What Olympus does
Olympus is a protocol-owned liquidity project best known for OHM, a token it once marketed as a decentralised reserve currency backed by a treasury of assets like DAI, ETH and its own LP positions. Rather than relying on external liquidity providers, Olympus used "bonding" — selling OHM at a discount in exchange for LP tokens or other assets, which the protocol then owned outright. That treasury nominally backed each OHM at a floor price, and stakers who locked OHM into the protocol earned a share of newly minted supply through rebases.
The (3,3) era and its unwind
Olympus became a 2021 DeFi phenomenon on the back of eye-popping advertised APYs, often in the thousands of percent, driven by continuous rebasing and the meme-driven "(3,3)" game theory that encouraged everyone to stake rather than sell. The trouble was structural: those yields were funded largely by new buyers and bond sales rather than external revenue, and OHM traded at a steep premium to its backing per token. When new capital inflows slowed in 2022, the premium collapsed, rebases couldn't outrun the price decline, and OHM fell from north of $1,000 to a small fraction of that, dragging the many "OHM fork" copycat protocols down with it.
What it looks like now
Post-collapse, Olympus rebuilt around a much smaller, more conservative treasury-backed model, positioning OHM closer to a treasury-backed asset than a promised-yield machine, alongside a stablecoin effort and various treasury-management and protocol-owned-liquidity tooling aimed at other DAOs. Staking yields are far lower and less central to the pitch than in the (3,3) days. Olympus is now a niche, much-reduced project rather than the DeFi bellwether it briefly was.
Risks worth knowing
OHM's history is the risk disclosure: a token whose price ran on reflexive, yield-funded demand rather than external cash flow, and which lost well over 99% of its peak value once that reflexivity reversed. Treasury composition, backing-per-token, and whether current yields are funded by real revenue rather than dilution are the numbers to check before assuming today's Olympus behaves differently from 2021's.