The Agora Dispatch — Olympus Community Weekly Newsletter — Wednesday 10 November 2021
Welcome to the Agora Dispatch — an Olympus community run newsletter — made by Ohmies, for Ohmies!
Summary
- Editorial — Our march on strategic assets begins
- OIP-43: Launch Convex bonds
- Insurance coverage for OlympusDAO
- Launch of Agora Insights
- OP Updates — Application open to Curve LP and Avalanche cohorts
- Odyssey Updates — Odyssey rebrand contest & Mushrohms roadmap released
- OIP-41 Passes — Incubator is a go!
- Twitter thread — Unbanksy talks about the broken VC model, and how Olympus can help fix it
- Ohmie of the Week — Theyoungretiree
- Ohmie profile — Kalash
- Meme of the Week — Yes, OHM is a cryptocurrency (credit futzco)
- State of the DAO — Weekly update
- Opportunities to contribute — join us
- Agora’s Learning ancient-Greek mythology series -
Editorial — Our march on strategic assets begins
Many of you would have seen the proposal to begin to acquire Curve protocol voting power through acquisition of the Convex token CVX.
This is the beginning of a new chapter for Olympus. We have established our base of risk free value in Frax, DAI and LUSD stablecoins — then absorbed large amounts of ETH — and now we can focus on governance tokens that are strategically important for our long term mission.
Over the coming months we will see proposals to eventually fill our treasury with a basket of these strategic assets that have their own revenue streams and will give Olympus a voice in shaping the future of defi.
This — coupled with the success of Olympus Pro, the Olympus Incubator (approved overnight) and a number products in the works — will allow our runway and backing to grow far beyond what bonding mere raw assets could do alone.
The future is bright!
OIP-43: Proposal to launch CVX bonds
Olympus is going full steam ahead with another proposal that seeks to acquire CVX tokens via bonds. The relationship between Olympus and Convex Finance dates back to more than two months ago when Olympus started depositing the excess FRAX in the treasury into Convex to earn yields.
Acquiring CVX tokens has several benefits, the most obvious one being the ability to influence the Curve gauge allocation so that more CRV rewards are directed to the liquidity pools deemed advantageous to Olympus. If Olympus is to fulfill its vision of becoming the central bank of DeFi, such ability to direct the flow of liquidity is crucial.
The proposal author, Wartull also looks at this as bringing another source of revenue for Olympus. Instead of relying on bond income to maintain or increase the backing behind each OHM, Olympus can rely on passive revenue generated from Curve trading fees to achieve a similar result.
The Snapshot vote is live now:
You can also join a discussion concerning CVX bonds this evening in the Olympus Discord:
Insurance Coverage for OlympusDAO
An often requested option is coming to Olympus: insurance coverage for smart contract vulnerability.
For the uninitiated, DeFi insurance is a rapidly growing sector within the crypto space. Users have the option to purchase insurance coverage for their investments and pay a percentage of the amount insured. It can provide peace of mind for using protocols like Olympus and could potentially save you from a total loss in the worst case scenario of an exploit.
Soon, Ohmies will be able to purchase insurance via InsurAce. The coverage will be 4.5% of the insured amount and will cover the insuree’s sOHM against unauthorized, malicious or criminal acts aimed at exploiting Olympus’ smart contracts.
For example, if you were to insure $10,000 worth of sOHM, your premium would be $450 dollars.
Rest assured, any interested Ohmies will see further announcements with more details as this rolls out.
InsurAce has offered some discounts around the insurance and there is currently a poll on the forum to get feedback on how to deal with them — have your say.
Launch of Agora Insights
We decided that the Dispatch was getting a bit too long and we didn’t want you to miss out on any of the important news. We thought long and hard and will now have the numbers at a glance in a separate publication we have dubbed Olympus Insights.
Following Zeus’s advice from January 20th 2021 — we stealth launched last Friday.
If you haven’t already please give Agora Insights a read and let us know what you think.
OP Updates — Application open to Curve LP and Avalanche cohorts
It is time to take back control over your liquidity. Since its inception, Curve Finance has quickly risen through the ranks and become one of the protocols with the highest TVL (total value locked). Its novel stablecoin swap mechanism means that users incur little slippage when exchanging between two different stablecoins. It attracts a large number of LPs (liquidity providers) as they stand to benefit from trading fees while avoiding the traditional issue of impermanent loss.
To bootstrap liquidity on Curve, many DeFi protocols offer farming rewards in their native tokens on top of CRV tokens. However, these protocols are still at the whim of these LPs as they don’t own the liquidity. Olympus is looking to help these protocols by launching the Curve LP Cohort:
OP (Olympus Pro) has helped protocols secure more than $13M worth of liquidity since its launch in late September. If you are interested in becoming part of the Curve LP Cohort, please fill up the OP application form and the Olympus contributor will get in touch with you.
OP is also looking to expand to Avalanche soon. If you are building on Avalanche and wish to sign up as an OP partner, you can join the Avalanche Cohort using the same application form.
OP application form: https://notionforms.io/forms/olympus-pro-application
Start owning your own liquidity today.
Odyssey Updates — Odyssey branding contest + Mushrohms roadmap
We spotted that Odyssey is running a branding contest to freshen up its identity — as they want to be in line with the current Olympus branding. Multiple prizes have been announced, including 1.33 OHM + 1 Free Second Generation Mushrohm + Invite to Odyssey core contributors for the first prize winner. Please follow the guidelines in this form when submitting your work — submissions will close 11/10/21.
The Odyssey team also released the updated roadmap for the Mushrohm project including the upcoming sporedrop and some details about another chance to mint check it out here:
https://twitter.com/Mushrohms/status/1456737687616974849?s=20
OIP-41 Passes — Incubator is a go!
We saw the proposal to commence the Olympus incubator receive a big tick of approval from the community passing with over 98% approval.
The initial program is for 90 days and has a maximum budget of $3.5 million in DAO OHM.
The program will be overseen by known community contributors who assisted in setting up the project:
They have been in talks with launch partners already — so watch this space for some exciting news!
Ohmie of the Week — Theyoungretiree
This week’s Ohmie of the Week — is a brave Ohmie facing down his leukemia at age 22 with an incredible spirit and grace. Together with his young wife they are making the best of it they can. He embodies the spirit of resilience and warmth, even in the greatest adversity, which all Ohmies can aspire to.
If you would like to help out some of their friends have started a gofundme campaign to help with medical bills — you can donate here.
We are proud to call you an Ohmie and Ohmie of the Week.
Stay strong king!
Twitter thread — Unbanksy talks about the broken VC model, and how Olympus can help fix it
In this thread, unbanksy gives a brief history of VC (venture capital) and why it played a crucial role during the early boom of semiconductor industry. However, this traditional way of funding new companies may not be relevant in DeFi. Nay, it can work against them when venture capitalists dump their equities (tokens) on the protocols right after launch.
So what if your protocol wants to raise money but avoids the pitfall of VC? Olympus can help in a few regards:
- Supply the early capital
- Bootstrap liquidity
- Provide go-to-market expertise
Olympus has proven that its model of accumulating and retaining liquidity works very well, and shares its success with other protocols via Olympus Pro. Now to go a step further by introducing OHM-X LP (liquidity provider) pair as a means for budding protocols to source liquidity. These protocols get to enjoy the benefits of POL, while having the assurance that Olympus will retain their native tokens on the market. For Olympus, this helps forward its mission of becoming the decentralized central bank by making OHM more ubiquitous. This is clearly a win-win for both.
Interested in becoming a partner? Sign up here: https://notionforms.io/forms/olympus-incubator-launchpad
Ohmie profile — Kalash
We stopped by the Sherpa’s rest at base of Olympus to chat with Kalash — he was seeing off a small crowd of Ohmies heading to the top in the hopes of securing some rare mushrohms — we waited for a break and got his story:
Can you give us a little background of your life before crypto?
There was life before crypto? I thought that was merely barely tolerable existence… Not life. I haven’t done the traditional life plan stuff. I went to college for a year, then the the air force for a year and a half (worked in the dental clinic, then received an honorable discharge under “Don’t ask, Don’t tell.”) I went back for a 3rd semester of college and got my associate’s degree at a community college in Mississippi, then came to California to get my pilot’s license (and never did anything with it), moved to LA and goofed around for a long time. I was on an episode of an MTV dating show. I worked in a porn store/sex shop for 9 months, then got into multi-level-marketing (and was terrible at it).
Since I wasn’t good, I became a live-in personal assistant/babysitter/limo driver for the people doing MLM that WERE good. That lasted a couple of years until that all fell apart (which is also a ridiculously over the top story… involving my boss at the time, a former president, a mistress from Vegas, and a rapid decline of his personal life, but this is about me…).
I then managed to get up to San Francisco. There, I worked at a computer repair shop for a few years, then quit to drive for Lyft and sidecar — I also recorded an audiobook for Audible, was in the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, hosted karaoke weekly at The Stud (bar in SoMa), and enjoyed not having a real job with a normal time schedule. Because of the Sidecar stuff, a driver I knew from their meetups began driving for Cruise Automation (GM acquired them while I was there; it’s their self driving/autonomy sub-company), and he invited me to join them. I was their 5th safety driver. I was there for a year (let the car drive, and take over for it if it messed up), and absolutely loved it! From there, I went to Nio (yes, the meme stock) to do the same thing in San Jose.
Because I was fairly geeky and none of the vehicle technicians were — and their job was to literally install computers and sensors into the cars to make them drive themselves, they stole me from the driving team and I (with absolutely NO mechanical background, and an ongoing fear of power tools) became a vehicle technician for a Chinese electric car company and I’ve been there for over 4 years. The first two were financially recovering from my time at the computer shop (you CANNOT live in San Francisco on $13/hr), then I started actually doing crypto things that actually made a positive return
How did you get into crypto?
I’ve kind of always been crypto curious. One of the guys I used to work for as an assistant during the MLM phase kind of forced me into BTC, and got me into a ponzi with that — and the SEC still has that case pending with 2btc of mine hanging in the balance of the outcome of that case… but I was never very happy with BTC. It was expensive and slow. So I did some research, and got into XBY (Xtrabytes) around 2017. It was still centralized, but I did write a couple articles for them that paid out in XBY. That project shut down about 6 months ago now, so all the pennies I scraped together to put into it were basically lost. I also did some mining using nicehash, and setup a mining rig in the shed when I had free electricity included in my rent. But the shed wasn’t water proof, and my mining rig drowned. So… yeah. Mining is a terrible investment. Water ruins everything (not financial advice). Some people do well with mining. I didn’t. What really got me on a positive path with crypto was Nexo about 2 years ago. Nexo became my first real savings account, a SAFER introduction to leveraging, and a lot of discord and reddit crypto interactions.
When and how did you join Olympus?
From the Nexo reddit. I picked up the best financial advisor. He’s 23, totally has ADHD, and is usually tripping on something. I dragged him into Nexo from their Reddit (he was new and asking questions) back in Jan/Feb — — then in July, he dragged me over to Olympus. Now I’m more involved with Olympus than he is. During Fohmo 3 I finally dumped my Nexo savings into OHM. I should have done that back when I first joined. The only OHM I’ve sold so far were 3 sOHM for a pre-release Mushrohm off Open Sea (I was too lazy, and really — who even HAS paper these days — to draw mushrooms for the whitelist).
What are you excited about for Olympus?
At this point? When we already have Olympus Pro and have just dabbling with multi-chain? It’s combining them, but more of an emphasis on the mutli-chain. Having Olympus get OFF Ethereum is going to make it available to anyone — not just those that can afford Eth gas (as a small % of their investment). The long stated goal of Olympus has been to create THE defi reserve currency. The fastest way to get there is to incentivize the creation of Olympus-paired liquidity tokens. Pro is going a long ways towards ensuring that Ohm has a diverse set of assets in its treasury — nearly making it a crytpo EFT equivalent. But once we’re multi-chain, I am most excited to see more Olympus bonds created with other L1 native tokens — helping expand the adoption of alternative L1 chains, and cementing OHM as the core trading pair (outside the native L1 token) for the entire ecosystem on that network as it grows. This will also let OHM become the first true multi-chain native token that can be used to determine the value of any token on any chain without an intermediary conversion.
What else are you into/excited about in the crypto space?
I’m still waiting on Odyssey to launch the sOHM embeded NFTs… Facebook just rebranded as Meta. But the metaverse was already on the roadmap for Olympus through Odyssey. They have a long ways to go to make their vision real, but work is in progress. I’m excited to see Olympus and Facebook competing; the old centralized company concept vs. the new DAO workspace. And if the whole reserve currency thing actually does come into being, potentially having Olympus competing with governments over monetary supply systems as well. The leveraging thing is really mind blowing (not like implemented at Rari). I’m looking for long term sustainability — and intend to share plans for that as they develop. If every $ you spend is coming out of a negative interest (profitable) loan, you’re never really spending money. You’re always making more.
Meme of the Week — Yes, OHM is a cryptocurrency (credit @futzco)
We saw a debate on Twitter regarding how to categorize crypto assets like OHM. Ironically, tokens such as BTC and ETH that many have taken to calling “cryptocurrency” are not really well-suited to be used as a currency. Imagine ordering pizza for dinner using BTC. OHM is a crypto asset, while designed to help maintain your purchasing power regardless of market condition. So what do you call OHM? The following meme by Stefan sums it up nicely:
State of the DAO — Weekly update
We highlight some of the updates that happened in the DAO over the past week:
Community and Content
Ohmies love numbers and all sorts of metrics. The Data & Metrics team was born out of this demand and they have been cooking up many useful Dune queries since. At the moment, the Policy Dashboard shows the trade volume and the ranking of OHM-DAI pool on Sushiswap. Soon, two more pools — OHM-ETH and OHM-LUSD pools — will be added and you can compare which pool is generating the most volume from users.
Marketing and Design
When Olympus Pro was launched, many users were confused about its value proposition. The Olympus’ bond mechanism is already hard to grasp for some, it is apparent that more educational effort needs to be spent to onboard more DeFi users to Olympus Pro.
The Marketing team is aware of this, and a considerable amount of time and care has been put into preparing materials that explain the concept of bonds and how to use Olympus Pro.
Operations
The Operations team have done some major improvements to the Olympus notion page. Now, all team members along with their respective departments and skill sets are listed in a central database. The page remains restricted for now, but we foresee this database can be useful in the future to track a user’s contribution and determine their fair allocation.
Engineering
Have you ever experienced issues with connecting your wallet on the Olympus dApp? Last week the front-end team published a fix to tackle the wallet connection issue when users enter the bond page.
If you encounter other front-end problems when interacting with Olympus, feel free to submit a ticket on the Olympus GitHub repository.
Policy
The Policy team drafted two proposals last week: OIP-42 which introduces insurance coverage for Ohmies and OIP-43 which aims to introduce CVX bonds. We have covered both proposals in the early sections of the newsletter. Due to the time-sensitive nature of OIP-43, it was put up for a Snapshot vote sooner than usual. You can cast your vote on the Olympus Snapshot page now.
Partnership
We saw an intriguing idea on the forum about the partnership between [REDACTED] and Olympus. [REDACTED] aims to repurpose Olympus’ bond mechanism to take in CRV and CRV LP tokens so that it can leverage those tokens to influence Curve gauge allocation. Once in the treasury, these tokens can also be deployed to other protocols to generate passive income. What do Ohmies get in return? Well, a lot:
https://forum.olympusdao.finance/d/319-support-redacted-as-an-olympus-branch
Thanks to the Partnership team for always exploring the DeFi frontiers. We are excited to see how this partnership pans out.
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 #dao-start-here channel and read the instruction carefully so that you can get assigned a role.
Have any questions? Just ask in the #general-dao 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 — The Ancient Greek Navy
Preface: When your Nation is located on the shores of a sprawling sea like the Mediterranean, building a robust naval force is essential. With a strong Navy, you have the ability to invade the shores of neighboring nations and protect your own shores from enemy attacks. The Ancient Greeks committed a large portion of their military resources to their Navy, which is one of the primary reasons for their longevity as a civilization.
The Trireme
Undoubtedly the greatest innovation in Naval warfare at the time, the Trireme was a three-tiered ship that could house anywhere from 150 to 170 oarsmen at a time. The ship was perfected by the Athenians in the 5th century BC and became the premiere warship of the Mediterranean nations for centuries due to its speed, maneuverability, and power. In addition to the three-tiers of oars, the ship was fitted with a large, bronze-clad ram on the bow for the purposes of ramming and destroying the hulls of enemy ships.
The one key drawback of the Trireme design was a lack of durability. Triremes were made with very thin hulls and ribs, which allowed the ship to be much faster and more maneuverable, but less sturdy. Eventually, as ranged weapons evolved to be more damaging (iron replaced bronze), the Greeks began sacrificing speed for larger, more sturdy ships.
Naval Tactics
During naval battles in the ancient times, there were only two primary attack vectors: ramming and boarding. Ramming was the most common form of attack, as Triremes were suited with the large bronze bows mentioned previously. These massive metal spears could easily sink enemy ships if the attacking ship was in the right position. To get into an advantageous ramming position, the Greeks employed several different strategies and formations.
The Diekplous maneuver consisted of forming Greek ships into a line and rowing through gaps between enemy ships. After the galley successfully crossed the opponent’s line, the Greek ships would turn around and attack the susceptible side of the opponent’s vessel.
The Periplous maneuver consisted of the Greek navy “sailing around” the enemy’s line. Like the Diekplous, the Periplous’ purpose was to expose the enemy’s stern for an easy ramming target. This maneuver requires the attacker’s ship to be faster and more maneuverable than the enemy, which is why it was used consistently by the Greeks and their Triremes.
One final strategy implemented by the Greeks during Naval battles was Shearing. Shearing occurred when the oars of one ship collided with any part of the opposing ship. During the collision, the wooden paddles would shatter and often skew the rower and the oarsmen surrounding him. In addition to maiming, if not immediately killing, the enemy, the attacker is given another advantage to ram the opponent while the enemy ship has been paralyzed (the oarsmen are unable to row).
