There’s been plenty for Amp holders to get excited about in the past two weeks, as Flexa partners with Incomm to facilitate crypto payments at their merchants’ points of sale, Amp can now be used as collateral on an interesting new lending protocol, and more governments declare that they will be experimenting with central bank digital currency payments. For new community members, check out previous issues on Substack and subscribe to stay up to date. For additional, more frequent updates, make sure to join the Amp community on Discord and Twitter.

InComm Payments, a leading global payments system, has partnered with Flexa to bring digital currency payments to its stable of retail partners at over 500,000 points of distribution worldwide. InComm connects consumers with a variety of different retailers around the globe, and will be sharing more details about merchants launching via this new integration in the coming months. 

Amp is now supported as collateral on Ruler, a lending protocol that provides fixed rates and no risk of liquidation for loans repaid on time. Users can take out stablecoin loans against their Amp, or lend their Amp to borrowers on the platform. In addition, 324,500 AMP and 100 xRULER (the Ruler protocol governance token) will be distributed over the month of July to Amp liquidity providers.

Last Friday, Bittrex Global added support for two new Amp pairs, ETH–AMP and USDT–AMP. Amp is also now listed on the Indonesian exchange Indodax, and natively supported by the Guarda and Krystal (formerly known as KyberSwap) wallets.

Earn rewards for staking your Amp on the Flexa network toward the apps below:

Stake Gemini

Stake SPEDN

Amp’s namesake is André-Marie Ampère, the French physicist and mathematician. Born in 1775, he lived through the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; leaving an enduring legacy, he has been described as “The Newton of electromagnetism,” and was the inventor of the electric telegraph as well as the solenoid. The SI unit of the ampere—the basic unit of electrical current—is named after him, and just as amperes measure the intensity of electricity, the value of Amp itself represents throughput for collateralized asset transfers.

China is testing its new central bank digital currency (“CBDC”) with its second giveaway of 12 million e-CNY (a.k.a. "digital yuan"). The giveaway comes with a “low carbon transportation” theme, and is part of an initiative encouraging citizens to use public transportation. Lottery winners will be able to spend their digital yuan with their preferred system of public transit through the e-CNY mobile app. 

Andrew Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, said in a June 30th speech—on his last day after 30 years on the job—that CBDCs stood to revolutionize modern banking. “[CBDCs] could result in something akin to narrow banking, with safe, payments-based activities segregated from banks’ riskier credit-provision activities. In other words, the traditional model of banking familiar for over 800 years could be disrupted,” he said. This comes as the United Kingdom continues to explore the possibility of launching what’s preemptively been dubbed the “Britcoin.”

New Zealand has joined the list of countries exploring Central Bank Digital Currency and stablecoins as they look forward to spending the coming months in public consultation on the topic. “The potential for a Central Bank Digital Currency to help address some of the downsides of reducing physical cash use and services is something we want to explore for New Zealand. A CBDC, similar to digital cash, might well be part of the solution,” said Andrew Hawkesby, assistant governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

Digest subscribers are by now familiar with the deep-dive Twitter threads authored by @floatingratio over the past few weeks, as we’ve already featured two of them. Check out the recent thread bundle from July 7, which encompasses everything @floatingratio has written on Amp and Flexa so far.

“Ampire Queen” and /r/amptoken community moderator @jshawshow was watching the Dodgers–Nationals game over the Fourth of July weekend and spotted a clever instance of “Amp” in the wild on the Jumbotron.

Thanks for taking the time to catch up on the latest Amp developments. And remember to look for more frequent updates on all things Amp by joining the official Discord and Twitter!