The Acronym Foundation (AF) was formally established in order to focus on the evolution of Web3 and digital payments. A fully independent organization, the AF is operated as a not-for-profit, with an initial donation of AMP tokens from Flexa Network, Inc.
“After years of hard work and diligence, Flexa is delighted at the launch of the [Acronym] Foundation, and very pleased to support its mission with a founding donation. Alongside all of the other projects integrating with [Acronym] and its protocols, we look forward to the Foundation’s stewardship in the years to come.” — Daniel McCabe, Co-Founder/CEO, Flexa
The AF will exclusively support the continued development of open-source software on public, decentralized blockchains. Accordingly, all AMP trademarks and intellectual property will be forever released to the public domain.
DeFi revolution
The AMP token contract was created in 2020 by Flexa and Consensys, introducing a novel partition structure for collateralizing transactions. Flexa also deployed the first open-source collateral manager contract, enabling permissionless staking pools. The goal was to create a straightforward and secure collateral token, extensible across the greater crypto ecosystem. At the time, decentralized finance (DeFi) was nascent, just prior to the infamous “DeFi summer,” when core LEGO bricks like vault contracts, liquidity provider (LP) tokens, and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance were all relatively new. For perspective, total value locked (TVL) on Ethereum was near 500M USD, less than 2.5% of its eventual peak. Over the course of 12 short months (which sometimes feels more like 12 years), unique DeFi users increased over 600% on Ethereum alone, enabling a Cambrian explosion of trading, money markets, insurance, derivatives, currency conversion, data availability, and identity.
AMP has continued to integrate with various DeFi applications, while powering the largest pure-digital payments network in the world. But crypto infrastructure has also radically transformed, with a multitude of base protocol layers, new consensus mechanisms, app-chains, and a universe of corresponding digital assets.
DeFi has the clear opportunity to dramatically impact the 28T USD global cost of trust. However, this ubiquitous, accelerated growth creates additional complexity and risk. The vital component of DeFi is the trustless and transparent verification of transactions; but as the technology becomes more complex, (e.g., rollups, zk-proofs, bridges) this verification can become non-trivial, and not entirely trustworthy. For AMP to increase its utility across a network significantly greater than ever anticipated, further infrastructure is required.
Collateral evolution
Currently, collateral manager contracts are required to fully utilize AMP. But as just mentioned, this further compounds the complexity of maintaining interoperability. With the growth of DeFi, it has become clear that a more extensible, integrated protocol will provide the most utility and requisite security. As the first initiative of the AF, a new collateral protocol will be designed with the following core features:
- The protocol will be an asset-agnostic, permissionless collateral contract on Ethereum
- The contract will be maintained and upgraded via on-chain governance
- Users can generate collateral signatures for use with any transaction, online or IRL
The current opportunity that DeFi presents cannot be understated. Even with the continuous ecosystem turmoil of 2022, transparent DeFi protocols such as Compound, Aave, and Maker have worked flawlessly. This technology should not be taken for granted. As a primary principle, the AF will contribute to DeFi in a meaningful way. And importantly, the evolution of collateral management will enable ambitious projects like Flexa and others to grow even faster, while unlocking complimentary integrations and immediate use-cases.
I will be serving the community as the initial President of the AF. To completely eliminate any source of conflict I have fully divested all of my Flexa Network, Inc equity.
With the international AMP community stronger than ever, we look forward to continued growth of the new protocol and AF, the entire crypto ecosystem, and fostering a financial system that is open and accessible to anyone.
Tyler Spalding, President, Ampera Foundation
For future updates, follow @acr_nym_fdn on Twitter.
*Note, this post has been slightly edited for clarity and to reflect subsequent Foundation and protocol name changes. No material changes have otherwise been made.
