TL;DR

• Rebases are gone and growth now comes from a treasury‑first model.

• Cooler Loans turn gOHM into oracle‑free, fixed‑rate collateral.

• Range‑Bound Stability (RBS) can keep OHM trading near backing ±2.5 %.

• Balance sheet: ≈ $200 m reserves, 80 % liquid, earning 4–13 % without reaching for risk.

• Why care? Olympus has matured into a lab for flat‑coins, repo‑style credit and protocol‑controlled liquidity (POL).

What started as a rebase-powered, memefied, coordination experiment during DeFi summer 2021 has slowly matured into a structured and layered financial protocol. This article will explore how the new version of Olympus is focused on treasury management, lending infrastructure, and long-term sustainability.

This is the story of the resurrection.

Part 1 ended with the rebase engine imploding. Today staking converts OHM → gOHM, a non‑rebasing governance wrapper. New OHM now mints only when market price > on‑chain backing per token, shifting the flywheel from emissions‑first to treasury‑first operation.

Slimming down the emissions was only half of the pivot though, the other half is turning a dormant treasury into something with more utility. Olympus did this via Cooler Loans.

Cooler Loans allow users to borrow DAI against the backing of their gOHM.

How it works:

• You deposit gOHM

• Borrow DAI at fixed terms and rate, with no oracles and no liquidations.

• Miss the interest threshold and the protocol simply buys your OHM at backing, burns it, writes off the loan

• Parameters are set via Treasury Asset Proposals (TAPs)

🧮 TAP-28
Duration: 121 days (rollable)
Rate: 0.5% APY
LTV: 2892.92 DAI per gOHM ≈ 95 % LTV at launch, ~45 % today (because backing rose)

V2 (audited, shipping soon) will drop the fixed duration entirely. Instead, interest will accrue continuously and once unpaid interest crosses a governance-set threshold (eg 1 year of interest), the same buy-back mechanism will be triggered. It's like a perpetual, volatility agnostic repo desk.

This makes OHM more than a meme. It's now a collateral asset with actual lending infrastructure.

Once credit was unlocked, Olympus needed a mechanism to keep the credit in check. This is where the team brought out their monetary policy tool box.

Olympus has introduced Range-Bound Stability (RBS) which is a mechanism that when deployed, quotes buy walls below and sell walls above a moving-average of market price.

💡 RBS = Central Bank-style intervention
Similar to how the Swiss National Bank kept EUR/CHF in a tight range (2011–2015).
OlympusDAO uses its treasury to:

• Buy OHM when price is below the range

• Sell OHM when price is above the range

As shown in this Dune query 5156506, between February 2023 and December 2024, OHM closed inside RBS’s ±2.5 % cushion on ≈ 80 % of days and breached the outer ±10 % walls only 11 times. Most of the breaches occurred during the week that governance voted to pause the bot for Cooler Loans via OIP-147.

There is also the argument that, right now, volatility is necessary for network growth. Once certain size is reached, RBS can be switched back to stabilise the system.

With all this in mind, active RBS is only as strong as the balance sheets that it aims to defend, so we'll have a look at the treasury next.

As of 20th May 2025, Olympus holds ≈ $217m in its treasury with about 80% of it (≈ $175m) being liquid backing.

One of the core principles of Olympus is to not gamble and lose the treasury but that doesn't mean it has to be idle. Olympus' yield stack includes:

• Sky Savings Rate on ≈ $58m (4.5 % APY) via sUSDS

• With $30m of this being put to work via an Olympus Morpho Vault (13%)

There is also a proposal to introduce carry trading into the yield basket.

All yield flows into the Yield Repurchase Facility (YRF). The YRF auctions DAI for OHM each epoch, burns the OHM, and strips backing into the treasury. This nudges backing-per-token up while float drips down.

With the balance sheet secured, Olympus started looking outward and making bets on where OHM could find its new home.

Olympus committed $500k in OHM to Berachain’s seed round for 1 % of Berachain genesis supply and now runs native bridges, treasury and a Kodiak v3 OHM–HONEY CL pool (~$15 m TVL). OIP-176 lets Olympus bribe up to $50k OHM per Beradrome epoch to keep emissions pointed at the OHM–HONEY gauge aiming to make OHM the no‑IL base pair for the chain’s native assets. citeturn2file0

If the thesis plays out, Olympus earns POL plus upside on HONEY emissions. If not, it still controls liquidity and marketing on a fresh L1.

All of which sounds great on paper but the real question is, will the market care?

As with any financial product; there are risks:

• A sudden clamp-down on the USD stablecoins backing the treasury would freeze ~80 % of reserves and short-circuit every defence.

• A Kernel or policy exploit could mint or drain OHM faster than governance can patch.

• A handful of gOHM whales could tilt emissions rate or drip settings for short-term gain.

• If POL slips below daily trading volume, exits could smash price through backing before buy-backs are effective.

Regardless of how all this plays, Olympus has already set the stage to offer lessons in token economics.

Olympus has grown from a meme machine to a capital-efficient treasury with switchable monetary policy. It is slowly becoming the central bank that it was envisioned to be.

It's also a live fire lab for:

• Risk/R&D teams studying flat-coins with treasury backing

• Trading desks that require deep, low-volatility base pairs

• Protocol business dev teams looking to bootstrap credit without new tokens

Zooming back out, those lessons fold into the broader narrative of how Olympus is ageing out of its meme phase.

Olympus was never “just” a ponzi; it was a coordination hack strapped to a treasury. The hack is smaller, duller and far harder to kill.

Less ponzi, more protocol.

TL;DR

• Rebases are gone and growth now comes from a treasury‑first model.

• Cooler Loans turn gOHM into oracle‑free, fixed‑rate collateral.

• Range‑Bound Stability (RBS) can keep OHM trading near backing ±2.5 %.

• Balance sheet: ≈ $200 m reserves, 80 % liquid, earning 4–13 % without reaching for risk.

• Why care? Olympus has matured into a lab for flat‑coins, repo‑style credit and protocol‑controlled liquidity (POL).

What started as a rebase-powered, memefied, coordination experiment during DeFi summer 2021 has slowly matured into a structured and layered financial protocol. This article will explore how the new version of Olympus is focused on treasury management, lending infrastructure, and long-term sustainability.

This is the story of the resurrection.

Part 1 ended with the rebase engine imploding. Today staking converts OHM → gOHM, a non‑rebasing governance wrapper. New OHM now mints only when market price > on‑chain backing per token, shifting the flywheel from emissions‑first to treasury‑first operation.

Slimming down the emissions was only half of the pivot though, the other half is turning a dormant treasury into something with more utility. Olympus did this via Cooler Loans.

Cooler Loans allow users to borrow DAI against the backing of their gOHM.

How it works:

• You deposit gOHM

• Borrow DAI at fixed terms and rate, with no oracles and no liquidations.

• Miss the interest threshold and the protocol simply buys your OHM at backing, burns it, writes off the loan

• Parameters are set via Treasury Asset Proposals (TAPs)

🧮 TAP-28
Duration: 121 days (rollable)
Rate: 0.5% APY
LTV: 2892.92 DAI per gOHM ≈ 95 % LTV at launch, ~45 % today (because backing rose)

V2 (audited, shipping soon) will drop the fixed duration entirely. Instead, interest will accrue continuously and once unpaid interest crosses a governance-set threshold (eg 1 year of interest), the same buy-back mechanism will be triggered. It's like a perpetual, volatility agnostic repo desk.

This makes OHM more than a meme. It's now a collateral asset with actual lending infrastructure.

Once credit was unlocked, Olympus needed a mechanism to keep the credit in check. This is where the team brought out their monetary policy tool box.

Olympus has introduced Range-Bound Stability (RBS) which is a mechanism that when deployed, quotes buy walls below and sell walls above a moving-average of market price.

💡 RBS = Central Bank-style intervention
Similar to how the Swiss National Bank kept EUR/CHF in a tight range (2011–2015).
OlympusDAO uses its treasury to:

• Buy OHM when price is below the range

• Sell OHM when price is above the range

As shown in this Dune query 5156506, between February 2023 and December 2024, OHM closed inside RBS’s ±2.5 % cushion on ≈ 80 % of days and breached the outer ±10 % walls only 11 times. Most of the breaches occurred during the week that governance voted to pause the bot for Cooler Loans via OIP-147.

There is also the argument that, right now, volatility is necessary for network growth. Once certain size is reached, RBS can be switched back to stabilise the system.

With all this in mind, active RBS is only as strong as the balance sheets that it aims to defend, so we'll have a look at the treasury next.

As of 20th May 2025, Olympus holds ≈ $217m in its treasury with about 80% of it (≈ $175m) being liquid backing.

One of the core principles of Olympus is to not gamble and lose the treasury but that doesn't mean it has to be idle. Olympus' yield stack includes:

• Sky Savings Rate on ≈ $58m (4.5 % APY) via sUSDS

• With $30m of this being put to work via an Olympus Morpho Vault (13%)

There is also a proposal to introduce carry trading into the yield basket.

All yield flows into the Yield Repurchase Facility (YRF). The YRF auctions DAI for OHM each epoch, burns the OHM, and strips backing into the treasury. This nudges backing-per-token up while float drips down.

With the balance sheet secured, Olympus started looking outward and making bets on where OHM could find its new home.

Olympus committed $500k in OHM to Berachain’s seed round for 1 % of Berachain genesis supply and now runs native bridges, treasury and a Kodiak v3 OHM–HONEY CL pool (~$15 m TVL). OIP-176 lets Olympus bribe up to $50k OHM per Beradrome epoch to keep emissions pointed at the OHM–HONEY gauge aiming to make OHM the no‑IL base pair for the chain’s native assets. citeturn2file0

If the thesis plays out, Olympus earns POL plus upside on HONEY emissions. If not, it still controls liquidity and marketing on a fresh L1.

All of which sounds great on paper but the real question is, will the market care?

As with any financial product; there are risks:

• A sudden clamp-down on the USD stablecoins backing the treasury would freeze ~80 % of reserves and short-circuit every defence.

• A Kernel or policy exploit could mint or drain OHM faster than governance can patch.

• A handful of gOHM whales could tilt emissions rate or drip settings for short-term gain.

• If POL slips below daily trading volume, exits could smash price through backing before buy-backs are effective.

Regardless of how all this plays, Olympus has already set the stage to offer lessons in token economics.

Olympus has grown from a meme machine to a capital-efficient treasury with switchable monetary policy. It is slowly becoming the central bank that it was envisioned to be.

It's also a live fire lab for:

• Risk/R&D teams studying flat-coins with treasury backing

• Trading desks that require deep, low-volatility base pairs

• Protocol business dev teams looking to bootstrap credit without new tokens

Zooming back out, those lessons fold into the broader narrative of how Olympus is ageing out of its meme phase.

Olympus was never “just” a ponzi; it was a coordination hack strapped to a treasury. The hack is smaller, duller and far harder to kill.

Less ponzi, more protocol.