Exchange Ampleforth Governance Token (FORTH)

FORTH is a governance token on Ampleforth, complementing AMPL which is a currency on the same blockchain. FORTH was released in April 2021, while AMPL has been in use since 2019.

The main idea behind Ampleforth is creating a cryptocurrency with an elastic supply, which is achieved by automatically expanding and shrinking the supply of AMPL, or rebasing following the price changes. This way, the price always hovers around $1. One caveat of this is that the number of tokens in every holder’s wallet changes constantly to keep the same value after rebasing. This limits some functionality that requires a fixed number of staked tokens from the users – namely, the voting process. FORTH was created as a token with a non-elastic supply to solve this issue.

FORTH is used by the Ampleforth’s community to vote on changes to the main protocol, directly or through delegates. The tokens were initially distributed between the early backers of the project and the active community participants – i.e. users who previously interacted with AMPL. FORTH’s launch came after Ampleforth’s ecosystem was established and AMPL proved to be a useful cryptocurrency as a step towards decentralization and a sign of trust in the community.