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What Is Olympus?

Olympus (ticker OHM) is a decentralized finance protocol, run by OlympusDAO, that issues a token backed by a treasury of crypto assets the protocol owns and manages on-chain. Olympus is best known for pioneering the idea of protocol-owned liquidity, where the protocol itself owns the trading liquidity for its token instead of renting it from yield farmers. It is also one of DeFi's great cautionary tales: a project whose token rose to over $1,400 in 2021 on the back of viral game theory and enormous staking yields, then lost roughly 99% of its value, and has spent the years since rebuilding around more conservative, treasury-backed mechanics.

Olympus launched in March 2021, created by a pseudonymous founder known as Zeus along with an anonymous team. Its original pitch was a "decentralized reserve currency": each OHM would be backed by at least one DAI in the treasury, and the protocol would sell discounted OHM through "bonds" in exchange for stablecoins and liquidity-pool tokens. Those bond sales meant Olympus accumulated its own liquidity, the innovation now called protocol-owned liquidity, which dozens of other projects later copied or forked.

The protocol became a 2021 phenomenon thanks to staking and the (3,3) meme. Stakers received rebasing rewards, meaning their staked OHM balance automatically grew every several hours, with advertised APYs that at times exceeded 7,000%. The (3,3) notation came from a simplified game-theory table showing that if everyone staked and nobody sold, all participants would win; it became a viral badge in crypto usernames. In practice the yield was paid in newly minted OHM, so the supply inflated rapidly, and the model depended on a constant flow of new buyers. Critics called it Ponzi-like, and supporters and skeptics argued about it all through late 2021.

The unwinding was severe. OHM peaked around $1,415 in April 2021 and held a multibillion-dollar market capitalization into late 2021, but as crypto markets turned, the reflexive logic of (3,3) ran in reverse. A large holder's sale in January 2022 triggered a cascade of liquidations, and by March 2022 OHM traded near $32, down about 98% from its peak, before drifting lower still. The headline price decline overstates losses for long-term stakers, since rebasing multiplied staked balances by roughly 267 times before rebases ended, but late buyers who paid four-digit prices were devastated. The crash discredited the high-APY model, and OlympusDAO itself eventually wound staking rewards down to zero, with rebasing fully ended in 2023. The protocol also suffered a smaller setback in October 2022, when an attacker exploited a bug in a new bond contract to drain roughly $300,000 in OHM, though the funds were returned to the DAO the same day.

What survived was the treasury, and modern Olympus is built around it. The protocol's market operations system, Range Bound Stability (RBS), launched in late 2022; it programmatically buys OHM with treasury reserves when the price falls toward the low end of a calculated range and sells OHM when it rises toward the high end, making OHM a free-floating but volatility-dampened asset, sometimes described as a "flatcoin" rather than a stablecoin. In 2023 Olympus added Cooler Loans, which let holders borrow stablecoins against gOHM (governance OHM) at a fixed 0.5% interest rate, with no price-based liquidations and no expiry, because the loans are backed by the treasury value standing behind each token. Cooler V2, introduced in 2025, refined this into a perpetual borrowing facility against the protocol's own backing.

Today's tokenomics look very different from 2021. OHM has no fixed maximum supply, but emissions are governed by an automated Emissions Manager rather than staking rewards, and supply has at times contracted as the protocol bought back and burned tokens through RBS. Each OHM is backed by liquid treasury assets, roughly $11 per token against a treasury near $195 million as of mid-2026, though both figures change with markets. Staking still exists only as a way to hold gOHM for governance voting and Cooler Loans; it no longer pays rebasing yield. Governance runs through on-chain voting and the OlympusDAO forum.

Getting Started With Olympus

Getting started with Olympus today means holding OHM as a treasury-backed asset, participating in governance, or borrowing against it:

  1. Step 1: Set up an Ethereum wallet such as MetaMask or Rabby. OHM is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, with bridged versions on networks like Arbitrum and Base.
  2. Step 2: Acquire OHM, most easily on a decentralized exchange such as Uniswap, where the protocol's own liquidity is deepest.
  3. Step 3: If you want governance rights or access to Cooler Loans, wrap or stake your OHM into gOHM through the official Olympus app.
  4. Step 4: Explore the app's dashboard to see the treasury, the current backing per OHM, and Cooler Loans, and read the docs before assuming anything works the way it did in 2021.

How to Get an Olympus Wallet?

OHM is a standard ERC-20 token, so any reputable Ethereum wallet can hold it.

MetaMask

MetaMask is the most widely used Ethereum browser-extension and mobile wallet. It connects directly to the Olympus app for swapping into gOHM, voting, and using Cooler Loans.

Rabby

Rabby is a browser-extension wallet designed for DeFi users, with transaction previews and multi-chain support that are useful when interacting with Olympus contracts on Ethereum and other networks.

Hardware Wallets

A Ledger or Trezor device can be paired with MetaMask or Rabby to keep private keys offline, which is recommended for larger holdings.

Olympus Resources

How to Buy Olympus?

OHM trades mainly on decentralized exchanges, which fits a protocol whose defining feature is owning its own liquidity.

Decentralized Exchanges

The deepest OHM markets are on Uniswap on Ethereum, where the protocol maintains its own liquidity and where the large majority of OHM volume trades, mostly in pairs against stablecoins. Smaller pools exist on the other networks OHM is deployed to, but liquidity outside Ethereum is thin.

Centralized Exchanges

Centralized exchange support for OHM is limited compared to its 2021 heyday, and listings change over time. Check CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap for the current list of venues, and verify any exchange before sending funds.

Latest Olympus News

Olympus's recent development has centered on its lending and monetary-policy machinery rather than yield. Cooler V2 turned borrowing against gOHM into a perpetual, treasury-backed facility at a fixed 0.5% rate with no price-based liquidations, and the loan-to-value available to borrowers ratchets upward gradually as backing per token grows. Alongside Range Bound Stability, the protocol has added an Emissions Manager, Convertible Deposits, and a Yield Repurchase Facility that recycles treasury yield into OHM buybacks.

The project now describes OHM as programmable, policy-controlled money, a kind of automated central bank, and explicitly not a stablecoin. Given how dramatically Olympus has changed since 2021, and how badly the original model ended for late buyers, the official documentation, governance forum, and app dashboard are the best sources for the protocol's current mechanics and treasury figures.