The Agora Dispatch — Olympus Community Weekly Newsletter — Wednesday 3 November 2021
Welcome to the Agora Dispatch — an Olympus community run newsletter — made by Ohmies, for Ohmies!
Please note that we will now publish numbers at a glance in a separate publication starting this Friday!
Summary
- Editorial — How we grow
- OIP-41 — proposal to launch Olympus Incubator
- ChefOmi proposes Ohmieswap
- How to get involved in a DAO: tips from a newbie
- How to buy and stake OHM cheaply
- New OP partners announced — The Fantohm cohorts
- Odyssey Updates — The Mushrohms
- OIP-40 — Let’s bring more ETH to the treasury
- Ohmie of the Week — Appleseed
- Twitter thread — Zeus warns about forks and dilution
- Ohmie profile — Sisu
- Meme of the Week — USOHM (credit ngmi_magazine)
- State of the DAO — Weekly update
- Opportunities to contribute — join us
- Agora’s Learning series — The Weapons & Armor of Ancient Greece pt. 1 — The Soldiers
Editorial — How we grow
Our friend Wollemi Pine had a great thread on twitter that presented a mental model for Olympus; Ohmie projects and personalities pop-up all across DeFi supported by a large underground mycelium network of roots.
These networks of roots can grow to be the largest organism in the forest — allowing for the nourishment of trees and animals alike.
You might have seen a recent post — from one of our contributors — on the forum about an incubation program. This is the beginning of a journey for Olympus to provide symbiotic nourishment to the most promising young saplings, destined to be among the mightiest trees in the forest.
When these trees are good and tall — they will then provide welcome shade for the Ohmie mushrooms to grow and our mycelium network of nourishment to spread further through the forest.
Exciting times.
OIP-41 — Proposal to launch Olympus Incubator
We saw a proposal to launch an Olympus incubator program posted to the forum.
It is proposed that the DAO would support a selection of new and pre-launch products that built on top of or integrated OHM with:
- seed funding
- community bootstrapping
- promotion
- advice and assistance
In exchange the Olympus Treasury would receive a portion of their governance token as negotiated by the DAO.
While there appears to be overwhelming support for the general idea at 97% in the temperature check poll — there is still a lively discussion about setting some parameters around the program.
Have your say on the forum here.
ChefOmi Proposes Ohmieswap
We saw ChefOmi post a proposal for a new exchange forking Sushiswap that he calls Ohmieswap.
Ohmieswap would incentivize its liquidity by issuing a new token called OSX and a portion of trading fees would be paid to OSX holders who stake their token as OSX.
The central idea of this exchange is to have OHM as the central trading pair — along with some functions allowing borrowing against sOHM for OHM to then be able to deposit as liquidity. The proposed future is to become a cross chain exchange.
We’ll watch with interest as this idea develops — will they be any match for our beloved collab partner the mighty Sushi, with their next gen Trident exchange? We’ll see.
How to get involved in a DAO: tips from a newbie
Start your work by wishing everyone ‘gm’ in the general chat, it does not have to be a ‘gm’ for you but that is how we initiate a day in a DAO: on a positive note. As you frantically see people planning upgrades and undertaking initiatives to solve problems unheard of, you feel an eerie sensation running down your brow alongside your sweat: doubt.
You doubt yourself. It is overwhelming. DAO is not meant for you. You are not even from a financial background, maybe crypto really is a sham; and how are you supposed to learn discord besides everything else?
You take a step back. You breathe. You relax. You check the calendar and find a meeting that sounds interesting to you. You stutter your way through the introduction in front of other DAO members when the realisation suddenly hits you: they are warm, caring, and not afraid to laugh alongside you. They will help you find your first team, your first project, and maybe they will even tip you your first crypto asset ever (don’t forget to factor in gas fees before you start feeling rich).
After all, behind each public wallet key is an incurable human nature.
OHM bounties are live
This week Olympus introduced OHM bounties in partnership with Layer 3. Bounties are ways to vibe with Olympus and earn some OHM in return.
Bounties are tasks the community can participate in to help spread the word about Olympus or to educate others about the protocol. For example — last week had a bounty of creating an infographic to explain the basics of Olympus. Some are as simple as putting (3,3) in your Twitter name and tweeting out (3,3).
Be sure to check in often at Layer 3 to see when new bounties are posted.
How to buy and stake OHM cheaply
Are high gas fees on Ethereum preventing you from joining the (3,3) force? There should be no excuse any more with the abundance of wsOHM liquidity on Avalanche.
In the following tweet, Ohmie @erethrium shared how to swap for wsOHM on the Traderjoe exchange on the Avalanche chain and why you don’t have to perform additional staking steps to enjoy rebase rewards:
Besides Avalanche, wsOHM is also available on Arbitrum, an Ethereum L2 solution. Check out our segment on the last edition of the Dispatch if you prefer to use Arbitrum instead.
New OP partners announced — The Fantohm cohorts
Happy Halloween! And here is your treat: Olympus Pro will be available on the Fantom chain and you can buy bonds from some of the partners starting this week. Dubbed the Fantohm cohorts, these partners are:
Keep an eye on the Bonds Marketplace as the bonds go live from 1 to 4 November.
Some words of advice — do not purchase a bond if its ROI is negative — that would mean paying higher than the market rate.
Odyssey Updates — Mushrohms News & Partnerships
The highly-anticipated Mushrohm reveal took place last Thursday evening (October 28th), and those who participated in the minting can now see their magnificent Mushrohms! A new teaser video is also out.
On top of that, Ohmie Memetics dropped some fresh alpha in the Olympus Odyssey Discord: a document detailing that spore drops will be released soon.
Holding a Mushrohm will give you VIP access to future whitelists, airdrops, and a variety of other incentives in the NFT space. Your Shrohm is a VIP card of sorts to some significant alfa.
Odyssey is working on a NFT auction house for Olympus and a liquid secondary market for Ohmie related NFT’s. The Shrohms will be one of the centerpieces to this auction house. The magnitude of their ambition is inspiring.
Olympus DAO, surely the largest DAO operation in DeFi, is working closely with Odyssey and brainstorming more NFT utilities integrating OHM.
You can check your Shrohm’s rarity on the handy RaritySniffer tool.
OIP-40 — Increase ETH allocation to 33% of Treasury RFV
OIP-40: Increase ETH allocation target to 33% of Treasury RFV
Olympus is a liquidity machine — it has accumulated more than $700MM worth of treasury assets to date, with almost one quarter of it representing the RFV (risk-free value). Having a high RFV instills confidence in OHM investors because it is used to back all circulating OHM.
With OIP-40, the author is looking to accumulate more ETH in the treasury, a non-reserve asset from Olympus’ point of view. Why non-reserve? Because ETH is not used towards the direct backing of OHM tokens. However, this might change soon as Olympus is looking to fulfill its vision of becoming the decentralized reserve currency of DeFi:
Finally, considering this increasing exposure to non-pegged assets, the Policy team is working on a proposal to shift from minting solely against RFV, by also incorporating quality (i.e. censorship-resistant, decentralized) non-pegged assets in the calculations. You can expect more on this soon.
If this proposal receives support from the community, Olympus would increase its ETH allocation target from 10% to 33% of the treasury’s RFV.
Learn more about the proposal and share your view on the Olympus forum.
Ohmie of the Week — Appleseed
This week’s Ohmie of the week is Appleseed — when he is not coming to the rescue of a malfunctioning front end issue — swooping in to save the day — he drops by the main discord to pick up some slack answering Ohmie questions or keeping a watchful eye for scammers.
A workhorse of the DAO — he is one of those everyday Ohmie heroes who keep our train on track — so we can get to where this reserve currency of DeFi is going.
We are proud to call him Ohmie of the Week!
Twitter thread — Zeus warns about forks and dilution
We couldn’t keep count of the number of Olympus forks on our hands — after seeing the success of (3,3), these projects seem to pop up out of nowhere like mushrooms after the rain. A word of caution though: none of these forks are affiliated or endorsed by Olympus, so please invest at your own risk.
Olympus aims to create a decentralized reserve currency with the OHM token. This entails a high inflation rate to increase the number of circulating OHM at the initial, growth phase of the project. Seven months in, Olympus is still in the growth phase, but there is a concerning trend with these forks trying to grow much faster with a shorter timespan leading to dilution:
Due to the open and decentralized nature of the blockchain, Olympus cannot prevent forks from spawning. Olympus is what it is today through its community, its DAO, its careful decision making and ability to execute. All play a role in helping it succeed.
Whether the forks can put down roots is yet to be seen.
Ohmie profile — Sisu
We met Sisu trailing his tutor around with a writing reed and several rolls of papyrus — ever the intern. We slipped away for a chat while their tutor was deep in debate.
Can you give us a little background of your life before crypto?
I was a wageslave before crypto and still am, you can find me shitposting during work hours. Right now I’m working as a UX/UI designer.
How did you get into crypto?
I got into crypto in the summer of 2017, ETH and mesh networks (Althea) really fascinated me and so I bought a bit of btc and eth. I faded in the bear market and only re-entered at the end of 2020 when I saw that btc was reaching ATHs. My name sisu stands for strength/grit in finnish, and it serves as a reminder to me to stay active (and never fade a bear market again lol).
When and how did you join Olympus?
I had learned about OHM from Tetranode in May or so, but only understood it as a basket of assets. When I saw the Mushroom meme craze, I had to figure out why the community was absolutely bonkers. So in late June I started to actually research wtf was Olympus and bought in. That was around the time I started hanging out in OT and created the @OlympusIntern account on twitter, at first it was just meant as a way to aggregate ohm resources, but now I see it as a platform to amplify cohmmunity projects and the econohmy.
What are you excited about for Olympus?
The cohmmunity. Hands down. I’ve made so many friends, learned an incredible amount, and have never felt such an open acceptance from any other group. The things that people are building are life-changing, and this is only the beginning.
What else are you into/excited about in the crypto space?
The only crypto projects I pay attention to are run by ohmies lol. So Incooom, Klima, Temple, Rome, and Fetch. Even when I try to find fringe projects, ohmies are there! Such as Treasure/$MAGIC, a loot-derivative gaming-nft-defi project, which have been ohmies since day 1 and recently announced a future magic-ohm pool on Arbitrum.
Meme of the Week — USOHM (credit @ngmi_magazine)
This week’s Meme of the Week comes from ngmi_magizine who makes fun of the ridiculous number of OHM forks spawning around DeFi — by suggesting the US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wants to create a US dollar based OHM fork, to put the USA back on top — very playful!
State of the DAO — Weekly update
We highlight some of the updates that happened in the DAO over the past week:
Community and Content
The beautiful minds over at the Content team have been working on a whitepaper that explores economic productivity in the crypto space, and uses Olympus as the case study. The work is still in progress, but we are amazed by the shrewd insights displayed by the authors. While the team is searching for a better depository to house the whitepaper, you can read its abstract on the Olympus documentation.
Operations
Ready, set, go! After months of preparation, the DAO is ready to trial Coordinape for allocation payout for the month of October.
Engineering
While Olympus is waiting for the audit result for V2 migration, the Engineering team are working on the smart contracts and front-end UI to offer users a seamless migration process. Last week, the smart contract team completed the code that allows single token migration.
Policy
If Olympus is a well-oiled machine, the Policy team are the technicians behind it. They need to monitor various key metrics like bond revenue, runway, and treasury growth and adjust the policy accordingly to protect all stakeholders. OIP-40 is one such example. The Olympus treasury has accumulated enough stablecoins that it has become necessary for Olympus to focus on another asset type. Being the native token of the Ethereum blockchain and having a strong censorship resistance, ETH is the natural choice for the Policy team.
Partnership
As unbanksy noted last week, to build above a $500MM protocol, you need constant innovation and dedication from the DAO members. And fresh ideas like the Olympus Incubator program are a testament to this. It’s not enough for Olympus to succeed, the partners have to succeed as well. That’s the philosophy of the Partnership team.
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 series — The Evolution of Weapons & Armor in Ancient Greece
Preface: Given the substantial length of time that the Ancient Greeks controlled the Northeastern Mediterranean (1450 BC to 600 AD), it is no surprise that their weapons, armor, and battle tactics evolved considerably over the course of their history. However, there are a few core principles that survived throughout the civilization’s existence.
The Hoplite
The most common of the ancient Greek soldiers, the Hoplite was an infantryman normally armed with a spear, a shield called a Hoplong (where the name Hoplite came from), and a suit of heavy armor. Many Hoplites also carried swords or daggers for close combat. A typical Hoplite was a middle-class Greek citizen with little (if any) military training, but could afford his own battle gear, as the soldiers were required to provide their own. This led to a lot of diversity among the Hoplites, with shields and armor displaying family crests and varying designs.
As the first line of defense (or offense), Hoplites utilized the phalanx formation to deter arrows and other mid to long-range attacks from the enemy. The formation encouraged cooperation among the soldiers and was crucial in the Greek’s defeat of the Persians in the Greco-Persian Wars. The success of the phalanx formation was also such that many future civilizations adopted it to counter archer-dominated armies (like the Persians).
The Peltast
For the poor souls who couldn’t afford a suit of armor and a heavy shield, most became Peltasts, light infantrymen with smaller, crescent-shaped shields and hardly any armor at all. These soldiers wielded Javelins as their primary weapon, a lighter, but more portable version of the Hoplong spear. Without the support of heavy shields and armor, Peltasts were much more vulnerable to ranged attacks and rarely grouped together as a phalanx formation was impossible with the limited protection.
However, what the Peltasts did have on their side was maneuverability. Without the burden of heavy armor and the requirement of staying in formation, Peltasts were able to cross rough terrains quickly and provide flanking support to the Hoplites. Peltasts were also very effective in combat when an army’s ranged attackers were defeated or distracted.
Strategos
Sourced from the words Stratos (army) and Agos (leader), Strategos were the highest-ranking military officers in ancient Greece. Strategos were natural leaders with ample military experience, tasked with leading an army made up of many men with little or no experience. To combat the lack of experience, Strategos prioritized cooperation and teamwork amongst the soldiers to maintain control and order.
When Strategos entered the world of combat, they were mainly delegated to the skill-intensive groups such as the Chariot Calvary or the Archer Teams. Their skills and experience could be best captured in those groups, while also not adding the risk of falling during close combat. Outside the world of combat, Strategos were among the highest regarded citizens of Ancient Greece and ranked as high as the most powerful politicians.
In part 2, we will explore the Ancient Greek Naval Forces.
