Ampera Testnet Goes Live, Audits Underway

Following internal testing, the Ampera Testnet officially opened to group of volunteers from the community. Having incorporated several rounds of user feedback, the protocol is now undergoing extensive contract audits. Once the audit feedback is integrated, Ampera will be ready for a guarded mainnet launch.

Ampera Around the World: Futurist Conference, WebX, Permissionless

WebX, Tokyo

During the sweltering Tokyo summer, the Ampera Foundation’s Tyler Spalding was invited to speak at Asia’s leading crypto conference, WebX. The panel, entitled Look Inside the Liquidity Machine, discussed the often misunderstood role of market makers and the challenges that they face in providing liquidity. Tyler shared his thoughts on how Ampera can help market makers reduce counterparty risk while making the market more efficient.

Futurist Conference, Toronto

In August, the Ampera Foundation sponsored and spoke at the Futurist Conference in Toronto on a panel entitled DeFi and The Future of Financial Services: Disrupting Traditional Finance and Creating New Opportunities. Tyler touched on the critical importance of regulatory clarity to unlock greater adoption, the importance of public infrastructure, his vision of the future for layer 2 networks, and made the case for payments as the killer crypto use case. As the largest crypto conference in Canada, Futurist also provided an opportunity for the Ampera Foundation to connect with the Canadian community community over pancakes and Ampera syrup, made fresh by Chef Tyler himself.

Permissionless, Austin

The Ampera Foundation’s developer advocate, Bubby, attended the DeFi-focused Permissionless conference in September. Despite the challenges DeFi faces in the U.S., builders and crypto enthusiasts converged to meet and discuss the latest industry trends. Layer-2 networks dominated discussions among attendees with much excitement around Optimism’s Superchains, including Coinbase’s BASE.

Ampera Foundation Quarterly Meetup

As a global team, the Ampera Foundation’s core contributors met up in July in Chicago for a quarterly in-person work session. These sessions are invaluable, not just for productivity, but for team morale and cohesion. The agenda focused on the additional features, marketing and governance initiatives. The team also was able to finally meet a part-time front-end developer who has been helping bring Ampera to fruition.

Grant Committee

In July, a vote was held to nominate and vote on the top candidates for the grant committee. After an initial nomination process and discussion via Discord, the final members were confirmed via a Snapshot vote shortly afterward. The resulting AMP Grant Committee is composed of nine people including mods, long time AMP advocates and one Ampera Foundation core team member.

Community Events

New York and Atlanta Community Meetups

It’s always a good time to get together with Ampera friends. Members of the Ampera Foundation will be attending the New York community meetup on September 19th at Madison Square Park while in town for ETH Global Pragma NYC and Messari Mainnet. In the first week of November, in conjunction with the WEB3ATL conference that the Ampera Foundation will be sponsoring, the community will be hosting the first Atlanta meetup. Additional details forthcoming via Twitter.

From the Community

Team Litecoin’s Spending Video

Finally, Ampera and Litecoin community member @Team_Litecoin really flexed his creative muscles in his latest video. Part spending video, part love story, it is definitely worth a minute of your time.

News

Regulators

• FASB, the organization responsible for establishing US corporate accounting and reporting standards, updated its policies to allow reporting of cryptocurrencies at fair value. This change helps reduce one of the major barriers to institutions holding crypto by fixing the “poor optics” created by the previous standards.

• Courts handed Greyscale and Ripple victories in their cases against SEC. While neither win immediately clears any hurdles for the industry, they are a step in the right direction and might help the industry receive more clarity over how to move forward in a compliant manner. As expected, the SEC is already appealing the Ripple case.

DeFi

• Vitalik et al. released a new privacy paper detailing a system for users to maintain privacy while proving that their funds are not part of any sanctioned funds in the same pool. This paper comes in response to the sanctions and government actions levied against Tornado Cash, a privacy protocol that is alleged to have been involved in money laundering, and its developers. Privacy pools, combined with zero-knowledge proofs, would solve some of the short falls of Tornado Cash while still allowing for privacy preserved transactions.

• Metamask announced Snaps, a new open-beta feature that allows independent developers to build new functionality into the Metamask wallet. For now, only audited and Metamask-vetted Snaps are allowed to ensure a safe rollout. Long term, the goal is to create a permissionless ecosystem.

• Until the snaps have been battle tested, it is probably safest to treat a snaps-enabled metamask the same as a hot wallet with minimal assets at risk, even if secured by a Ledger.

Payments

• Lightspark announced its Wallet SDK with support from Flexa to bring fast bitcoin payments to as many merchants as possible. Meanwhile, in Toronto, Flexa powered payments at the Blockchain Futurist Conference with the conference’s own $UNNY token.

• PayPal launched its stablecoin, PayPal USD (PYUSD), in partnership with Paxos. This shows that even established institutions like PayPal see the value of stablecoins and cryptocurrencies more broadly.

• While some governments continue to keep crypto at a distance, others are taking the opportunity to embrace crypto and encourage innovation. Indonesia’s Commodity Futures Trading Supervisory Agency recently released an updated list of 501 supported tokens, including Amp. Meanwhile, Hong Kong granted additional exchange licenses and expanded its trial of the digital yuan. These are encouraging steps in the right direction for crypto adoption globally.

Thanks for tuning in! Remember to look for more frequent updates of all things Ampera on Discord and Twitter.