1. What is Ampleforth?

Ampleforth is a digital-asset-protocol for smart commodity-money.

2. Why was it created?

Founded with a mission to create fair, politically independent money, the protocol’s creators noticed that commodity-monies like gold and silver are naturally fair and independent.

Unfortunately, such commodity-monies cannot efficiently respond to changes in demand, making them a poor substitute for central-bank-money.

To address this shortcoming, the project's founders designed a synthetic commodity-money that propagates price-information into supply, much like how thermal expansion propagates nearby kinetic energy into a material’s volume in the natural world.

3. How does it work?

The Ampleforth protocol always seeks a price-supply equilibrium, and will automatically enter a state of unrest until it finds one. To illustrate this, we can walk through a simple example:

When demand changes, the system seeks a new equilibrium point by universally expanding to, or contracting from holders.

In the case above, when demand suddenly increases, the system seeks a new price-supply equilibrium, such that Alice ends up with 2 Amples each worth $1. And the opposite would be true if demand decreased.

* Please note: Although Amples have an equilibrium price-target, they cannot be thought of as a stablecoin initially. Specifically:

1. User balances can gain or lose value.
2. The time to reach equilibrium is market dependent.

4. What are the benefits of seeking Equilibrium?

Whether Alice holds 1 Ample worth $2, or 2 Amples each worth $1, makes no difference in terms of net balance, but there are two key benefits to seeking price-supply equilibrium:

1. It applies countercyclical pressure
2. It encourages a stable unit price

Together these properties allow Amples to avoid the deflationary problems of fixed-supply commodities, without requiring a central authority.

5. The Evolution of Risk & Reward

Thus far, digital assets like Bitcoin have been uncorrelated with all other asset classes, making them uniquely useful for modern portfolio construction. But over time, as the market adoption of Bitcoin increases, both risk and reward will naturally decrease, changing its utility to become a more reliable store of value.

Like Bitcoin, Amples also evolve in utility alongside risk / reward. However in its final state, Amples become a fair and politically-independent commodity-money that can be used as an alternative to central-bank-money, rather than a digital-silver or digital-gold.

6. A Trader's Coin

Unlike current-generation cryptocurrencies, gains and losses in the Ampleforth network are attributed to supply in addition to price. Thus it benefits traders to take both information signals into consideration. Common technical analysis methods like Simple Moving Average will not paint the full picture. Imagine the price and supply series below:

A trader looking only at price cannot differentiate between selling at t < O and t > O because by all appearances the price series chart is symmetric. However, a trader looking at price × supply sees an asymmetric opportunity and can capitalize on it.

As a result, the movement pattern of Amples will be distinct from today’s cryptocurrencies, breaking new ground for traders to experiment with entirely new strategies. For a complete explanation of how to trade Amples, see the "Red Book" below.