Olympus is run as a DAO, meaning its governed by its community in a fully decentralized manner through smart contracts. The protocol was founded by a group of anonymous accounts going by the names of “Zeus,” “Apollo,” “Unbanksy,” and “Wartul.”

According to GitHub, the main code contributors have been “Zeus” and Jeff Extor. Zeus is rumored to be a teenager, captivating the community with his charismatic personality. Olympus did have a couple of private backers before the initial launch, such as Zee Prime Capital, Nascent, D64 Ventures, Maven11 Capital, and a few unnamed individuals.

Olympus has been called one of the most interesting economic experiments in the DeFi space for several reasons. Olympus owns a treasury that mints and sells new OHM when it is trading above its price floor of 1 DAI and buys back and burns OHM when it is trading below that. OHM is issued by a process called bonding. Users sell an asset like FRAX, DAI, or wETH to the treasury and receive discounted OHM in return. They can also choose to provide FRAX-OHM or DAI-OHM as liquidity to the SushiSwap liquidity pool and receive discounted OHM. The bond is redeemed after a five-day vesting period.

Users can also choose to stake OHM, which reduces the supply of OHM on the open market and creates value for the protocol. Staking rewards are extremely high on Olympus and note north of 7,000% APY at the time of writing, down from over 100,000% at the beginning of the protocol. Moreover, staking rewards auto-compound every eight hours. The goal of these high rewards is to reward users for accumulating more OHM instead of hoping for an appreciation of OHM in USD terms. The protocol acknowledges that the price of OHM could, and potentially should, come down in dollar terms in the long run. However, the goal of this aggressive accumulation strategy is to expand the protocol’s market capitalization and grow the treasury.

Although Olympus did initially not have any use case beyond growing its treasury, it recently announced the launch of Olympus Pro. With Olympus Pro, the DAO will provide its bonds as a service to selected partner protocols, allowing them to grow their own treasury instead of relying on “mercenary capital” in the form of liquidity pools.

Lastly, Olympus is well-known for its strong marketing and meme game, allowing it to build and grow one of the most vibrant communities in the space. It has introduced the “3,3” meme, a simplified version of communicating that staking capital with the protocol is optimal for both parties involved. This modification of the “hodl” meme used by bitcoiners has become one of the most widespread additions to Twitter handles alongside .eth addresses.

Since its intention is to be a free-floating currency, the total supply of OHM is uncapped. Currently, over 1.7 billion OHM are staked with the network. Prior to the “Initial Discord Launch” that allowed non-US users that were early enough a part of the Olympus Discord channel to participate in a private sale, the team vested pOHM, a derivative of the main OHM token. It allows the team to mint OHM for every pOHM, which subsequently gets burned. Vesting is as follows:

Team: 330m pOHM and 7.8% supply

Investors: 70m pOHM and 3% supply

Advisors: 50m pOHM and 1% supply

pOHM holders finish vesting anywhere between two and five billion OHM, meaning it is in their interest to grow the protocol.

OHM is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. The network is governed as DAO and constantly features new OIPs (Olympus Improvement Proposals).

ERC-20 is a token standard most new tokens follow when publishing on the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is one of the most popular blockchains for DAOs and is secured by a proof-of-work consensus mechanism that requires miners to mine new Ether. A set of decentralized nodes validates transactions and secures the Ethereum blockchain.

Check out Ampleforth (AMPL) — an algorithmic stablecoin.

Check out TerraUSD (UST) — an algorithmic stablecoin on the Terra blockchain.

Learn how decentralized finance works in our DeFi 101 guide.

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