Bancor

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:

• Earn interest with Gemini (http://gemini.com/earn)
• Earn SUSHI rewards on the AMP-ETH pool on Onsen (https://app.sushi.com/farm )

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:

https://amptoken.org/whitepaper.pdf

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