The Agora Dispatch — Olympus Community Weekly Newsletter
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Wednesday 21 July 2021
Welcome to the Agora Dispatch — an Olympus community run newsletter — made by Ohmies, for Ohmies!
Summary
- Editorial — We are one month old today!
- FRAX & FUSE Proposals — have your say
- Agora Pod to drop this Friday
- Aave 1 DAI million deposit goes live
- Ohmies cold to CEX listing
- Zeus — New asset on the horizon?
- New Olympus merchandise drops
- Remember Ohmies — Olympus is on Ethereum
- Simple staking calculator released (credit @Brian (3,3))
- Twitter thread — explain it like I’m an ape (credit @Asfi (3,3), @Glue)
- Odyssey DAO launch — Our thoughts from the first community call
- Ohmie of the week: @Memetics
- Numbers at a glance — RFV per OHM breaks the $20 mark
- Ohmie profile: @Dropkickdarren
- Meme of the Week — We Are (3,3)!
- Opportunities to contribute — join us
- Agora’s Learning ancient-Greek mythology series: Cadmus
Editorial — We are one month old today!
Five weeks ago, with a single message in the discord general chat, Agora was born
On our fifth issue we just want to say thanks to all the Ohmies who read every week and recognize our contributors who have made this dream a reality.
Agora is: @Kschan, @RCP3, @Dropkickdarren, @0xRusowsky, @Glue, @Dudemyguy, @NicoOfAllTrades, @Defiplato, @GHOST08 and @Mark11.
We are always looking to onboard more contributors — come stop by our channel in the DAO discord server and introduce yourself.
FRAX & Fuse Proposals — have your say
Deposit some of our FRAX
A familiar face made a proposal last week to trial a deposit of 333,333 excess treasury FRAX to the Convex platform — about 6% of the 5.5 million total treasury FRAX. This would allow Olympus to earn trading fees, CVX and CRV tokens on that deposit. After several days of discussions on the forum — the proposal has now proceeded to a snapshot vote here. Consider the risk and any benefits, speak up on the forum and when you are ready — please vote.
Change up our FUSE pool
As Ohmies would be aware Olympus currently runs its own borrowing and lending Fuse pool on the Rari Capital platform (a.k.a. Olympus pool party). This means we are responsible for, among other things, the collateral ratio and the addition and removal of assets to that pool.
One of our partnership coordinators has suggested we could add some more assets to the pool which you can read about and discuss here.
The goodly folk over at the FEI protocol have signaled their intent to mint $1.333M FEI to deposit into the pool if FEI is added. This would provide FEI some needed revenue and hopefully a much cheaper borrowing rate for Ohmies (who are currently paying ~23% APY on USDC).
@Glue, when asked about the proposal, commented that:
“As Olympus explores new assets, it needs new tools to evaluate communities, utility and more. The Fuse Pool Party can serve as a novel mechanism to see how strong communities truly are.”
We’ll keep you up to date as this progresses.
Agora Pod to drop this Friday — keep an eye.. uh.. ear out
We saw some Agora praise from the community on discord last week (thanks Adam):
That’s when we knew it was time to give the people of Greece more Agora.
We soft launched a trial of the Agora podcast last week (we literally just read the newsletter aloud) — after some feedback we have settled on a better format that we think you’ll really like. Keep your ear to the ground because it’ll drop this Friday with some very special guest appearances!
Also special thanks to Ohmie @Ananth who helped us catch a pretty crucial typo after we went to print last week.
Ohmies are cold on CEX listings
When Ohmies were asked in a recent temperature check about their thoughts on a CEX listing the results came back quite cold — 79% of Ohmies saying it wasn’t something worth pursuing at this time.
There were 67 comments on the post (good engagement Ohmies) with most concerned about the damage to culture, potential manipulation and loss of the tasty trading fees the protocol receives from owning almost all the liquidity.
Shout out to @Bento and @Graz who played the devil’s advocates taking positions that:
- as long as they weren’t doing custodial bonding what is the downside; and,
- we should explore more what they could offer before dismissing the idea totally.
Maybe non-custodial wallets Dharma, Rainbow or Argent could be a middle road that is just right!
Aave 1 million DAI deposit goes live
In the third edition of our newsletter, we covered that the Olympus community had passed a proposal to deposit 1 million DAI in the treasury to AAVE to earn passive rewards. Since then, the DAO had been working on setting up the necessary contracts to make this happen. On 15th July, 11 days after the proposal had passed, the integration was complete and the DAO deposited 1 million DAI in the treasury to AAVE as laid out in the proposal.
Our Dune dashboard Augurs are also working hard to implement this fresh deposit within our RFV graphs.
You can verify the transaction on Etherscan here.
Zeus — new asset on the horizon?
We saw a curious tweet from @Zeus earlier this week which made us think big things are brewing atop the mountain. (We imagine he was looking down through misty clouds, light reflecting off a sharp white toga as he typed it)
Zeus points out that Olympus, through its bonding mechanism, is a demand machine taking large sums of the bonded asset and storing it in our treasury (FRAX and DAI so far).
So @Zeus speculates — what would happen to demand if we took on something other than a stablecoin (maybe.. ETH)?
New Olympus merchandise drops
Did you know there is a merchandise shop run by the Olympus community and benefiting the treasury?
We spotted the slick new Sushi collab swag — but it also sports shirts, hoodies and caps — sure to keep you at the height of fashion from Sparta to Rhodes.
Remember Ohmies, Olympus is on Ethereum
We saw that Olympus hosting provider, FleekHQ, had some technical difficulties this week which made it difficult to access the Olympus website in some regions for a short time.
Remember though Ohmies, your OHM is on the censorship-resistant Ethereum blockchain and not on a website. The Olympus website is just a front-end to let you engage with the contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. All Olympus contracts can be accessed via multiple front-ends including Etherscan.io.
Simple staking calculator released — (credit Brian (3,3))
Our newly minted Sherpa @Brian (3,3) (congrats) has created an item you’ll want close on your travels around the Peloponnese — a simple staking calculator for you to speculate about your future OHM!
Just:
- Make a copy of the spreadsheet so you can edit it -
- Pop in your staked OHM, the current price of OHM and the rebase rate (all available on the dashboard here)
- And kablammo you’ll be able to muse on your future holdings!
Fair warning — it is addictive!
Twitter thread — Explain it like I’m an ape (credit @Glue and @Asfi)
@Asfi and @Glue came together in a twitter thread this week to simplify the important elements of Olympus so even the simplest Greek could understand. You can follow along with the Dune Dashboard (note the language is simple ape dialect).
Metric
Market cap — OHM price mostly pointless — look at market cap & your percent of market cap
Current Index — If you were cool and you were here from the beginning, this is how many OHM per 1 OHM you would have
Circulating Supply / Total Supply — All the OHM in the world. If it’s not circulating, it’s in the DAO and bond contracts (OHM yet to be released to the bonders)
% OHM Staked — (3,3) but in percentage terms
Risk Free Value of Treasury Assets — How much (in stablecoins) the protocol made from selling bonds
Market Value of Treasury Assets — Treasury has lots of assets — this is how much they’re worth
Market Value of Protocol Owned Liquidity OHM-FRAX and OHM-DAI — The market price of LP tokens owned by the treasury
DAO Market Value — DAO holds OHM which is used to compensate contributors in the DAO.
TVL = Total Value Locked — Higher TVL means higher user confidence in the protocol
RFV of LP Bonded — The US dollar-based revenue from LP bond sales that assumes each OHM = $1.
DAI/FRAX Bonded — The revenue from reserve bond sales measured in DAI or FRAX.
Discounts (at the time of bonding) — How much discount wen bond
Bond Prices (time of bonding) — Price wen bond
Runway Available — Wen will the APY party end if Olympus revenues stop
APY Over Time — Apes like high APY but protocol has to pay many OHM. Protocol likes lower APY, but apes run away. We look for middle ground. Apes stronk together AND apes live long lives.
Treasury Market Value / Market Cap — Bigger TMV/MC ratio means more apes want to spend money on OHM and OHM is underpriced
Treasury Risk Free Value / Market Value — Big TRFV/TMV ratio means more treasury to make more OHM
Growth of Circulating Supply compared to initial Circulating Supply — Numbers go up only because OHM is constantly minted
Holders over time — The higher the number, the more people believe in OHM aka all the frens we made along the way
RFV / OHM — Actual real money that is backing every OHM
Liquidity to Market Cap Ratio — The capability of the liquidity pool to facilitate a large trade
The full table is available here.
Odyssey DAO Launch — Our thoughts from the first community call
NFT project Odyssey launched their DAO earlier this week and we stopped by the first community call yesterday to see what they are up to.
About 20 Ohmies tuned in and the mood was buzzing with excitement. After an introduction from @Girth and @Oxjay — behavioral scientist and philosopher @Church (head of marketing from Alchemist) took the reins.
With an engaging softly spoken voice the meeting proceeded like easy listening radio as @Church took us through his experience walking through @Yves demo of the Odyssey museum. He sketched the memetic pathways he saw as the culture of Olympus would physically be represented in the metaverse as living art — recording who we are, how we are and where we are going.
You can demo the Odyssey 3D Museum here (NFT’s are placeholders) https://oncyber.io/odysseydao
@Yves gave us an update on the G3N3SIS art which is currently being crafted by artist Dimitri Daniloff. He has received permission from an archaeologist in his locality to scan four one-of-a-kind Greek artifacts, each dating 2,000+ years old. These will be turned into 3D Photogrammetric art for the G3N3SIS series NFT distribution event.
Work in progress G3N3SIS art.
They let us know that the following NFTs tiers:
Genesis (ultra rare): 3
Rare: 33
Uncommon: 333
Common: 3333
Total: 3702 (3 + 33 + 333 + 3333)
There will be a number of ways for Ohmies to acquire some of these NFT’s.
We also discussed the utility of the Odyssey NFT’s. The plan is to provide each tier a rebase of sOHM every 33 epochs. In an awesome game of chicken anyone can burn their NFT for that tier’s accumulated sOHM pool at any time — but once you have burned you lose your NFT and are out of the game. This creates an exquisite mechanism to provide layers of value to the NFT’s.
Just two months old — the cultural ambition of this project is staggering.
Odyssey are looking for Ohmies to help build out the project so please join the DAO discord here. Also they also have a Q and A on utility with @Girth and @JeffX this Thursday 22 July at 1:14 EDT in their discord and all are welcome.
Ohmie of the Week: @Memetics
Thanks to @Glue (🌲,🌲) for being such a great Ohmie of the week! This week’s Ohmie of the week is @Memetics. @Memetics wears many hats in the community (just look at all the discord roles) and is always there with a kind word of encouragement to take the leap and put yourself out there. One of the big brains behind the Odyssey project, he seems to have taken his own advice! When we found out he was selected as Ohmie of the week we couldn’t think of anyone more fitting. Well deserved!
Numbers at a glance — RFV per OHM breaks the $20 mark
As we do each week, we returned to Delphi to gather up the latest breakdown of the treasury numbers and protocol statistics (you can access it yourself here if you desire). Please read on for this week’s numbers at a glance:
- Number of Ohmies +1153:
- July 13th: 6043
- July 20th: 7196
Last week we reported that the number of Ohmies surpassed 6000 and guess what, Olympus just onboarded more than 1000 new Ohmies this week alone!
2. The RFV per OHM just broke the $20 mark on 16 July! For context, the protocol started out with the premise of backing each OHM with 1 DAI. However, the revenue from bond sales has contributed tremendously to the growth of the treasury, and now there is more than $20 in treasury assets backing every OHM in circulation.
3. Last month, Ohmies voted for the protocol to reduce reward rate in favor of sustainable growth. By reducing the number of OHM emitted per epoch, the protocol is able to distribute these rewards for a longer period (we call this runway). Since then, the protocol has seen a steady increase of runway. As of the 20th of July, the protocol has a runway of 229 days at the targeted APY of 20,000% (currently ~15800%).
4. Bond sales (reserve bonds) statistics:
- DAI bonds: 1,833,071 DAI has been bonded in a week
- Week-over-week growth of +28.17%
- FRAX bonds: 1,175,362 FRAX has been bonded in a week
- Week-over-week growth of -14.06%
5. Bond sales (liquidity bonds) statistics:
- OHM-DAI LP bonds: 199,303 of RFV in a week
- Week-over-week growth of +114.59%!
- OHM-FRAX LP bonds: 115,153 of RFV in a week
- Week-over-week growth of +1.31%
For liquidity bonds, only their RFV (risk-free value) rather than the market value is counted. RFV represents the real value of the assets that counts towards the backing of each OHM.
6. Olympus Policy dashboard has been updated to include BCV targets for different bonds:
BCV targets allow users to see the desired bond capacity targeted by the protocol. A higher BCV value indicates a lower bond capacity, which means less bonds will be sold.
7. An experimental dashboard that analyzes the user behavior of Olympus has been released.
Here are some interesting facts about Olympus’ users:
- 97.74 % of users who interacted with Olympus for the first time did so via staking.
- More than half of the users also did a follow-up stake, and with a larger staking size. This is inferred from the median staked amount of “First Staking Stats” and “Following Staking Stats”.
Note: This dashboard is relatively new and may be updated from time to time to include other metrics.
8. Macro numbers from around the cryptoverse:
9. Liquidity Providing Fee Generation
Via: Croco.Finance (0x31f8cc382c9898b273eff4e0b7626a6987c846e8)
Even when Ohmies decide to be (-3, -3) the protocol is always winning. Being the largest liquidity provider in OHM-DAI and OHM-FRAX pools, Olympus captures most of the trading fees whenever someone sells or buys OHM. It has now generated $666,587 in revenue from trading fees across OHM-DAI and OHM-FRAX pairs. That includes over $180,000 in fees generated over the past week! It is worth noting that these LP fees are collected in both OHM and the stable asset (either DAI or FRAX) at 0.3% per trade (on Sushiswap and Uniswap, respectively).
Upshot: On Tuesday, 20th July between the hours of 2:00–3:00 am UTC the protocol earned almost 9k in trading fees alone!
Ohmie profile — @Dropkickdarren
We met @Dropkickdarren on the beaches of marathon where he had just gone for a light run from Athens — sprightly and youthful he carried himself with an easy confidence and playful demeanor.
Can you give us a little background of your life before crypto?
Before I got into crypto I played professional football (soccer for all the Americans). I dropped out of school when I was 15 and played for 6 years in Japan, Portugal and Germany respectively. I loved every minute of the journey, from immersing myself in new cultures and languages, seeing parts of the world I could only dream of a few years ago as well as making lifelong friends along the way! I came to quit as I was always interested in so much beyond football and couldn’t divert my time to other things I loved, i.e. crypto.
How did you get into crypto?
I had bought some Ethereum in the depths of the bear market but other than that I hadn’t dived into the space. What kicked it off for me was all the food tokens, Defi summer was crazy. I personally didn’t invest in much but just trying to keep up with the mayhem was a thrill and a half, I was hooked. It really hit me with what the underlying goals of some of these protocols were — open finance to all. It really resonated with a lot of the values I try and hold myself to. This idea of permissionless access to financial tools and applications really drew me into the space.
When and how did you join Olympus?
As someone who’s trying to juggle university, I came across Olympus in early March and vaguely understood the concepts. With the market euphoria elsewhere I naively was focused on fleeting opportunities and HFT. In Mid-May I finally sat down to grapple with the concepts and I’ve been involved within the community ever since.
What are you excited about for Olympus?
A decentralized reserve currency, denominated in crypto native value, is an ambitious goal. I’m excited for Olympus as it has created an incentive structure that effectively allows the community to own the protocol + the currency it issues. This is something I’ve never seen before in supposed ‘community first’ projects. The community are A1 as well and I’ve never seen such an amalgamation of insights and shitposts all within the same channel — shoutout the OT crew! Olympus is pushing boundaries all the time.
What else are you into/excited about in the crypto space?
I’m excited for the gaming and metaverse space to mature. As long as wearables keep up with the speed of crypto the world is going to get pretty meta, pretty soon.
Meme of the Week — We are (3,3)! (credit @Cartesius)
We picked out a classic meme of the week from meme-smith @Cartesius — which was forged in the very early days of Olympus. We think it captures the commitment of Ohmies to (3,3) as serious as the Spartans take war.
Opportunities to contribute — join us
To get involved with what is happening atop Mount Olympus, join the DAO Discord.
Once you are in, head to the #start-here channel and read the instruction carefully so that you can get assigned a role.
Have any questions? Just ask in the #general channel and a helpful Ohmie will appear to guide you along your path.
Keep it (3,3), till next week Ohmies — with love from the Agora Dispatch team.
Agora’s Learning ancient-Greek mythology series: Cadmus, founder of Thebes
Cadmus is an imperative character in Greek Mythology as he is credited with founding (and ruling) Thebes, a powerful city in ancient Greece about 55 miles from Athens. Cadmus is also credited with introducing writing and the alphabet to the Greeks.
The story of Cadmus begins in Tyre, an ancient Phoenician port city near modern-day Lebanon. Cadmus’ father Agenor was the king of Tyre and ruled in company with his wife Telephassa and five children (four sons and one daughter). Europa, Agenor’s daughter (Cadmus’ sister), was rumored to be the most beautiful woman in all of Tyre, so much so that she attracted the attention of Zeus himself (no, not our Zeus).
Europa’s beauty seduced Zeus, who disguised himself as a white bull and abducted the king’s daughter, carrying her all the way to Crete. Agenor was agonized by the disappearance of his precious daughter and commissioned his sons to journey out in search of her, instructing them not to come back to Tyre until they’ve found her.
The four sons, including Cadmus, all failed to find Europa, who had already birthed three children by Zeus and settled down in Crete with a King. Cadmus made a final effort to find Europa by seeking out the Oracle at Delphi, who advised him to give up the search for Europa and found a new city. The Oracle instructed Cadmus to follow a cow he would find outside the oracle and build a city on the spot where the cow would stop to rest. Sure enough, Cadmus soon found a cow a few meters from the oracle and followed it to Boeotia where, after crossing the shallow stream of the Cephissus river, it layed down in fatigue.
After a near fatal encounter with a dragon (who happened to be the son of Ares: a story for another day) Cadmus and his five remaining companions sacrificed the cow to Athena (goddess of wisdom and heroism) and built the city of Thebes from the ground up.
