Audits Progressing

The Ampera Foundation (AF) has initiated a secondary audit of the Ampera protocol for redundancy. The smart contracts are being thoroughly reviewed to provide confidence in their security and functionality. Additionally, both manual and automated economic attacks have been simulated to ensure the protocol operates as expected. Upon completion, all audit results will be compiled and made publicly available.

In the meantime, follow along testnet developments in Discord, and potentially join the various stages of user testing. (Note, the current cohort of interface testing is full but more spaces should be opening shortly!) Ensuring the security and resilience of Ampera is the absolute priority, and the myriad of community support has been crucial to its development from the very beginning.

Legends for Legends

Tyler Spalding was invited to speak at the annual Legends for Legends (L4L) conference in Amsterdam. L4L is organized by Theta Capital, the largest digital asset fund in Europe, deploying over $500M over the past two years exclusively towards Web3 projects.

The content was heavily focused on mainstream adoption, and featured presentations by 20+ industry leaders like Tyrone Lobban (J.P. Morgan), Sriram Krishnan (a16z), and Dan Morehead (Pantera Capital). Tyler delivered a keynote presentation on the importance and historical context of collateral and money, what it means to DeFi, and how Ampera aims to bring it all together. Tyler also participated on a closing panel with Tarun Chitra (Gauntlet), Lasse Clausen (1kx), Haseeb Qureshi (Dragonfly), and Matt Walsh (Castle Island). It was a jam-packed day of content, available online soon with previous events.

The entirety of the L4L conference is free to attend (in-person and online) but voluntary donations are often provided in support of the Alternatives 4 Children charity.

NYC: ETH Global and Pragma

David Mendoza and Chris Art from The Ampera Foundation recently participated in the ETH Global hackathon in New York. The event brought together almost 1,000 hackers from 49 countries, with 33%(!) of them newcomers to Web3. There’s no better time to get involved with the decentralized revolution; check out the ETH Global: recap (includes video) and opportunities to join future community events. In the meantime, the AF will look forward to seeing you at an Ampera sponsored hackathon sooner than later!

Messari Mainnet

AF members also attended the Mainnet conference along with ecosystem partners. In particular, we recommend the discussion with Robert Leshner (CEO of Superstate) about digitizing real world assets: RWAs in DeFi: Why Boring Is Good – For Now. Another especially relevant panel highlights the impending growth of on-chain RWAs featuring executives from S&P Global, Apollo, and Blocktower.

New York Community Meetup

Some of the US northeast AMP community gathered in Madison Square Park on a warm September evening for burgers, shakes, and DeFi. Outside of the NYC area, attendees also visited from Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and even Nashville. These events provide a unique opportunity for candid conversations about Ampera and the greater crypto ecosystem, and AF members are excited to attend as often as possible. To potentially organize a community meetup anywhere in the world, DM bubby_io. The AF has often provided donations to help cover organizational costs, and the process is simple!

WEB3ATL

Ampera sponsored the WEB3ATL conference on the Georgia Tech campus hosted by the 404 DAO over the course of three full days. The 404 DAO team has been impressive in growing the Web3 ecosystem in Atlanta, featuring sponsors and speakers from not only crypto-natives like Coinbase, The Graph, and Chainlink, but also major corporates like FedEx, Porsche, and Money Gram. Tyler Spalding joined a panel on stablecoins, and emphasized the significance of their product-market fit.

Local community members Big Al and Jason Weyl pulled out all the stops with a new Ampera booth and conference swag. Inspired by the ATL, ChatGPT and Glass Meadow released a limited edition “Ampera Whitepaper” mixtape. Quantities were extremely limited, but if you want to hear the whimsical lyrics, DM Big Al to see if he might have any CDs left!

Social Media Highlights

Long-time community member Levi the Giant started a podcast with inaugural guest Big Al. Definitely worth a listen if you are interested in learning more about crypto community leadership. Mainstream adoption continues as new Spedn videos and contests have been gaining momentum. This is the way.

Collateral / Financial Services News

• Onyx, JP Morgan’s blockchain group, rolled out programmable payments that automate transactions based on pre-set rules, making the treasury management process faster and more efficient. These payments are made through JP Morgan’s permissioned blockchain, JPM Coin, with Siemens, FedEx, and Cargill trialing the new feature. 

• Citi piloted its new Citi Token Services which leverage blockchain and smart contract technology to solve friction points for its institutional client in the cash management and trade finance sectors. These digital letters of credit enable instant payments between buyers and sellers, reducing transaction times from days to minutes. Although currently limited to a permissioned/private blockchain, it demonstrates the interest and exploration of potential real world applications for blockchain technology.

• PayPal’s recently introduced ERC-20 stablecoin, PYUSD, can now be used with Venmo. This provides a new method for Paypal and Venmo users to pay each other or external wallets. It’s encouraging to see established companies like PayPal continue to gradually roll out additional utility rather than just using it for a press release.

• MUFJ and Binance Japan are working together on a new yen-pegged stablecoin to help with cross-border trade settlement and as an on-off ramp for other cryptocurrencies. The Japanese government has taken a much more crypto-friendly disposition lately, which has likely resulted in more local experimentation in the space.

• Coinbase continues to look abroad as it seeks to expand its offerings to the crypto community worldwide, securing a license from the Bermuda Monetary Authority allowing non-US clients to trade perpetual futures. While US citizens will be stuck watching from the sidelines, it is a positive development and will hopefully show other regulators that regulated crypto futures trading is a safe product.

Crypto Infrastructure

• An Ethereum Layer 2 that uses the Solana Virtual Machine, Eclipse, announced its mainnet launch. By using the SVM, Eclipse gains the benefits of parallel execution and local fee markets like on Solana while still ultimately settling on Ethereum. This is an interesting development in the crypto space. Will developers be more willing to build on the SVM? Will this ultimately help or hurt Solana? It’s unclear but worth keeping an eye on. 

• As teams around the world work to unlock new use cases for blockchain technology, Fhenix, a modular rollup, has made an interesting assertion. Fhenix claims that fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) may be a better solution than ZK encryption for any situation involving complex logic or on-chain confidentiality. The heart of problem, Fhenix claims, is that with ZK encryption, provers can see the underlying data and FHE solves this. With many resting their hopes for better user-experience on ZK encryption, it is a positive development to have other teams experimenting with alternative solutions that can help bring the next generation of dApps to the world.

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