Coin columns · Ethereum City (Capital)
Olympus (OHM): A Treasury-Backed Coin That Rode the (3,3) Craze
A floating ‘reserve currency’ that saw both boom and bust
Olympus DAO is a decentralized finance (DeFi) project launched on Ethereum in 2021, and OHM is the coin it said would be backed by assets in its treasury. It is a floating ‘reserve currency’, not a one-dollar stablecoin, and has lived through both a huge 2021 boom and a steep fall.
1. A reserve-currency experiment from anonymous builders
Olympus was started in 2021 by a team led by a founder using the pseudonym ‘Zeus’, and a DAO of token holders later took over. OHM is not pegged to the dollar or any national currency; the idea is that stablecoins and other assets in the protocol’s treasury act as reserves supporting its value.
Where many projects drew outside liquidity (funds that support trading) with big rewards, Olympus promoted ‘protocol-owned liquidity’. On the Crypto Nation map, OHM stands in Ethereum City (the capital), because Ethereum is where the coin was first issued.
2. Bonding, staking and (3,3)
In early Olympus, users could sell assets such as DAI or liquidity tokens to the protocol in exchange for OHM at a discount, delivered after a short vesting period, in a ‘bond’. The assets went into the treasury, and the protocol minted new OHM against them. Staking OHM paid out newly issued OHM like interest, with advertised yields in the thousands of percent.
The game-theory meme ‘(3,3)’, the idea that everyone gains most by staking rather than selling, became the community’s slogan, but the high yield depended on minting more OHM. Olympus has since reworked itself, adding ‘Range Bound Stability’, where the protocol trades OHM when its price leaves a set band, and ‘Cooler Loans’, which let holders borrow stablecoins against OHM at a low fixed rate.
3. Where it is used, and what happened
OHM trades on Ethereum’s decentralized exchanges and lending services, and can be turned into gOHM, which carries votes in Olympus’s governance. It has also run a yield repurchase facility, which uses part of the treasury’s earnings to buy OHM back.
OHM peaked at the end of 2021 and lost most of its value through 2022, after which Olympus focused on aligning treasury backing with market price. More recently a ‘Convertible Deposits’ design, in which stablecoin depositors gain the right to convert into OHM at a preset price, went to governance as a way to grow the treasury.
4. Things to know
OHM is not a stablecoin and its price swings widely. The early design relied on minting new coins to pay high yields, so when sentiment turned, the price fell with it, a circular risk known as reflexivity. Projects that copied the model faced similar difficulties.
The protocol is complex, voting turnout is low, and the stability of stablecoins held in the treasury, such as USDS, matters. Automatic operations that try to hold the price in a band may fail when markets move fast, and pseudonymous contributors make transparency worth a closer look.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.