levels to the current LM campaigns on the AAVE, SNX, BAT, WOO, etc… pools which is roughly 10K-20K BNT per week.

Vote For:
Enable LM rewards for an eight week duration on the AMP-BNT Pool (Conditional upon onboarding BNT to the Flexa Network, currently ongoing behind the scenes)
Increase the co-investment limit to 2M BNT from 1M BNT

Vote Against:
Do not enable LM rewards for the AMP-BNT Pool

TLDR:

  • This proposal seeks to activate LM rewards on the AMP-BNT pool and increase the co-investment limit to 2M BNT
  • The Amp community has already been highly supportive of Bancor’s platform and the Bancor community so this would be another step in strengthening the relationship between the two communities.
  • The Amp community will be hosting an AMA in their Discord featuring our very own Nate Hindman and Mark Richardson to drive awareness about the Bancor platform to their large userbase.
  • Bancor is applying to have BNT onboarded as a supported digital token on the Flexa Network
  • Bancor already has the deepest liquidity for the $AMP token across competing platforms, thus making it the ideal platform for more large trades from aggregators and professional market makers
  • Amp LPs are staking-natives, not farm-and-dumpers. BNT rewards are likely to be returned en-masse back into the pools.
  • Incentivizing this pool will continue to bring in even more traders and LPs to the pool that will lead to a long lasting relationship between the two communities

Token Contract Address:

0xff20817765cb7f73d4bde2e66e067e58d11095c2

Project Website:

https://amptoken.org/

Overview:

Amp is a digital collateral token that offers instant, verifiable collateralization for any kind of value transfer. Projects like Flexa use Amp to secure transactions and build networks that accrue value both securely and transparently. Flexa, a payments network, is the first use case of Amp’s features as a collateral token. The Flexa Capacity contract is a collateral manager that uses Amp to collateralize the payments of 40,000+ merchant locations across the US and Canada.

Motivation:

The Amp community has been very excited about the Bancor platform ever since being whitelisted. In fact, a proposal was passed to increase the BNT co-investment due to the high demand for the Amp side of the pool and no space left. That proposal was passed back in April 2021 and the Amp community has since increased by 173% and 288% on Twitter and Reddit, respectively. At over 20,000 members on Twitter and Reddit each, a LM reward campaign would present an opportunity for newer members to learn about Bancor, use the platform, and join the community as well.

Amp’s community presence

Amp has a sizable presence especially across Twitter and Reddit:

Twitter: 21,932 members
TG: 2,485 members
Discord: 10,636 members
Reddit: 24,807 members

In addition to the above, 4 more Amp Telegram community channels in other languages have popped up organically in the last few weeks: Chinese, French, Indonesia, Spanish.

Market indicators of Bancor opportunity

The market cap for AMP is roughly $3.3B with $67M in trading volume the last 24 hours as of time of writing.

Since the beginning of the year, it has done roughly $12.8M daily volume on average (see: historical stats) on Exchanges. A large majority of AMP currently resides on DEXes with Balancer leading the pack:

The balancer pool is by far the largest with 110M AMP tokens and is an 80-20 pool paired with USDC.

Source: Etherscan

This pool is actually larger than the AMP-BNT pool in terms of Amp tokens:

Source: Etherscan

But the Bancor pool has more depth (11.7M vs. 9.5M). There is large appetite from the AMP community to stake AMP in the Bancor pool and migrate this liquidity over. With LM rewards as an incentive, we could capture liquidity from Balancer as well as Uniswap and Sushiswap

Source: Uniswapv2

Source: Analytics.sushi.com

On the Bancor platform, AMP has undoubtedly ranked as one of our top performer pools for the past weeks if not months.

Use Cases

The current primary use case of the Amp token is to be staked in the Flexa Capacity contract to collateralize payments on the Flexa network. Currently, the Capacity contract has 23B AMP ($1.6B) staked in it as most of the Amp community are staking natives.

Source: app.flexa.network

The APY on Capacity is 3% but with LM rewards, Bancor also has an opportunity to attract some of these long term stakers looking to earn more with their Amp and invest in another community.

Other:

Long term strategic opportunity

Building ties with the AMP community could be beneficial to Bancor in the future as it could pave the way for a Bancor Pay solution integrated into the Bancor platform. This could potentially allow Bancor users to deposit supported digital tokens (AMP, BAT, COMP, LINK, ZRX, LRC plus BNT in the future if it gets onboarded) and stablecoins (USDC, GUSD, DAI) into their Bancor wallet which can be used for payments with retailers that are integrated into the Flexa network. This could be a good differentiator that sets the Bancor platform apart from other competing DEXes and would enable new functionality for the benefit of Bancor users.

Why LM for AMP now?

Having built out extensive foundations and partnerships to serve market needs, now AMP is focused on providing new opportunities for holders and the ecosystem overall (as outlined in the Long term strategic opportunity above) and cross protocol usage of AMP to support scaling of the economy.

What does Bancor get?

  • The AMP pool draws liquidity from an expanded market beyond DeFi, crypto, NFTs-- it’s the entire retail market. Flexa, and Amp consequently, gets a lot of exposure to the retail market so any collaborations with Amp will lead to more Bancor exposure to a new audience.
  • Integration with the AMP (Retail) x Bancor (DeFi) bridge enhances interoperability for BNT/AMP liquidity pool across other DeFi protocols and the overall market.
  • A transparent mechanism to convert retail consumer sentiment into loyalty towards Bancor as a DeFi protocol
  • Hype for a future opportunity to integrate a BNT x AMP payment solution

Available Audits:

Consensys Diligence Audit Report Amp (June 2020)

Trail of Bits: Amp Security Assessment (August 2020)

Whitepaper:

Amp More Information:
July 28: ~1m TLDR on AMP
June 17: Digital Payments 101 (a story featuring the AMP TOKEN)

Amp Recent Developments:
August 6: AMP is coming to the cross-chain lending protocol zero1_flux
July 28: AMP listed on Binance
July 7: Flexa (leverages AMP) announces collab. w/ @InCommPayments, a global payments tech company with >500,000 retailers globally.
July 2: AMP listed on Bittrex
June 29: AMP x RULER first collateral collab begins
June 16: AMP listed on BitMart
June 10: AMP listed on CoinBase

3 Likes

The AMP community will be hosting an AMA on their discord this Sunday featuring Mark and Nate. They will also be joining our community call to discuss their project and answer any questions from our community.

The data for the AMP pool is missing from dune analytics because dune uses price data from coinpaprika. I have asked the AMP team to submit an application to have their token onboarded and that should go through in a few weeks.

In the meantime, what I have done is modified our existing dashboard that gets us weekly fees and volume in USD but converted that to TKN amounts (AMP in this case since there is no price data to pull from). I then multiplied those TKN amounts by the current AMP price (~.06) to get weekly fees and volume since the week of 5/3:

The above is not quite accurate because I am using current token price which might not have been true when those fees were collect on previous days (could have been higher or lower). This is just for the community to have an idea of how much volume/fees this pool has driven making the assumption that amp has always been .06 cents which is not quite true:

Lastly, we are applying to have BNT onboarded on the flexa network and I have relayed this to folks from our end.

2 Likes

@glenn - I wonder if it would be possible to make this conditional?

I would not be in favor of LM for AMP unless BNT is supported.

Could we edit the proposal to start the LM after BNT is supported?

1 Like

FYI, we are having offline discussions with the AMP team and they are OK with us enabling LM rewards if BNT gets onboarded to the Flexa Network. The proposal “FOR” choice has been modified to add this condition and even if the DAO passes this proposal then LM rewards won’t be enabled until that happens. This will also helps us leverage the AMP community to have BNT onboarded.

4 Likes

That’s perfect !

AMP Pool is one of the best pools on bancor by far excited to see us get involved further

2 Likes

I support this proposal as it’s an incentive for AMP holders to leverage on their holdings.

1 Like

I fully support this, the Amp community is full of an educated and savvy group of investors. They will welcome BNT on the network, and fill the pool up quickly

1 Like