Eli Noto 8/27/20 

 
 
Bill Drummond’s Adaptive Commodities  
 
 
 
Never before has it been so easy to set up real life economic game theory experiments and see 
how they play out with real money. On July 30​th​ a developer, pseudonymously named Bill 
Drummond, created Anti-Ample ($XAMP) in response to the excitement around Ampleforth 
($AMPL) – an algorithmic stablecoin that attempts to be peg to the dollar via inflation and 
deflation by issuing and burning coins. Bill wanted to find a way to mess with what he felt was a 
terrible idea getting too much attention and do it in a way that captured the ethos of crypto. This 
as it turned out, was only the beginning of a series of projects that Bill Drummond describes as 
Adaptive Commodities in which the supply of tokens changes based on certain predefined 
conditions. 
 
$XAMP 
 
With XAMP, Bill set the mechanics so that every 24 hours the price is checked against the price 
24 hours before that. If the price today is less than the yesterday, 1% of the total supply burns. If 
the price today is higher than yesterday, no burn occurs and the rebase target is set to the new, 
higher price at that time. Here is a helpful diagram from one of the community members 
@Idiom: 

 
 
The theory is that the burn should help entice new money to enter XAMP during downward price 
moves because as the burns occur, each subsequent dollar that enters will be able to purchase a 
great percentage of the total supply than before the burn. This, in turn, should generate demand 
and help increase the price ideally more than the burn decreased the price.  
Eli Noto 8/27/20 

 
$XAMP Constituents 
 
This incentive structure created two differing factions.  
● Pro-Burn: This group wanted burns to occur as frequently as possible in order to 
accelerate the supply reduction despite it also reducing the dollar value of their holdings. 
● Anti-Burn: This group sought to avoid burns in order to protect their capital and tried to 
keep the price above the burn price or trade out of XAMP near the burn and then get back 
in post-burn to own a greater percentage of the supply and protect their capital. 
 
$TOB 
 
Two weeks after releasing XAMP, Bill dropped Tokens of Babel. This experiment worked in the 
opposite way of XAMP. Initially it was set up so that every 12 hours if the price was higher than 
12 hours before, 0.5% of the supply would burn. Bill also set up a liquidity pool on uniswap for 
the XAMP/TOB pair and specifically chose not to set up an ETH/TOB pair so that XAMP and 
TOB would be linked together.  
 
This created a situation in which people would trade the ratio between XAMP/TOB to try to 
increase their stack of both while avoiding burns which encouraged trade volume growth as well. 
Unsatisfied with the way the game was playing out, Bill consulted with the community on 
Telegram and modified the rules so that rather than every 12 hours, TOB could rebase every time 
the price was higher than the rebase target. If the target is not reached within 12 hours, a new 
target is set at the current price plus 10%.  
 
$TOB Constituents  
 
With TOB there were a few competing interests.  
● Holders: They wanted price to increase and suffered the burns to hopefully attract new 
money. 
● Traders: They wanted the price to increase but did not want to suffer burns. During a 
small price appreciation phase, they would jump in and out of TOB to protect their dollar 
value while increasing their TOB stack. However, by selling before the target is reached, 
they prevent the burns from occurring except during sustained price appreciation phases 
where external events drive new money to enter and make it detrimental to exit and 
re-enter as price continues to drive upwards despite the burns. 
 
$TOB Areas for Improvement 
 
At this stage, it seemed to occur to Bill Drumond that TOB was ultimately dependent on external 
events to drive price appreciation because there was no compensation for suffering the burns. 
With that in mind, he announced an upcoming token called $ASH that would be generated from 
staking TOB. The team at $ZZZ is collaborating with Bill to create a staking environment on 
their platform which is similar to uniswap but for staking.  
 
Eli Noto 8/27/20 

Interesting side note, as soon as it was known that Bill was collaborating with $ZZZ, their token 
exploded in value. The same thing happened with $TAU after they reached out to Bill on twitter 
to invite him to collaborate on their platform. 
 
What do we know about $ASH so far? 
 
Based on hints Bill dropped in the telegram channel, ASH will reward stakers in an interesting 
way. The earlier you stake, the higher your yield and if you unstake, that emission rate will never 
be available again. Additionally, it will be weighted by your percentage ownership of the tokens 
so that effectively, it encourages people to stake with whichever project has the lowest market 
capitalization at that time. The supply will be infinite but the emission rate will be very low and 
perpetually decreasing.  
 
This will act as a reward to incentivize holding tokens despite burns. Eventually other staking 
pools may be opened, allowing other behaviors to be incentivized in the ecosystem. There has 
been some talk of XAMP/TOB Liquidity Pool Tokens being used as stakes to incentivize 
additional liquidity for the pair.  
 
With everyone excited about $ASH, Bill took the community by surprise with the release of 
BOA. 
 
$BOA 
 
With each experiment, Bill clearly learns and adjusts the way he releases projects (there was a 
fairly major snafu with TOB’s release due to bots frontrunning the release) and builds incentive 
structures. With BOA, he attempted to fix some of the issues with TOB and make a 
self-immolating coin that rewards rather than punishes holders. 
 
BOA is setup so that if anyone sells or transfers any BOA, they are taxed 1% of the value of the 
tokens. Those taxes are pooled together in the BOA tax pool. To start, 50 tokens were placed into 
the circulating supply and 50 were placed in the tax pool for a total of 100 coins (divisible to 18 
decimals). Over time, as people sell or transfer their BOA, the circulating supply will naturally 
decrease and the tax pool will increase. As a reward to holders of BOA, if the tax pool is greater 
than the circulating supply, holders can burn their BOA (reducing total supply) and receive the 
same number of BOA plus a little extra from the tax pool until the ratio between the circulating 
supply and tax pool is equal again. Thus, the total supply will perpetually decrease, holders will 
be rewarded and price per token will be encouraged to increase. 
 
$BOA Constituents  
 
Contrary to the other two projects, with BOA the community is basically aligned in their 
incentives. People who sell help the project via generating tax revenue, people who buy help the 
project via increase in price, people who trade help the project via tax revenue. 
 
$BOA Areas of Improvement 
Eli Noto 8/27/20 

 
The main issues that are outstanding with BOA is the shallow liquidity pool plus 1% tax makes 
short duration scalp trades in any significant size unprofitable which reduces trade volume. Since 
trade volume to market cap is a common metric used to identify active projects, this may hurt 
BOA’s marketability. 
 
Key Takeaways 
 
These projects are fascinating in that they are a demonstrating a new way to quickly iterate 
different incentive structures to see how people react. In its current state, all of the above projects 
are dependent purely on hype, speculation and desire to participate in the next project as there is 
no actual utility beyond trading from one market to the other and getting access via the tokens to 
subsequent releases. This seems to suggest that if Bill ever stops creating new projects, 
eventually the projects will slowly bleed to death as there is nothing to actually drive new 
demand. 
 
What can we learn from this? 
 
By watching these different experiments play out, people could then adapt the incentive structure 
for use with a project with an actual use case. If the tokens actually serve a purpose and the BOA 
structure is used with it, the token would likely appreciate at a tremendous rate and maintain 
resilience in the face of broad market sell-offs.  
 
Additionally, if Bill Drummond’s team is able to tie this together with some sort of collaboration 
with another project or a unique actual project with a use case of their own, this entire ecosystem 
is likely to gain traction rapidly at that point. 
 
 
Resources: 
 
Telegram ​(the only place to get the latest news and generally where Bill Drummond releases 
new projects) - https://t.me/burn_the_state 
 
Anti-Ample 
● Official Website ​http://antiample.org/ 
● Burn Schedule Community Website ​https://www.xampburn.com/ 
● Uniswap - ​https://uniswap.info/token/0xf911a7ec46a2c6fa49193212fe4a2a9b95851c27 
 
Tokens of Babel 
● Official Website (not entirely up-to-date) - ​https://www.tokensofbabel.com/ 
● Burn Schedule and Burn Trigger Community-built site – ​https://tobburn.com/ 
● Uniswap​ - ​https://uniswap.info/token/0x7777770f8a6632ff043c8833310e245eba9209e6 
 
BOA 
● Official Website ​https://boa-token.webflow.io/ 
Eli Noto 8/27/20 

● Uniswap - ​https://uniswap.info/token/0xf9c36c7ad7fa0f0862589c919830268d1a2581a1