Announcing the most fundamental upgrade to Flexa since the release of the Flexa payments network itself
At Flexa, our mission is to make payments more efficient and accessible for people all over the world. To accomplish this, we work to build technology that makes any asset spendable in any app at any store. And as a result, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to decentralize payments while making them even more efficient and secure.
Almost a year ago, we embarked on a project to improve the transparency and security of Flexacoin, the collateral at the heart of the Flexa network. We wanted to determine if it was possible to stake collateral to Flexa-enabled apps in an entirely verifiable way—on chain — and further, to build a form of collateral that could be staked to the Flexa network without ever leaving its original wallet address.
Today, we’re delighted to share the outcome of these efforts, in the form of a new digital collateral token that’s been in development for more than eight months and is even more extensible and powerful than what we ever envisioned back when we first set out to build it.
Developed in close partnership with ConsenSys, Amp (AMP) is a new token and staking platform that has been designed to support the instant, transparent, and verifiable collateralization of any type of value transfer — whether fast or slow, digital or physical, like-kind or multi-asset.
As the leading Ethereum-focused software engineering organization, ConsenSys helped push the development of Amp to the very forefront of the Ethereum development landscape. Truly, Amp is as cutting-edge and extensible as any ERC20-compliant token available today. The Amp token’s implementations of newer Ethereum technologies like partitions and operators, along with its collateral management interfaces and partition strategies, offer capabilities that have never before been deployed on Ethereum at this scale.
Amp’s universal extensibility and ERC20-compliant framework introduce new opportunities to improve the speed and security of asset transactions across a vast set of financial use cases — including payments, exchange, lending, remittance, and beyond. The Amp smart contracts have been thoroughly audited by leading security research firms ConsenSys Diligence and Trail of Bits. And because Amp is open source, its code is freely available to be integrated and extended by any third-party platform or application.
Because of the nature of the interfaces required to implement the new capabilities of Amp, it wouldn’t have been possible to simply upgrade the Flexacoin token using its existing smart contract or at its existing contract address. Therefore, Amp was necessarily developed as a new, separate token, which is now available to be migrated from Flexacoin at a rate of 1:1.
Although the functionality of Amp as collateral vastly exceeds that of its predecessor, the supply and economics of Amp remain identical to that of Flexacoin. Amp will retain Flexacoin’s fixed and fully diluted supply of 100 billion tokens, as well as the same long-term token distribution and supply curve that have previously been outlined.
As of today, Flexa has begun using Amp as the primary collateral for securing all transactions on its pure-digital payments network. Starting now and continuing for the next three weeks, Flexa Capacity will use a combination of Flexacoin and Amp to collateralize payments on the Flexa network, and Flexa will continue to distribute network rewards based on any wallet’s combined FXC and AMP balance.
On Wednesday, September 30, 2020, Flexa Capacity will stop supporting Flexacoin as collateral, and Flexa will destroy its ownership of the Flexacoin token contract. At that time, network rewards in Flexa Capacity will begin to be distributed on the basis of AMP balances alone. Any Flexacoin remaining in Flexa Capacity after September 30 will still be available to migrate to Amp; however, at that time, Flexacoin will stop being used by the Flexa network as collateral for payments, and Flexacoin balances will no longer earn any network rewards.
To migrate your existing Flexacoin holdings to Amp at a rate of 1 FXC = 1 AMP, connect your MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, or Wallet Connect–enabled digital asset wallet to the new Flexa Capacity dApp at app.flexa.network and follow the simple steps to migrate. (If you have your Flexacoin tokens stored on a Ledger or Trezor, you can also connect your wallet to Flexa Capacity via MetaMask by following the steps in this guide.)
Once you authorize Flexa Capacity to migrate your tokens to Amp, the dApp will execute a single transaction that sends your FXC to the Ethereum burn address (at 0x00···dead) and mints new AMP from the Ethereum zero address (see an example). Afterward, the Capacity dApp enables you to easily re-stake your Amp to Flexa Capacity in order to continue earning network rewards.
Please note that there is no deadline for migrating Flexacoin to Amp. Because the migration from Flexacoin is supported directly within the Amp token contract, it will always be possible to migrate from FXC to AMP for as long as the Ethereum blockchain is online.
The only important date related to the migration from Flexacoin to Amp is September 30, which is the date at which the Flexa network will stop using Flexacoin as collateral, and after which Flexa Capacity will no longer distribute network rewards based on Flexacoin balances.
We believe that Amp improves upon Flexacoin in every way, and opens up endless new possibilities for improving collateralization on the Flexa network that were never possible with Flexacoin. As a result, we have no plans to support Flexacoin in any Flexa products after September 30, 2020.
The bottom line: While there is no requirement to do so, you can ensure that you don’t miss out earning any Flexa network rewards by migrating your Flexacoin balance to Amp no later than September 30, 2020.
In order for Amp to effectively collateralize the Flexa network (or any other high-volume value transfer application), it must maintain a sufficient amount of exchange liquidity relative to other assets. As part of executing this fundamental upgrade to Flexa Capacity, the Flexa team has also been working to achieve Amp liquidity in partnership with the most regulated and aboveboard digital currency exchanges.
That’s why we’re delighted to share that our longstanding partners at Gemini will be the very first market to support the new Amp token for exchange. Founded in 2014 by twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss to empower the individual through crypto, Gemini is often regarded as the most secure and compliant digital asset exchange in the world. Gemini has worked closely with the New York State Department of Financial Services to obtain approval to offer trading and custody services for Amp, and will share more details regarding the availability of Amp on the Gemini exchange soon.
Since day one, the level of support shown by the community of Flexacoin holders for Flexa and its mission has been downright inspiring. After all, very few DeFi communities have ever approached half of their circulating token supply staked back into the network, much less the two thirds that we saw on Flexa Capacity just days before this migration to Amp.
At Flexa, we take our responsibility to the Flexa community very seriously, and want to make the process of migrating the FXC staked on Flexa Capacity as simple as possible. Earlier this morning, we distributed a small amount of ether to every Flexacoin holder who was staking Flexa Capacity at the time of Amp’s release on the Ethereum mainnet. As a small gesture of appreciation for the support of those contributing their assets directly to the Flexa network, this ether should serve to offset the gas costs of Flexacoin holders who would like to migrate their tokens to Amp as early as possible during this period of increased activity on the Ethereum network.
We’re incredibly grateful to the entire Flexa community for their support along this remarkable journey, and couldn’t be more excited about the new forms of decentralized finance that will be made possible on top of this new platform. Going forward, Flexa will remain intensely focused on making payments more efficient and accessible for buyers and sellers all over the world, and we will continue to devote the majority of our effort to the development and adoption of our Spend and Connect platforms.
At the same time, we recognize our great fortune in being able to build the future of payments on top of revolutionary software like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the various platforms that collectively represent DeFi. The time and effort that Flexa and ConsenSys have committed to the development of the Amp platform pales in comparison to the collective efforts of the broader digital currency development community, but is one of the main reasons that we’ve chosen to open source the Amp token and related smart contracts so that other developers might find value in its capabilities for their own projects.
We know that the future of Flexa is even brighter now that we’re building on Amp, and we can’t wait to see what unfolds on the Amp platform in the near future. To stay up-to-date with upcoming Amp-related developments, including new resources for developers and network participants, we hope you’ll join us in following Amp on Twitter, Medium, and Discord. And we thank you, as always, for your continued support!