- DeFi 2.0 OlympusDAO is a good place to start. Olympus is a decentralized reserve currency protocol that is based on the OHM token. Each OHM token is backed by a basket of assets stored in the Olympus treasury. This in turn creates a floor price for OHM that the actual price shouldn’t fall below. In order to participate in Olympus, the users can either stake their existing OHM tokens and get new OHM from the rebase rewards or trade different assets in exchange for discounted OHM.
The latter process, also called bonding, is one of the main concepts that allows the protocol to own its own liquidity.
The bonding process works in the following way.
The protocol sells its own tokens (OHM) at a discount to their market value in exchange for other assets. The discounted OHM is vested over a period of a few days, usually 5.
At the moment, the protocol supports bonding of 2 main asset types: the LP tokens that represent liquidity added to decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap or SushiSwap and single assets such as DAI, FRAX, wETH or LUSD.
When users exchange LP tokens for discounted OHM tokens, the LP tokens essentially become controlled by the protocol itself. As we know, the owner of LP tokens always has total control over the underlying liquidity. In the case of Olympus, the protocol owns LP tokens of the most common OHM pairs such as OHM-DAI, OHM-WETH, OHM-FRAX or OHM-LUSD which in turn means that the protocol owns its own liquidity.
At the time of writing this article, Olympus owned over 99.5% of its own liquidity across all markets and exchanges.
The bonding mechanism used by Olympus opened a lot of new possibilities not only for Olympus itself but also for other protocols via Olympus Pro.
Olympus Pro, recently launched by the Olympus team, allows other protocols to leverage the same bonding mechanism that made Olympus successful and offer it as a service.
Olympus Pro started attracting more and more protocols seeking a more sustainable way for bringing long term liquidity. Some of the protocols participating in Olympus Pro include Alchemix, Frax, StakeDAO and Pendle.
Olympus Pro also launched a dedicated marketplace for selling bonds. Investors will be able to use this marketplace to buy tokens of different protocols at a discount in exchange for other assets that can then become a part of the protocols’ treasuries.
Olympus is also about to release a V2 of their protocol that improves and optimises some of the existing features. One of them improves the bonding mechanism where bonded OHM will now be also staked in the protocol during the bonding time.
Olympus is clearly one of the most interesting new protocols and maybe it should be fully explained in a separate article.