The current geyser programs are ending soon, let’s talk about the next rounds!

About the Geysers

The Geyser program was created as a way to distribute AMPL out into the world in a sensible, permissionless, and predictable way. It did this by directing to those who contributed to the health of the AMPL ecosystem by providing liquidity on DEXs.

You can learn more here. However, it’s always been within the DAO’s control to change or modify this program as it sees fit to keep up with the evolution of the marketplace.

History and Future

The first geyser was launched in the Summer of 2020. At the time, AMPL was a young project. One of the big issues then was the question of how AMPL could achieve broad and diverse distribution. However, considerable time has passed since then, and the project has matured in many ways.

DeFi Summer saw an influx of attention and new users. AMPL is now tradable on exchanges like Coinbase, KuCoin, Bitfinex, and others, in addition to various decentralization exchanges. FORTH governance is live, along with an associated treasury under its control. The Spot flatcoin is a promising future demand sink for AMPL and has the potential to reach an even larger audience because the value proposition is easier to understand and appreciate.

Now that SPOT is moving from a “soft-launched” phase to a “launched” phase, it’s a good time to revisit the Geyser configurations and ensure they’re doing as much as possible for the success of the ecosystem. There has been a general consensus building that a small number of deep pools, combined with liquidity owned directly by the DAO is the best direction to move toward long term.

AMPL is, at its core, a scarce commodity. In order for the DAO to own liquidity, mint SPOT, support Spot rotations via the rotation vault, or support the ecosystem in currently unforeseen ways, it will need to maintain a sizable enough portion of AMPL to perform these duties. I don’t think the original goal for the ecosystem fund to give out all the AMPL into the market continues to matches the needs of the ecosystem today and going forward. Instead, I propose shifting the geyser reward token to FORTH.

It makes sense for those who are supporting the health of the ecosystem to continue to get a stake in its governance. Allocating FORTH for liquidity providers can help deepen community ownership and increase governance among the most active stakeholders.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that, for those who still value single-sided AMPL staking, this is now available in the recently rolled out >> Rotation Vault <<!

Proposed Configuration

The Forth DAO Treasury owns 3,715,664 FORTH directly and 147,928 FORTH in the Arrakis PALM Vault

I propose moving from 3 month cycles to 4 month cycles to minimize governance overhead. If we imagine devoting half of a hypothetical 2% inflation to geyser rewards for a year, then that would equate to 50K forth for this four month period. This could be broken down as follows:

Geyser	Platform	Pair	Chain	FORTH Amount
Beehive v5	Uniswap v2	ETH/AMPL	Ethereum	35,000 FORTH
Fly	Uniswap v3	SPOT/USDC	Ethereum	15,000 FORTH
Total				50,000 FORTH