Last month, Pendulum’s sister chain, Amplitude, won a parachain auction and secured a slot on the Kusama network. It’s a great honor to receive this vote of confidence from our community and now is the time to ship ⛴ In this article, we’ll take a moment to outline the network rollout and the road ahead.
Amplifying Innovation
In line with the spirit of Kusama as the “wild cousin” of Polkadot — a space to conduct experiments and let ideas grow into maturity — Amplitude is a network for developers, tinkerers, and those with groundbreaking ideas. When a novel technology has grown robust, the projects on Amplitude can be brought to the main chain, Pendulum. Pendulum is projected to compete for a Polkadot parachain slot in Q4.
Amplitude itself has three foci: battletesting core chain features, translating EVM contracts to Wasm and a dynamic testing ground for developers to try out their fiat dApps.
(Battle)test new core chain features
Building the next generation platform for smart fiat contracts demands rethinking a lot of wheels. This, in turn, demands a test environment where real users can give real feedback with real value. Amplitude is that network for Pendulum, where our team will test out new network dynamics, services and concepts. Amplitude is where users can play with experimental DeFi services before they are ready to be shipped on Pendulum.
Translate EVM contracts to Wasm
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) was a groundbreaking innovation at the time, but over time has shown to have a few limitations. WebAssembly (Wasm) is the next great leap in web technologies and already adopted by all major browsers, so we believe this technology will become the Web3 standard of the future. Amplitude will be giving grants and bounties to developers who translate existing EVM contracts and tools to Wasm, and deploy them on Amplitude. This will be a boost to the entire DotSama ecosystem.
Developers to test out their dApps
As a “canary” parachain, Amplitude allows developers to test out their new tools, services, or smart contracts in an environment that will be quite similar to the one on Pendulum. Through our developer grant programs, we will provide financial and knowledge support to those building and launching their projects on Amplitude.
With this three-fold approach we aim to make Amplitude a cornerstone in the Kusama ecosystem. Moreover, we intend to expand our community of creators and builders and create a solid product pipeline for Pendulum. Now, let’s look at how the network will be launched.
Into the Swing of Things
To ensure an orderly rollout, while keeping the development as lean as possible, Amplitude will launch step-by-step. By rolling out in an agile manner, we have the ability to perform mission-critical safety, stability and robustness tests in production. This minimizes any risks for users. Constant and iterative software rollouts tend to produce better systems than big and bulky launches.
Below we will outline the rollout plan from the assignment of the lease slot to the launch of the decentralized governance structures.
Amplitude Rollout
Chain launch
Lease slot opens on August 8 (on block #13910400, to be exact), and we expect the Amplitude chain to go live a few days after.
Democratization
Immediately after the chain launches, the next phase of the rollout will begin: the road to democratization. In this phase, which we estimate will take about 10 weeks, the objectives are to:
- Perform the last runtime upgrades with updated features.
- Test core network parameters & features such as infrastructure nodes, tools and services.
- Run several governance referenda to ensure the voting system works as expected and that the community is actively involved at this early stage. Amplitude is already listed on Polkassembly and ready for voting!
- Distribute the crowdloan $AMPE rewards and start the vesting. At this stage, $AMPE will not be transferable, but will be vesting on the crowdlenders account. The good news is that even unvested tokens can be used for both governance voting and collator staking. Token transfers will be enabled after the democracy launch, which we will outline below.
Democracy launch
After the completion of the democratization process, a governance referendum will enable token transfers, and the full decentralized governance structure. From this point, the Amplitude network will be live and we will continue to roll out new features, like the upcoming Spacewalk bridge for example.
Get Involved
Here at Pendulum we are very excited to launch Amplitude, and cannot wait for your feedback as we roll out the network with an agile, step-by-step approach. Amplitude will be a great environment for developers interested in fiat-focused DeFi. Are you developing a stable token or interested in building Web3 infrastructure that bridges the gap between TradFi and DeFi? If yes then apply for support from our Grant Program today. Amplitude is a community-first project, that’s why the Pendulum team chose to not allocate any tokens to the team or advisors in the AMPE tokenomics. Jump into our socials and join us in building out the forex on DeFi future!
About Amplitude
Pioneering the internet of fiat. Amplitude is the sister network of Pendulum on Kusama. It will act as a testing ground for Pendulum applications and network parameters and be powered by the AMPE token. Developed by SatoshiPay.
About Pendulum
Building the missing link between fiat and DeFi through a fiat-optimized smart contract blockchain based on Polkadot’s Substrate. Allowing traditional finance fiat services to integrate with DeFi applications such as specialized forex AMMs, lending protocols, or yield farming opportunities. Developed by SatoshiPay.
Keep your eyes on the Pendulum!
Pendulum Twitter | Amplitude Twitter | Telegram Announcements | Telegram Community | Discord | Reddit
Amplitude: The Rollout was originally published in Pendulum-Chain on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
