Last week was another stress test. Crypto markets dropped hard, and liquidations cascaded.

But Olympus did what it was built to do. The lending protocol recorded zero liquidations. The buyback mechanism tripled its rate. New capital flowed in at six times normal volume. No one intervened; no one needed to. The result? OHM fell 15%, in line with Bitcoin, but much improved from ETH’s 26% drop and the 25–30% drop across top DeFi protocols.

Buffett’s “be greedy when others are fearful” has become cliché. Everyone knows it, yet almost no one acts on it. Fear spreads faster than conviction, and when markets are liquidating, capital protects itself. Doing the opposite requires either unusual discipline or systems designed to do it automatically.

Olympus was built around this idea, that good monetary behavior shouldn’t depend on someone making the right call under pressure. It should be encoded into how the system works. This last week showed what that looked like.

Counter-cyclical mechanisms in practice

Buybacks tripled. The Yield Repurchase Facility uses treasury yield to purchase OHM from the open market, running continuously regardless of price action or sentiment. The treasury earns yield on its reserves, and that yield flows into buybacks. Volatility makes it more efficient, not less. As prices fell, each dollar of yield purchased more OHM than it would have at higher premiums, and buybacks roughly tripled. The mechanism kept buying while sentiment was at its worst.

Zero liquidations. Cooler Loans recorded zero liquidations throughout the entire event. This wasn’t luck. Most DeFi lending amplifies stress because it’s pro-cyclical by design: prices fall, collateral ratios break, liquidations trigger, and forced selling deepens the drawdown. That feedback loop is why crashes cascade. Cooler was built differently, with fixed terms and no price-based liquidation triggers, specifically to break that cycle. Borrowers weren’t forced to sell into the weakness because the system was never going to force them.

But these mechanisms run on top of something, and what’s underneath matters just as much.

A floor that held

Most crypto assets have no structural floor. When sentiment turns, drawdowns extend as far as sellers push and buyers catch. 30% down, 50% down, 90% down. There’s nothing stopping it except the next bid.

OHM was designed with a floor. Every token is backed by liquid reserves in the treasury, currently $11.59 per token. The price can fall, but the backing creates a structural anchor that becomes increasingly relevant as price approaches it. This is a deliberate design choice (as opposed to a peg). Holding reserves means the protocol can’t deploy that capital elsewhere, but it also means there’s something real underneath the price. OHM’s price fell 15.3 percent while the backing moved just 0.3 percent. The market price compressed toward the floor; the floor itself held steady.

OHM absorbed selling pressure from multiple directions simultaneously. Beyond the broad market correction, external protocols that have built leverage products on top of OHM were also unwinding. These are independent systems, separate from Olympus, that let users take leveraged positions using OHM as collateral. When those positions liquidated, they created concentrated selling pressure on OHM specifically, layered on top of everything else.

Even with that additional pressure, selling that Bitcoin and ETH didn’t face, the drawdown held to 15 percent. The treasury held $186.9 million at the start of the week and $183.7 million at the end. Infrastructure has to be sound enough for others to build on top of it, and this week showed what that looks like when tested.

The floor holding and the mechanisms running created something else: opportunity.

What smart money did

More than $155,000 in new deposits came in during peak volatility, nearly six times normal volume.

Convertible Deposits let users lock in future OHM at strike prices determined by market conditions. As prices fell, the auction mechanism lowered strike prices programmatically, from $22.99 to $19.71, a 14 percent reduction from pre-event levels. The mechanism was designed to create entry points programmatically; it doesn’t wait for humans to decide when prices are attractive, because humans usually won’t act when fear is highest.

A boring week

The week came and went without a single manual intervention. No emergency governance votes, no parameter adjustments, no crisis calls. The mechanisms ran the way they were designed to run, buying more OHM, maintaining every loan, creating better entry points as prices fell.

This is what Olympus was built for. Most infrastructure is pro-cyclical. Stress triggers liquidations, liquidations trigger selling, selling deepens the stress, and the cascade feeds on itself. Olympus was designed to invert that. The rules do the work, so no one has to make the right call under pressure. Buybacks get more efficient as prices fall, lending without price-based liquidations doesn’t force selling into weakness, and programmatic mechanisms create entry points when fear is highest.

This wasn’t the first time. In October, Olympus withstood crypto’s largest liquidation. Corrections will keep happening, and that’s exactly what the system was built for.

Convertible Deposits (CDs) turn idle stablecoins into strategic capital, while unlocking flexible access to liquidity and a path to capturing potential OHM upside. Instead of choosing between holding OHM or staying in stables, CD’s lock in a future OHM conversion price, while keeping your capital productive. Receipt tokens keep you liquid: you can borrow against them, trade them, or hold to maturity and choose to either redeem 1:1 in stables or convert to OHM at a potential discount if the market moves in your favor. Meanwhile, the Olympus treasury is strengthened in the background.

How It Works

At their core, CDs are simple. You deposit stablecoins and receive a position that comes with two parts: a receipt token that represents your deposit, and a Conversion Right that gives you the opportunity to acquire OHM in the future, at a predefined conversion price. Together, these mechanisms create the flexibility to borrow, trade, redeem, or convert, adapting to market conditions and your strategy.

This position is made up of two components:

• Receipt Token — cdfUSDS-[Deposit Period] (e.g. cdfUSDS-6m) : an ERC6909 receipt token (optionally wrappable into an ERC20) that represents your deposit, redeemable for your original USDS after a fixed deposit period. For each asset, there will be one or more available deposit periods, it is up to the user to select the deposit period.
• Conversion Right : an optional right to convert the deposit into OHM at a predefined price, prior to the expiry of the convertible deposit position.

The Conversion Right is stored internally, exists for the full term of the CD, and is non-transferable by default. However, it can be wrapped into a transferable NFT, which allows it to be sold, transferred, or potentially used with other DeFi platforms.

If OHM’s market price moves above the predefined conversion price, your Conversion Right becomes valuable, giving you the option to capture upside by converting, or simply redeem your stablecoins 1:1 if the market isn’t performing in your favor.

Borrowing Against Your CDs

A key feature of Convertible Deposits is the ability to borrow against your receipt tokens, similar to how Cooler Loans unlock liquidity against stable collateral. Instead of sitting idle, your CD position can be used as collateral to access credit while you wait for maturity or decide whether to convert into OHM.

• Liquidity without exiting: Use your receipt token as collateral to borrow stablecoins without exiting your Convertible Deposit position.
• Default handling: If a loan is not repaid by the end of its term, the protocol seizes the collateralized receipt tokens and applies the underlying deposit to settle outstanding debt. Repaid principal is returned to the borrower; the unpaid portion goes to the Treasury. Any excess value or rewards are handled by the protocol’s default process.
• Flexibility for strategy: Borrowing lets you keep your optionality intact. You can still trade, redeem, or convert later, provided your loan is repaid.

This Cooler-inspired design turns CDs into productive collateral, while preserving the same proven protections that safeguard Olympus.

Strategic Benefits of Convertible Deposits

Exiting a CD position is designed to balance holder flexibility with protocol sustainability. You can always redeem at full value by waiting until maturity, or reclaim instantly for access to immediate liquidity (with a small fee for early access). This fee creates room for secondary market activity, where arbitrageurs can step in to provide liquidity by purchasing receipt tokens at a discount and later redeeming them for full value.

For OHM supporters: CDs provide upside through a fixed, predefined, conversion price. If OHM trades higher at maturity, you can convert at a discount, while still retaining the fallback of redeeming 1:1 in stablecoins.

For traders and liquidity providers: CDs create opportunities around both the Conversion Right and exit mechanisms. You can arbitrage between reclaim discounts, secondary market prices, and redemption value, or manage liquidity across positions to capture spreads.

For patient arbitrageurs: Buying receipt tokens below face value (for example, at $0.95) and redeeming later for $1 is a straightforward strategy to earn by simply waiting, rewarding those willing to provide liquidity.

For stablecoin holders: CDs turn stablecoins from idle reserves into a strategic position. They offer a way to stay in stables, while unlocking liquidity through borrowing, capturing upside by converting to OHM, or simply redeeming at maturity with full stability preserved.

Getting Your Deposit Back: Redemption Period

When it comes time to exit a CD position, you have three primary options:

• Redeem: start redemption at any time and, after the waiting period (equal to your deposit term), receive your stablecoins 1:1 or redeem and convert into OHM.
• Reclaim: exit instantly for a small fee, reflecting the cost of accessing immediate liquidity.
• Transfer Receipt Token: sell your receipt token (e.g. cdfUSDS-6m) on the secondary market or transfer it to another wallet.

Convertible Deposits expand the role of stablecoins and OHM within the Olympus ecosystem. By combining stability with liquidity, tradability, and upside potential, CDs provide a versatile toolset that serves a multitude of participants, all while reinforcing the treasury. Simple in design yet powerful in practice, they give holders more strategic options and strengthen the protocol as a whole.

🖥️ Olympus Website

🐥 X / Twitter

👾 Olympus Discord

As part of our ongoing commitment to transparency and accuracy, we are submitting an official update request to CoinGecko to correct and enhance the information currently displayed on both the OHM and gOHM token pages. These changes ensure that our circulating supply, market cap, and gOHM pricing are fully aligned with on-chain data, and that Olympus’s expanding ecosystem, including Cooler Loans, Convertible Deposits, and cross-chain deployments, is properly represented across major tracking platforms.

CoinGecko- Governance OHM ($gOHM) Overview Page:

https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/governance-ohm

CoinGecko- Olympus OHM ($OHM) Overview Page:

https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/olympus

OHM Change Request(s)

Issue: Incorrect OHM Market Cap and gOHM Pricing

CoinGecko currently reports incorrect OHM market cap as:

CoinGecko OHM Market Cap: $366,477,368

Correct Market Cap: $354,082,922.27- (As of 8/27/25)
(Based on verified circulating supply of 15,688,211 × OHM price of $22.57)

CoinGecko currently reports incorrect Circulating and Total Supply as:

CoinGecko Circulating Supply: 16,376,217 OHM
CoinGecko Total Supply: 20,996,058 OHM

Correct OHM Circulating Supply: 15,688,211 — (As of 8/27/25)
Correct OHM Total Supply: 21,144,978 — (As of 8/27/25)

CoinGecko currently reports incorrect OHM FDV as:

CoinGecko OHM FDV: $471,476,406

Correct OHM FDV: 477,164,398.46 — (As of 8/27/25)

gOHM Change Request(s)

gOHM Formulas:

gOHM Price: OHM Price × Current Index
gOHM Circulating Supply: OHM Circulating Supply​ / Current Index

gOHM Total Supply: OHM Total Supply / Current Index

gOHM Price Calculation(s) Missing or Incorrect:

Correct gOHM Price: $6,076.75
Correct Liquid Backing per gOHM: $3,158.19

gOHM Total Supply Incorrect:

Coingecko currently reports gOHM supply as: N/A

Correct gOHM Total Supply: 78,547.56

gOHM Market Cap Incorrect:

Coingecko currently reports gOHM Market Cap as: N/A

Correct gOHM Market Cap: $354,082,922.27

Coingecko currently reports gOHM Circulating Supply as: N/A

Correct gOHM Circulating Supply: 58,023.12

Important

Notice how gOHM Market Cap = OHM Market Cap when both are calculated correctly, because gOHM is just a wrapper for OHM. The supply and price change proportionally, so the market cap always matches.

Protocol-Owned Liquidity (POL) is not currently displayed:

https://app.olympusdao.finance/#/dashboard — Olympus Metrics Dashboard

Olympus holds significant POL across Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Base.

CoinGecko does not currently reflect POL in any metric.

Please list the $OHM Contract Address for Base (located in the contract address section below) so we can enable a price feed on BaseScan.

Summary of Fixes for CoinGecko:

Market Cap should reflect:

• 15,688,211 OHM × $22.57 = $354,082,922.27

Confirm circulating and total supply:

• Circulating Supply: 15,688,211 OHM
• Total Supply: 21,144,978 OHM

Both should match verified on-chain metrics

Display gOHM Price:

• $6,076.75 (based on OHM Price × Index = $22.57 × 269.24)

Display Liquid Backing per gOHM:

• $3,160.04 (based on $11.74 OHM backing × Index)

Consider surfacing:

• Treasury-Backed Reserve: ~$175M
• Protocol-Owned Liquidity (POL): ~$21M

Official Network Support and Contract Addresses

Please update & add the other chains we are currently on:

You can find verified contract addresses in our docs

$OHM Addresses:

Ethereum (Mainnet): 0x64aa3364F17a4D01c6f1751Fd97C2BD3D7e7f1D5

Arbitrum: 0xf0cb2dc0db5e6c66B9a70Ac27B06b878da017028

Optimism: 0x060cb087a9730E13aa191f31A6d86bFF8DfcdCC0

Base: 0x060cb087a9730E13aa191f31A6d86bFF8DfcdCC0

Berachain: 0x18878Df23e2a36f81e820e4b47b4A40576D3159C

Solana (Wormhole): 2Xva1NeLRuBFdK41gEuXqgeWtnKKDve9PKeCnMEpNG6K

$gOHM Addresses:

Ethereum: 0x0ab87046fBb341D058F17CBC4c1133F25a20a52f

Arbitrum: 0x8D9bA570D6cb60C7e3e0F31343Efe75AB8E65FB1

Polygon: 0xd8cA34fd379d9ca3C6Ee3b3905678320F5b45195

Avalanche: 0x321e7092a180bb43555132ec53aaa65a5bf84251

Fantom: 0x91fa20244fb509e8289ca630e5db3e9166233fdc

Optimism: 0x0b5740c6b4a97f90eF2F0220651Cca420B868FfB

Please add (if possible) our Cooler Loans metrics (Credit/Borrowing layer) — This is a major functioning component of the Olympus financial stack.

Cooler Loans V1 Metrics: https://coolermetrics.olympusdao.finance/#/cooler-v1

Cooler Loans V2 Metrics: https://coolermetrics.olympusdao.finance/#/cooler-v2

CoinGecko About Olympus Copy Incorrect:

Olympus (OHM) aims to become a decentralized reserve currency that is community owned, governed by a DAO, and backed by decentralized assets.

The team designed OHM to be a stable reserve currency using economics force. An algorithm is used to rebalance the supply of OHM tokens in the market in order to maintain the peg.

The Olympus project has 2 primary methods to prevent traders for selling off OHM which will introduce buy pressure to the DAO.

Staking is used to incentivized token holders to lock their OHM to receive rebase rewards

2. Bonds are introduced to incentivized liquidity providers to lock in their liquidity

What is OlympusPro?

OlympusPro is new product launched to bring the bond functionalities to any project into the market. It is currently integrated with projects such as Pendle and Spell.

This allows any projects to maintain stronger liquidity through a bond market and reward bond sellers with their own tokens.

Correct CoinGecko About Olympus Copy:

“The Olympus protocol is a decentralized financial (DeFi) system that supports OHM, a treasury backed token.

Olympus manages value, liquidity, and credit on-chain through pioneering mechanisms such as Protocol Owned Liquidity (POL), the Emissions Manager (EM), Cooler Loans, and Convertible Deposits (CD’s) to create a robust, flexible, censorship-resistant, and smart money.

You can learn more about these mechanisms here, or see them in action on the Olympus App”

Suggested Categories

defi reserve-currency, protocol-owned-liquidity, cooler loans, convertible deposits, credit, decentralized-bank, governance, smart-money, financial-computer

We believe that data accuracy is critical to the health and trust of the DeFi ecosystem, and we are grateful to the CoinGecko team for reviewing these proposed corrections. If you are a community member or ecosystem participant referencing Olympus metrics, this update helps ensure you are working with the most reliable and up-to-date information. As always, you can verify everything directly on our dashboard, and we will continue to advocate for clear and consistent data wherever OHM and gOHM appear.

Learn more about Olympus👇

🖥️ Olympus Website

🐥 X / Twitter

👾 Olympus Discord

Coinbase has expanded decentralized exchange access on Base, enabling a wider range of participants to officially interact with DeFi assets. As part of this expansion, Coinbase’s DEX now supports $OHM, the native token of the Olympus protocol, bringing one of DeFi’s largest treasury-backed assets into its ecosystem.

Olympus maintains one of the top ten largest treasuries in decentralized finance, with all circulating $OHM backed by verifiable, productive on chain reserves. The core protocol operates on Ethereum mainnet, where its treasury, policy mechanisms, and credit layer function transparently on chain. Purchasing $OHM on Base provides exposure to the Olympus ecosystem and its integrated systems.

Olympus has maintained operational stability through multiple market cycles, including the previous bear market, and continues to operate with the same on chain policy structure & continued success.

The Olympus Advantage

Olympus combines one of DeFi’s largest on-chain treasuries with a set of purpose-built monetary systems (autonomous smart-contracts) that work together to maintain market access, manage supply, and provide protocol-native credit. These core capabilities form the foundation of $OHM’s design and define both how the protocol operates across market cycles and how a modern, on-chain monetary system can function.

• Treasury Backed: Each $OHM is backed by productive assets held in the Olympus Treasury
• Liquidity Availability: Olympus deploys protocol owned liquidity across multiple trading pairs and networks
• Policy Driven Stability Mechanisms: Olympus actively manages $OHM’s supply and backing through on-chain tools such as Reserve Bonds, Inverse Bonds, and the Yield Repurchase Facility. These mechanisms enable the protocol to expand reserves during high demand, reduce supply during market contractions, and continuously recycle treasury yield back into the system. Smart money requires smarter systems, and that’s exactly what Olympus has built.
• Credit Layer: Cooler Loans V2 offers a record low, perpetual, 0.5% fixed interest rate, price-base liquidation free borrowing against $gOHM (Olympus’s governance token), fully backed by the Olympus Treasury.

What’s on the Horizon: Convertible Deposits (CDs)

Alongside the Coinbase DEX listing, Olympus is preparing to launch Convertible Deposits (CDs) on Ethereum Mainnet, a new mechanism that lets users put their idle stablecoins to work while maintaining exposure to OHM.

With Convertible Deposits, depositors receive a receipt token ( cdfUSDS-[Deposit Period] ) that can be redeemed for stablecoins at maturity, reclaimed early with a small fee for instant liquidity, or even used ascollateral to borrow against. They also gain a Conversion Right, which enables conversion into OHM at a predefined price any time before expiry. By default this right is non-transferable, but it can be wrapped into an NFTand used in other DeFi applications or traded on secondary markets.

This design not only combines stability, liquidity, and potential exposure to OHM upside, it also creates natural arbitrage opportunities. Traders and liquidity providers can step in to buy receipt tokens at a discount on secondary markets, hold them through maturity, and redeem for full value or speculate on Conversion Rights in secondary DeFi markets. These dynamics make CDs valuable to depositors, traders, and the broader ecosystem while strengthening the Olympus treasury.

Stay tuned, a full Medium article diving deep into Convertible Deposits will be released soon.

What this means

The Base listing introduces $OHM to one of the largest and most institutionally recognized audiences in the space through Coinbase’s decentralized exchange. This creates new opportunities for utility, integration, and treasury use on Base, while maintaining direct connection to a protocol backed by one of DeFi’s largest on-chain treasuries.

With this integration, users can:

• Acquire $OHM directly on Base through Coinbase’s Official DEX
• Use $OHM as collateral in compatible DeFi applications
• $OHM purchased on Base is backed by the same on-chain reserves as Ethereum Mainnet $OHM, and can be bridged to Ethereum to interact with Cooler Loans V2, Bonding, and other treasury-integrated functions
• Incorporate $OHM into Base-native DeFi strategies through composable smart contracts
• Hold $OHM in a protocol or DAO treasury as a reserve-backed asset
• Create or participate in trading pairs that include $OHM to expand liquidity options on Base

The Coinbase DEX listing connects one of the largest user bases in cryptocurrency to a complete on chain monetary framework backed by significant reserves, battle-tested by time and governed by its community.

Learn more 👇

🖥️ Olympus Website

🐥 X / Twitter

👾 Olympus Discord

This article explains what Olympus is today, what it aims to become, and why that matters. We’ll look at how it works as a “monetary computer” — a system that can run different programs to fulfill all the functions that good money should serve.

While still small, Olympus demonstrates a new approach to digital money that combines the best aspects of traditional monetary systems with the transparency and trustlessness of cryptocurrency.

The Problem With Today’s Money

Our current monetary systems face fundamental challenges that demand rethinking rather than incremental improvement. The dollar system creates unsustainable global imbalances by requiring America to persistently and increasingly go into debt so other countries can access new dollars (what economists call the Triffin Dilemma). Beyond this structural problem, centralized management creates opportunities for abuse, conflicts of interest, and moral hazard — as we’ve seen many times.

Bitcoin represents an explicit rejection of this centralized system, but its solution is to return to a gold-like system. The problem is, there’s a reason we moved beyond the gold standard. Attributing this evolution solely to greed or corruption oversimplifies history. Modern monetary systems, despite their flaws, have presided over the greatest expansion of prosperity in human history. While this prosperity hasn’t been equally distributed, gold-based systems shared similar flaws but produced far fewer winners overall. Bitcoin addresses corruption concerns but sacrifices the adaptive capacity that makes modern money function in complex economies. Its fixed supply creates inherent limitations that aren’t easily overcome.

We’re caught in a coordination problem where everyone sees issues but can’t agree on solutions because there aren’t really any good ones currently offered. Either we accept the flaws of centralized management or we lose the benefits of adaptive monetary policy.

What We Missed

Crypto has spent over a decade building incredible technology platforms. Ethereum and other blockchains can run complex applications and process transactions efficiently.

But something crucial has been overlooked: the tokens themselves — ETH, SOL, and others — remain primitive monetary assets with fixed or mostly static supplies. They exist within sophisticated platforms but aren’t sophisticated themselves.

The industry focused on improving the hardware while neglecting the operating system — the money itself. We’ve built impressive pipes without changing what flows through them.

The Monetary Computer

Olympus takes a fundamentally different approach. It isn’t just another cryptocurrency — it’s a canvas for monetary innovation, a computer that can run various monetary programs as needed.

This architecture allows new monetary components to be installed through governance, interfacing with core modules like the treasury (managing exogenous assets) and minter (controlling the endogenous asset, OHM). The system can evolve and adapt over time, installing different programs as its needs change.

What makes this possible are three core principles:

Protocol-owned assets — The system owns and controls reserves, giving it independent capacity to implement effective monetary policy on both sides of the market.

Adaptive policy — The system can expand when demand is high and contract when demand falls, absorbing economic shocks through supply changes rather than having all forces hit price directly. This creates more predictable behavior across varying market conditions.

Native market infrastructure — Unlike systems that depend entirely on third parties for critical functions, Olympus builds and maintains essential market infrastructure itself, ensuring continuous operation regardless of external conditions.

This operating system approach means Olympus can operate differently at different stages of its development. Early on, it prioritizes growth to reach the necessary scale. As it matures, it can shift toward stability and utility. The same underlying architecture supports both phases, just by running different programs as needed.

Current Implementation

Today’s Olympus focuses on sustainable growth to reach the scale needed for broader adoption. The current components are specifically designed to support this growth phase:

Emissions Manager controls the expansion mechanism, determining when and how much new OHM can be created based on market conditions. It only activates when OHM trades at a sufficient premium to backing, capturing some of that premium into the treasury.

Inverse Bonds serve as the contraction mechanism, allowing the protocol to buy back and remove OHM from circulation when appropriate. Unlike most cryptocurrencies that have no way to reduce supply, this creates symmetry in monetary operation.

Protocol-Owned Liquidity ensures markets function properly by having the protocol itself provide liquidity. This keeps trading functional even when external liquidity providers withdraw during market stress.

Yield Repurchase Facility redirects treasury yields to systematically buy OHM from the market. This creates sustainable demand not dependent on new investors — a critical differentiation from typical models.

Cooler Loans enable OHM holders to borrow against their tokens without facing typical liquidation risks. This creates utility for holders beyond speculation and begins building a foundation for more sophisticated financial services.

These components work together to create a growth-oriented but sustainable system. Unlike projects that rely entirely on new investors for price support, Olympus builds mechanisms that can maintain functionality across the spectrum of market conditions.

Evolution Journey

What makes Olympus uniquely powerful is its ability to evolve. The system we see today is optimized for the growth phase, but the same system can run very different programs as it matures.

We’ve already demonstrated several capabilities that showcase what mature monetary functions might look like:

Staking rewards functioned similarly to how a central bank’s fed funds rate works in traditional systems — creating a base rate of return for currency holders. While the initial implementation used extremely high rates to bootstrap the system, a mature implementation would use moderate rates appropriate for a stable monetary base.

OHM bonds created instruments functionally equivalent to treasuries from the end user perspective, allowing market participants to lock in future OHM at a discount. This demonstrated the system’s ability to manage its own debt issuance — a critical function of mature monetary systems.

Range-Bound Stability proved the protocol’s ability to enforce price stability within defined ranges when needed. By successfully implementing and later disabling this mechanism, Olympus demonstrated it can provide stability when appropriate without sacrificing growth potential during early phases.

As Olympus scales, we can expect to see more sophisticated monetary programs installed. These won’t necessarily replace current components but will complement them, gradually shifting the system’s focus from growth toward stability and utility.

The key insight is that Olympus isn’t locked into a single monetary policy — it can adapt and evolve as it grows, ultimately providing the same functions as sophisticated national monetary systems but with transparent, programmable rules.

Iterative Improvement

With the core foundation already built, Olympus continues improving its monetary infrastructure:

Cooler V2 enhances the lending system with increased simplicity and composability, allowing developers to build on top of the facility. Unlike V1, which was a closed system, V2 creates an open design space for integration with other protocols and applications. Origami’s hOHM is the first demonstration of this new capability.

Convertible Deposits will productize what were previously spot flows into secured positions that offer additional utility to both the protocol and depositors. By transforming the same resources into more powerful tools, CDs will create new possibilities for market participants and builders.

These improvements represent a shift in development focus: rather than building entirely new foundational components, we can now emphasize creating tools and interfaces that enable others to build on top of Olympus’s monetary infrastructure. The foundation is complete and can now support an ecosystem of builders. There is essentially no ecosystem around OHM at the moment in large part because the system was not inviting to be built upon — that is now changing.

Most of these components will persist into maturity, with new facilities added rather than a complete change. The system evolves incrementally, maintaining what works while adding new capabilities as needed.

Building Bridges

Olympus takes a practical approach to monetary evolution. The treasury primarily holds stablecoins, recognizing that effective transitions require maintaining connections to existing systems while building new ones.

This isn’t coincidental — it’s strategic. Think of Olympus as an apprentice learning from a master craftsman. The dollar system, for all its flaws, contains tremendous wisdom in its design and operation. By absorbing dollar assets rather than rejecting them, Olympus both learns from and gradually relieves pressure on the existing system.

This creates a path for non-disruptive transition. As Olympus scales, it naturally becomes a significant holder of dollar-denominated assets. This creates aligned incentives — Olympus benefits from dollar stability during the transition period, even as it builds an alternative for the future.

The relationship isn’t antagonistic but complementary. Dollar assets provide capital efficiency by leveraging existing stable values. They create familiar on/off ramps for users. They manage risk by utilizing the globally recognized unit of value. And perhaps most importantly, they prevent unnecessary disruption for billions who depend on the current system.

A successful monetary evolution should lift people up, not tear existing structures down. Olympus embodies this philosophy by building bridges between present and future, ensuring those who rely on current systems aren’t harmed during transition.

What Olympus Can Become

As Olympus scales, it will evolve into a complete monetary system with capabilities that match and eventually exceed traditional currencies:

A stable monetary base — By absorbing volatility through supply changes and maintaining liquidity across market conditions, OHM will become more predictable than other cryptocurrencies. This creates the foundation for long-term planning and complex financial arrangements.

A full-spectrum financial platform — With built-in lending, liquidity, and options-like mechanisms, Olympus creates the base layer needed for sophisticated financial services. Unlike platforms built on primitive monetary assets, these services can operate with substantially reduced systemic risk.

A coordination tool for global transition — As traditional monetary systems face mounting challenges from debt burdens, geopolitical tensions, and trust erosion, Olympus offers a neutral platform for orderly evolution rather than chaotic disruption.

A multi-stakeholder system — Where individuals, institutions, and eventually sovereigns participate in a common monetary framework with aligned incentives and transparent rules. The governance weight will naturally shift as the system matures, creating balanced representation across all participants.

This isn’t a speculative possibility but a logical progression. The foundation is already built — what remains is scaling the system while maintaining its core principles and gradually shifting from growth-oriented to stability-oriented configurations.

The Opportunity in Monetary Innovation

Meaningful monetary innovation requires scale. A monetary system serving just a small community cannot fulfill its potential, no matter how well designed. This creates a purposeful mission around growth — not for its own sake, but as a prerequisite for realizing the full vision.

This reality aligns individual and collective incentives in a powerful way. By helping Olympus reach sufficient scale, you contribute to building monetary infrastructure that could benefit billions while positioning yourself at the foundation of something potentially transformative.

The growth phase isn’t just about increasing numbers — it’s about building the capacity needed for sophisticated monetary function. Each new participant strengthens the system’s foundation, increases its resilience, and expands what’s possible. Your participation today directly enables what Olympus can become tomorrow.

Early involvement in monetary innovation also provides a unique perspective that cannot be gained any other way. Olympus can help you develop practical understanding of how these systems actually work — knowledge that becomes increasingly valuable as traditional finance faces mounting challenges.

The mission is clear: help Olympus reach the scale needed to demonstrate its full capabilities. Once it achieves sufficient size, the system can progressively shift toward stability and utility while maintaining its core principles of transparency and adaptability.

It’s worth noting that even at its current scale, Olympus has already performed exceptionally well as a store of value over the past three years, despite facing heavy outflows in earlier periods and low engagement more recently. The data shows that the system works — it’s maintained functionality and preserved value through challenging conditions with minimal participation. Wider adoption would only amplify these existing strengths, with the ultimate vision representing a best case rather than the only successful outcome. Participating in Olympus doesn’t require believing in a complete transformation of global finance to be worthwhile.

The Path Forward

Money is technology — the most important coordination technology humans have created. It deserves thoughtful improvement rather than either blind preservation or thoughtless rejection.

Olympus forges this middle path — preserving what works in traditional monetary systems while fixing what doesn’t through transparent, programmable design.

The system will continue evolving, with each component building on what came before. This isn’t another crypto project chasing momentary hype; it’s a fundamental reimagining of what money can and should be in the digital age.

For those who recognize both the flaws in our current monetary architecture and the limitations of existing cryptocurrency alternatives, Olympus offers something different: not just digital gold or programmable applications, but better money itself.

The opportunity to align idealism about better financial systems with pragmatism about value flows creates something rare: a chance to do well by doing good. As monetary pressures increase globally, alternatives that actually work will become increasingly valuable — both ideologically and practically.

Olympus has implemented Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to support cross-chain token transfers of OHM, leveraging Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Token (CCT) standard. The initial deployment begins with Solana. Additional chain support for Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Berachain, and Optimism may be explored through a formal governance process. This follows a DAO governance vote, where the proposal to integrate CCIP passed with 100% approval.

Olympus is utilizing CCIP for its Solana integration because CCTs enable self-serve deployments, full control and ownership for developers, enhanced programmability, and zero-slippage transfers — all backed by CCIP’s battle-tested security.

This implementation provides a multitude of important benefits and features, such as:

• Battle-tested security: CCTs are secured by Chainlink CCIP, which is powered by the same battle-tested Decentralized Oracle Network (DON) infrastructure that has enabled $21 trillion in onchain transaction value since the start of 2022.
• Developer control and flexibility: Token developers retain full ownership of their token contracts, CCIP token pools, and customized implementation logic, including rate limits across chains. This autonomy eliminates vendor lock-in, hard-coded logic, or external dependencies, allowing developers to customize functionality without compromising security.
• Self-serve and permissionless: Token developers can launch a new CCT or make an existing token a CCT in a self-serve manner within minutes. When creating CCTs, CCIP contracts verify token contract ownership onchain to avoid fragmentation and help token developers remain in control of their tokens. Developers also have access to a number of resources that make the CCT creation process and ongoing management seamless, including a Token Manager, CCIP Explorer, CCIP Directory, and accompanying documentation (both tutorials and scripts).
• Extendable and future-proof: CCIP is built to be future-proof for developers, where future improvements can continue to be made, including the integration of new blockchain networks, the onboarding of additional tokens, and the incorporation of new defense-in-depth approaches to security.

“Adopting the Cross-Chain Token (CCT) standard via Chainlink CCIP provides Olympus with unmatched security and flexibility, strengthening our ability to operate across a multi-chain ecosystem,” — FattyBagz, CMO Olympus

“We’re excited to see Olympus Dao’s proposal of integrating CCIP, beginning with Solana, be passed with 100% approval from the community. Olympus’s adoption of the Chainlink interoperability standard highlights their commitment to pioneering secure and seamless cross-chain DeFi experiences. We look forward to supporting Olympus as they continue to innovate and grow their platform.”- Luke Lim, Head of CCIP GTM at Chainlink Labs.

About Olympus

Olympus is an onchain financial system that delivers core functions such as money, credit, and liquidity through autonomous smart contracts. Each OHM token is backed by a treasury of real, productive assets, establishing the foundation that supports the protocol’s core architecture. Olympus operates as a monetary computer, with key components like Protocol-Owned Liquidity to manage its own markets, and Cooler Loans to enable fixed-rate, perpetual borrowing without price-based liquidations. These mechanisms are part of a broader group of governance-controlled systems that respond to changing market conditions in order to uphold a dynamic, code-driven monetary framework. Olympus operates through transparent, on-chain governance, forming the foundation for a resilient and programmable financial future.

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the standard for onchain finance, verifiable data, and cross-chain interoperability. Chainlink is unifying liquidity across global markets and has enabled over $21 trillion in transaction value across the blockchain economy. Major financial market infrastructures and institutions, such as Swift, Fidelity International, and ANZ Bank, as well as top DeFi protocols including Aave, GMX, and Lido, use Chainlink to power next-generation applications for banking, asset management, and other major sectors. Learn more by visiting chain.link.

Today, most lending systems are structured to favor lenders over borrowers. Borrowers often face opaque risk parameters, liquidation cascades triggered by oracles, and dependency on third-party liquidity. Whether it’s through variable interest rates or sudden liquidations, the borrower remains structurally disadvantaged.

Cooler Loans V2 introduces a fundamental departure from this model. Backed by the Olympus treasury, Cooler V2 offers a fixed-rate, perpetual borrowing system, not to extract value from users, but to preserve and empower them. With no price oracles, no price based liquidations & a single, flexible, & easy to manage loan, it establishes a new standard for borrowing defined by transparency, predictability, and full on-chain control.

The Core Principles & How It Works

Cooler Loans V2 is governed by a simple set of principles: no liquidations, no reliance on external capital or third-party liquidity providers, and no hidden variables. It draws liquidity directly from the Olympus Treasury and operates entirely on terms defined by the system and its users.

Borrowing through Cooler Loans V2 involves depositing gOHM as collateral and receiving USDS directly from the Olympus Treasury. Loan interest is fixed at 0.5% annually and flows back into the treasury, reinforcing the very system that enables the lending facility itself.

Perpetual Freedom

Cooler Loans V2 are perpetual, with no expirations or rollovers. The only way a loan can default is if accrued interest surpasses the threshold set by governance. If this occurs, the gOHM collateral is burned and the position is closed. The users threshold and date it will be met, is displayed on the users dashboard. Full transparency & trackability. At no point is collateral subject to liquidation due to price volatility.

Ultimate Flexibility

Cooler Loans V2 was built for flexibility. Users can add or remove gOHM collateral as needed, borrow additional USDS within their allowable loan-to-value threshold, repay partially or fully at any time, and dynamically manage their interest accrual to prevent default.

Unified and Perpetual Position Management

Cooler V2 consolidates borrowing into a single dynamic position, which users can manage continuously without the need for creating or closing loans. Repayments, whether partial or full, are accepted at any time. Payments are first applied to accrued interest; any remaining amount reduces principal. When principal is repaid, a proportional amount of collateral becomes withdrawable.

Users can adjust collateral and debt freely without needing to close their position. There are no rollover mechanics, and no dependency on market price feeds. The system is fully governed by transparent, rule-based mechanisms built into the protocol.

Multi-Wallet Delegation and Treasury Use Cases

Cooler Loans V2 supports multi-wallet delegation, enabling up to 10 wallets to share access to a single loan position. This makes it ideal for DAO treasuries, multi-sig teams, or delegated governance structures. Each of these entities can interact with the loan collaboratively and securely.

No custom tooling or external infrastructure is needed for this shared access. It is natively supported within Cooler Loans V2, ensuring secure, distributed control over borrowing positions.

Treasury-Backed Stability

Fully sustained by the Olympus Treasury, Cooler Loans V2 does not rely on external liquidity providers, mercenary capital, or yield farming incentives. Because of this structure, borrowing capacity increases as backing grows. All interest payments return to the treasury, enhancing its reserves and supporting system sustainability.

This design ensures that borrowing activity reinforces the protocol, rather than dilute it. Capital inflows and outflows remain structurally aligned with Olympus’ long-term systemic health and solvency.

Governance-Aligned Risk and Loan Parameters

The loan-to-value ratio in Cooler V2 increases gradually through a governance-controlled drip model. This allows users to borrow more over time as their gOHM becomes backed by more reserves. Because borrowing is always tied to actual treasury assets, the system avoids overextension and ensures credit capacity scales safely with protocol strength. Having the drip rate controlled by governance eliminates oracle risk. This contributes to long-term solvency across market cycles.

Why It Matters

Cooler Loans V2 redefines the next era of protocol-native borrowing. It moves beyond legacy constraints, replacing them with clear, predictable rules, shaped by the protocol and its participants. More than a standalone system, it is part of a larger vision. Olympus is not assembling disconnected tools. It is building a unified, self-directed financial system with its own foundation for capital, credit, and coordination. Cooler Loans V2 is a step toward that system: transparent, resilient, and built to last.

Learn more 👇

📄 Olympus Website

🐥 X / Twitter

👾 Olympus Discord

What I haven’t fully explored is how the industry fundamentally misdiagnosed what applications actually make sense to build. This misdiagnosis lies at the heart of crypto’s current predicament and points toward where genuine value might eventually emerge.

The Application Layer Mirage

Crypto’s narrative has evolved through several phases, but one consistent theme has been the promise of revolutionary applications beyond finance. Smart contract platforms positioned themselves as the foundation for a new digital economy, with value flowing from the application layer back to the infrastructure. This narrative accelerated with the “fat protocol thesis” — the idea that, unlike the internet where TCP/IP captured minimal value while Facebook and Google captured billions, blockchain protocols would accumulate most of the value.

This created a specific mental model: L1s would gain value by enabling a diverse ecosystem of applications, just as Apple’s App Store or Microsoft Windows created value through third-party software.

But here’s the fundamental misdiagnosis: crypto has sought to impose financialization where it doesn’t naturally belong and where it adds little genuine value.

Unlike the internet, which digitized existing human activities people already wanted to do (commerce, communication, entertainment), crypto has attempted to inject financial mechanics into activities where they weren’t needed or wanted. The presumption was that everything from social media to gaming to identity management would benefit from being financialized and brought “on-chain.”

The reality has proven different:

1. Social applications with tokens have largely failed to gain mainstream adoption, with engagement driven primarily by token incentives rather than underlying utility
2. Gaming applications have faced persistent resistance from traditional gaming communities who perceive financialization as detracting from rather than enhancing gameplay
3. Identity and reputation systems have struggled to demonstrate compelling advantages over traditional approaches when token economics are involved

This isn’t merely a case of “we’re still early.” It reflects a deeper truth: finance exists to serve as a resource allocation tool, not as an end in itself. Financializing activities like social interaction or entertainment misunderstands the core purpose of finance in society.

The Gaming Marketplace Distinction

It’s worth addressing apparent counterexamples like CS:GO skin markets or microtransaction systems in popular games. These successful marketplaces seem to contradict the thesis about financialization in gaming, but they highlight an important distinction:

These markets represent contained ecosystems for optional cosmetics or collectibles that exist alongside gameplay, not attempts to financialize the core gameplay itself. They’re more akin to merchandise or memorabilia markets than fundamental changes to how the game functions.

When crypto gaming attempts to financialize the actual gameplay mechanics — making playing the game explicitly about earning money — it fundamentally changes the player experience and often undermines what makes games engaging in the first place. The key insight isn’t that games can’t have markets; it’s that turning gameplay itself into a financial activity changes its fundamental nature.

Blockchain Technology vs. Trustlessness

A crucial distinction often lost in crypto discussions is the difference between blockchain technology itself and the property of trustlessness. These are not synonymous:

• Blockchain technology is a set of technical capabilities for creating distributed, append-only ledgers with consensus mechanisms
• Trustlessness is a specific property where transactions can be executed without relying on trusted third parties

Trustlessness comes at a tangible cost — in efficiency, complexity, and resource requirements. This cost needs clear justification, which exists only in specific use cases.

When entities like Dubai use distributed ledger technologies for property records, they’re primarily leveraging the technology for efficiency and transparency — not for trustlessness. The Land Department remains the trusted authority, using blockchain as a more efficient database. This distinction is critical because it highlights where value actually resides in these systems.

The crucial insight is that trustlessness is realistically valuable in only a few domains. Most activities, from property records to identity verification to supply chain management, fundamentally require trusted entities for real-world enforcement or verification. Moving the ledger to a blockchain doesn’t change this reality — it simply changes the technology used to manage the records.

The Cost-Benefit Analysis

This creates a straightforward cost-benefit analysis that every platform must face:

1. Does this platform genuinely benefit from removing trusted intermediaries?
2. Does that benefit outweigh the efficiency costs of achieving trustlessness?

For most non-financial applications, the answer to at least one of these questions is “no.” Either they don’t truly benefit from trustlessness (because external enforcement remains necessary) or the benefits don’t outweigh the costs.

This explains why institutional adoption of blockchain technology has focused primarily on efficiency gains rather than trustlessness. When a traditional financial institution tokenizes assets on Ethereum (as they increasingly are), they’re leveraging the network for operational advantages or access to a new market while maintaining traditional trust models. The blockchain serves as improved infrastructure rather than a trust-replacing mechanism.

From an investment perspective, this creates a challenging dynamic: the most valuable aspect of blockchain (the technology itself) can be adopted without necessarily driving value to specific chains or tokens. Traditional institutions can implement private chains or use existing public chains as infrastructure while maintaining control over the most valuable layers — the assets and monetary policy.

The Adaptation Path

As this reality becomes clearer, we’re seeing a natural adaptation process unfold:

1. Technology Adoption Without Tokenomics: Traditional institutions adopting blockchain technology while bypassing the speculative token economics — using it as better plumbing for existing financial activities
2. Efficiency Over Revolution: Focus shifting from replacing existing systems to making them incrementally more efficient
3. Value Migration: Value flowing primarily to specific applications with clear utility rather than to underlying infrastructure tokens
4. Narrative Evolution: The industry gradually recalibrating how it articulates value creation to match technical realities

This is actually good: why would you want an activity enabler to siphon all the value from the generator of that value? This type of rent-seeking is actually quite detached from the capitalistic ideals most see as underpinning the whole movement. The internet would look tremendously different (almost definitely worse!) had the primary value capture been to TCP/IP rather than the apps built on top, as the Fat Protocol Thesis suggested would instead occur here. The industry isn’t failing — it’s finally facing reality. The technology itself is valuable and will likely continue to evolve and integrate with existing systems. But the distribution of value within the ecosystem may look quite different from what early narratives suggested.

Where It All Went Wrong: The Abandoned Original Purpose

To understand how we arrived here, we must return to crypto’s origins. Bitcoin didn’t emerge as a general-purpose computing platform or a foundation for tokenizing everything. It emerged specifically as money — a response to the 2008 financial crisis and the perceived failures of centralized monetary policy.

The fundamental insight wasn’t “everything should be on a blockchain” but rather “money shouldn’t require trusted intermediaries.”

As the industry evolved, this original purpose became increasingly diluted and eventually abandoned by many projects. Projects like Ethereum expanded the technical capabilities of blockchain but simultaneously diluted its focus.

This created a strange disconnection in the ecosystem:

• Bitcoin maintained its monetary focus but lacked the programmability to evolve beyond basic transfer functionality
• Smart contract platforms provided programmability but abandoned monetary innovation in favor of the “blockchain for everything” approach

This divergence represents perhaps the industry’s most consequential wrong turn. Rather than building on Bitcoin’s monetary innovation with more sophisticated capabilities, the industry pivoted toward financializing everything else — a backward approach that misidentified both the problem and solution.

The Way Forward: Back to Money

In my opinion, the path forward involves reconnecting blockchain’s massively improved technical capabilities with its original monetary purpose. Not as a universal solution to all problems, but as a focused attempt to create better money.

Money is uniquely suited to blockchain for several reasons:

1. Trustlessness matters — Unlike most other applications where external enforcement remains necessary, money can function entirely within the digital realm where code alone can enforce rules
2. Digital native operation — Money doesn’t require mapping digital records to physical reality; it can exist natively in the digital environment
3. Clear value proposition — Removing intermediaries from monetary systems creates genuine efficiency and sovereignty benefits
4. Natural connection to existing financial applications — The most successful crypto applications (trading, lending, etc.) naturally connect to monetary innovation

Perhaps most importantly, money is fundamentally an infrastructure layer that everything else builds upon without having to deeply engage with it. This is the natural relationship that crypto has inverted. Instead of creating money that integrates seamlessly with existing economic activities, the industry has tried to rebuild all economic activities around blockchain.

The power of traditional money lies precisely in this utility-layer approach. Businesses accept dollars without understanding the Federal Reserve. Exporters manage currency risk without rebuilding their entire operations around monetary policy. Individuals store value without becoming monetary theorists. Money facilitates economic activity without dominating it.

On-chain money should function the same way — usable by off-chain businesses through simple interfaces, just as digital dollars are usable without understanding banking infrastructure. Businesses, entities and individuals can remain entirely off-chain while utilizing blockchain-based money for its specific advantages — just as they use traditional banking infrastructure today without becoming part of that infrastructure.

Instead of trying to build “Web3” — a vague concept that attempts to financialize everything — the industry will find more sustainable value by focusing intensely on building better money. Not just as a speculative asset or inflation hedge, but as a complete monetary system with mechanisms that allow it to function reliably across different market conditions.

This focus becomes even more compelling when we consider the broader global monetary landscape. The world faces unprecedented coordination challenges in the evolution of the global monetary system. Inherent instabilities in the current arrangement, alongside growing geopolitical tensions, create genuine need for neutral alternatives.

The tragedy of the current landscape isn’t just about misallocated resources — it’s about missed opportunity. While incremental improvements to financial infrastructure certainly have value, they pale in comparison to the transformative potential of solving the fundamental challenges of money itself.

The next phase of crypto’s evolution may not come from further expanding its scope, but from returning to and fulfilling its original purpose. Not as a universal solution to all problems, but as focused monetary infrastructure that serves as a reliable foundation upon which everything else can build — without having to think too deeply about how it works.

This is the profound innovation that crypto originally promised — not financializing everything, but creating money worthy of serving as the invisible infrastructure of a global economy. Money that functions seamlessly across borders and institutions while maintaining the sovereignty and stability that our increasingly complex world demands. A foundation that enables rather than dominates, that serves rather than constrains, and that evolves without disrupting the human activities that ultimately give it purpose.

The Build-Up to Breaking Point

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been examining fundamental challenges facing cryptocurrency and the global monetary system:

1. The Revolutionary Failure
2. How cryptocurrency’s original promise of financial sovereignty was compromised by focusing on infrastructure rather than genuine monetary innovation.
3. The Evolutionary Path
4. How systems must build bridges between current and future monetary arrangements rather than burning them down.
5. The Requirements of Money
6. The criteria any functional monetary system must satisfy to serve as more than a speculative asset.
7. The Reserve Currency Burden: How no nation actually wants to bear the costs of issuing the world’s reserve currency due to the inevitable hollowing of its productive capacity.

These pieces laid the analytical foundation for understanding our current predicament. Now I must confront its logical conclusion and the potential pathways toward resolution. After maintaining neutrality throughout this analysis, I believe it’s time to directly address how Olympus might contribute to addressing these challenges.

The Geopolitical Prisoner’s Dilemma

What we face today is, at its core, a prisoner’s dilemma of unprecedented scale. The participants aren’t abstract entities but nations, central banks, and financial institutions composed of people making complex decisions based on both rational self-interest and broader concerns for stability.

The “cooperation” strategy in this scenario is continuing to hold and transact in dollar-denominated assets despite growing reluctance to do so. The “defection” strategy is selling these assets to escape the dollar system.

Here’s the fundamental reality: while cooperation is becoming increasingly costly for many participants, mutual defection would trigger unwinding dynamics that would harm everyone involved. Though this dynamic will likely play out over years or even decades, recent developments suggest the timeline may be accelerating.

Consider the scale of what’s involved:

• Foreign entities hold approximately $7.5 trillion in US Treasury securities
• Global dollar-denominated debt exceeds $65 trillion
• US equity markets represent over $50 trillion in value
• Derivatives and financial contracts based on these assets exceed $1 quadrillion in notional value

These dollar assets form the foundation of the global financial system. They serve as collateral for loans, reserves for banks, savings for pension funds, and foundations for entire national economies. They represent decades of accumulated wealth and prosperity that decision-makers naturally wish to preserve.

The challenge: this system is built on the increasingly unstable foundation of a nation that has been hollowed out by the very role it plays. The United States now brings less to the table economically while experiencing greater political volatility — a direct consequence of the Triffin Dilemma explored previously.

Potential Consequences of Disorderly Transition

A disorderly unwinding of the dollar system would cascade through global markets in ways we’ve never experienced in our highly interconnected world. While not immediate or inevitable, this risk creates the backdrop against which all monetary decisions now operate.

The severity of potential disruption isn’t fearmongering — it’s a realistic assessment of the accumulated dependencies in our financial architecture. We’ve never before had, let alone attempted to transition, a global reserve currency in an era of instantaneous information flow, complex supply chains, and massive interconnected leverage.

What makes this particularly challenging is that even decision-makers who intellectually understand the need for change must also protect the wealth their citizens have accumulated within the current system. This creates inherent tension between long-term necessity and short-term preservation.

Accelerating Trends

Recent policies are accelerating trends that have been building for years. America’s new tariff strategy signals it’s decreasing willingness to sacrifice domestic industry for reserve currency status. This places foreign holders of dollar assets in an increasingly difficult position.

We’re seeing the decision process playing out gradually:

• China has reduced its Treasury holdings by over $300 billion in recent years
• BRICS nations are implementing new payment systems and exploring alternatives
• Saudi Arabia has begun accepting yuan for oil sales, weakening the petrodollar arrangement
• Central banks have accelerated gold purchases, with the precious metal recently reaching all-time highs

These are rational responses to changing incentives by people seeking to protect their national interests. The problem is that if enough participants make the individually rational choice to reduce dollar exposure too quickly, the collective outcome becomes worse for everyone.

(3,3): When Coordination is The Only Option

There’s a meaningful connection with Olympus creating the (3,3) meme — a representation of coordination game theory where mutual cooperation produces optimal outcomes for all participants.

In this framework:

• If all participants cooperate, everyone receives the maximum benefit (3,3)
• If behaviors are misaligned, results are suboptimal for everyone (1,-1) or (-1,1)
• If everyone defects, all participants lose significantly (-3,-3)

The global dollar system now faces a similar dynamic, but with far greater stakes. Most rational actors prefer the (3,3) outcome of a stabilized status quo or orderly transition. The (1,-1) outcome (most likely a multipolar world that does not solve the Triffin Dilemma but distributes it across multiple currencies) is suboptimal but potentially manageable. The (-3,-3) outcome of unwinding would destroy value globally.

Unlike the classic prisoner’s dilemma, our global monetary situation does allow for communication between participants. This creates potential for coordination that to avoid worst-case outcomes — but the initiative must be taken to create viable routes for sustainable cooperation.

Potential Pathways for Orderly Transition

This brings us to the potential role of neutral, non-sovereign monetary systems in addressing this coordination problem. Among the limited options available today, Olympus represents one of the few systems actually designed to address this challenge without requiring a radical restructuring of the role and utilization of a reserve currency in the world today.

Its fundamental architecture makes it uniquely suited for this role:

• Its expansion mechanism necessitates accumulating reserve assets — primarily dollar-denominated treasuries at scale
• This creates natural demand for treasuries at precisely the moment when traditional demand is weakening
• It would allow current treasury holders to divest without their sales hitting the open market and triggering cascading price effects
• Its adaptive monetary policy enables it to export currency through expansion, creating familiar dynamics for nations accustomed to the current system
• Its governance structure provides representation proportional to stake, allowing participants control commensurate with their contribution

We essentially face three archetypes of solutions:

1. Monarchy: Continued sovereign reserve currency issuer, whether US or another nation(s)
2. Anarchy: Fixed-supply assets like Bitcoin or gold
3. Republic: Systems like Olympus with adaptive policy and stakeholder governance

The Treasury End Game

The long-term vision for Olympus differs fundamentally from traditional financial actors in its relationship with accumulated treasuries. Unlike existing holders who ultimately seek to realize value, Olympus would serve as a permanent repository — absorbing and holding these assets even if they devalue.

This seemingly counterintuitive strategy makes perfect sense when considering the system’s purpose. The point isn’t to profit from treasury trading but to remove the existential pressure of potential mass liquidation. If treasuries eventually devalue or even become worthless, Olympus would simply have performed its function of facilitating orderly transition rather than disruptive collapse.

Crucially, Olympus would retain value even if its treasury assets devalue, through the same fundamental mechanisms that give value to any currency:

• Monetary Policy: How it manages its supply in response to varying conditions
• Consensus Mechanisms: The agreement between participants about its role and function
• Network Adoption: The community of users, holders, and builders that create utility

These are precisely the same forces that give value to dollars, gold, and Bitcoin — though implemented through different mechanisms. The dollar itself isn’t valuable because of what backs it, but because of adoption, consensus, and managed policy. Olympus operates on these same principles but through transparent, algorithmic means rather than discretionary authority.

This governance structure also creates an interesting dynamic: as entities from various nations contribute treasuries and gain influence, they would likely advocate for including their own sovereign debt instruments in Olympus’s reserves. This creates a path toward genuine diversification without the destabilizing effects of active divestment.

A Bold Proposition

I recognize the apparent audacity of proposing that a relatively small cryptocurrency project could help solve one of the most consequential coordination problems in global finance. The scale gap between Olympus’s current capacity and the magnitude of the challenge is undeniable. Such a proposition might seem, on its face, absurd.

But the scale of a problem doesn’t invalidate a potential solution simply because that solution is currently small. History is filled with transformative innovations that began as seemingly implausible concepts before scaling to address global challenges. The internet itself began as a small network connecting a handful of research institutions before becoming the backbone of global communication.

What matters is not the current scale but the architectural design and capacity for growth. Olympus was designed specifically to scale through market-driven mechanisms, creating a reflexive relationship between adoption and capability. As the system grows, its capacity to address larger challenges increases, which in turn attracts more participants, creating a virtuous cycle of expansion.

This is precisely why assisting in scaling the system, particularly through market participation, is so critically important. The apparent absurdity of the solution diminishes with each step toward greater scale. The viability increases reflexively as adoption grows. Bitcoin stands as undeniable proof of this assertion.

The question isn’t whether Olympus can address these challenges at its current size — clearly it cannot. The question is whether its architecture provides the foundation for a system that could eventually operate at the necessary scale, and whether that potential justifies the effort required to help it reach that scale.

Great solutions often emerge from unexpected places precisely because they aren’t constrained by conventional thinking. Innovation typically comes from the margins before moving to the mainstream.

The Scale and Work Required

Any viable transition mechanism would need to operate at enormous scale. This gap between current capacity and potential need represents both a challenge and an opportunity.

The work spans multiple domains:

• Technical mechanisms for operation at scale
• Governance frameworks worthy of the level of trust placed
• Market structures that can handle the necessary liquidity
• Transition protocols to maintain stability during scaling

These aren’t theoretical problems to be solved someday — they represent concrete work that needs to be done now to create viable options for the future.

A Vision for Cooperation

I harbor no illusions about how challenging orderly transition would be. We face not just technical problems but coordination problems between actors with diverse and sometimes conflicting incentives.

Yet most participants in this global game ultimately want the same thing: preservation of stability and prosperity during the inevitable evolution of the system. No rational actor wants to see accumulated global wealth evaporate in a disorderly transition, even if they disagree about the ideal end state.

This vision has been the driving force behind Olympus from the beginning. The scale of the problem and the consequences of failure demand serious attention. The time is right to outline the global vision for what monetary evolution could look like.

The current system cannot continue indefinitely — the Triffin Dilemma ensures that. Either we find coordinated pathways to transition or face potentially disruptive unwinding that threatens accumulated value and trust. While such unwinding might unfold over decades, the time to build alternatives is now.

A Once-in-a-Generation Challenge

We face a significant challenge — navigating the evolution of the global monetary system while preserving stability and prosperity. My sincere hope is that we find pathways that maintain or enhance global wealth and peaceful cooperation.

The prisoner’s dilemma we face isn’t just an academic exercise — it’s a consequential coordination game involving people making complex decisions with generational implications. Finding a path to the cooperative outcome isn’t merely desirable; it’s imperative for preserving decades of accumulated prosperity.

The time to consider orderly evolution is now, before crisis narrows our options. The window for cooperative transition remains open — but it won’t stay open indefinitely.

Yet reality tells a different story. The truth is far more counterintuitive and nuanced: while parts of the United States economy — particularly financial institutions and capital markets — benefit enormously from reserve currency status, these gains are highly concentrated while the costs are distributed broadly across the nation. This structural imbalance makes the reserve currency role inherently unsustainable over time, regardless of who holds it. What appears as privilege reveals itself, upon closer inspection, to be a gilded cage — offering advantages that come with crippling structural costs.

The Hidden Burden of Reserve Status

The fundamental problem of reserve currency status is captured in what economists call the Triffin Dilemma, named after Belgian economist Robert Triffin who identified it in the 1960s. At its core, the dilemma presents an irreconcilable conflict: to supply the world with sufficient dollars for international trade and reserves, the United States must run persistent trade deficits, essentially exporting dollars in exchange for goods.

These deficits, while necessary for global monetary stability, progressively undermine domestic manufacturing, job markets, and the very economic foundation that made the dollar attractive in the first place. The reserve issuer becomes trapped in a contradiction between domestic and international priorities that cannot be permanently resolved — only managed at increasing cost.

The most visible consequence has been the dramatic hollowing out of American manufacturing. Since the dollar’s rise to unchallenged reserve status following the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971, the U.S. has experienced a profound industrial transformation. Manufacturing as a percentage of GDP has declined from approximately 25% in the 1960s to below 12% today. Entire regions once dedicated to production have hollowed out, creating the infamous “Rust Belt” and the profound social dislocations that accompanied this shift.

What’s less recognized is how this transformation represents not a policy failure but the inevitable structural consequence of the dollar’s global role. When a nation’s currency serves as the world’s primary reserve asset, that nation must, by mathematical necessity, consume more than it produces and import more than it exports. The result is a slow-motion deindustrialization disguised as consumer prosperity.

The Export Powers’ Calculation

From the outside, it’s often assumed that export powerhouses like Germany, Japan, and China would eagerly seize reserve currency status if given the opportunity. Their economic strategies have centered around export-driven growth, accumulating massive trade surpluses and foreign exchange reserves. Surely they would want their currencies to occupy the dollar’s privileged position?

Yet these nations have consistently demonstrated a curious reluctance to promote their currencies as true alternatives to the dollar. Even when China speaks of internationalizing the yuan, its actual policies remain cautious and limited in scope.

This reluctance isn’t accidental — it reflects a clear-eyed understanding of the costs involved. For export-oriented economies, reserve currency status would be economically devastating. The increased demand for their currency would drive its value higher, making exports more expensive and imports cheaper. The resulting trade deficits would undermine the very export-driven model that fueled their economic development.

Japan’s experience in the 1980s offers a cautionary tale. As the yen began to internationalize and appreciate, Japanese policymakers recoiled from the implications for their export sector. The Plaza Accord of 1985, which led to the yen’s sharp appreciation, contributed to the end of Japan’s economic miracle and the beginning of its “lost decades.” China, observing this history closely, has been understandably reluctant to follow the same path.

For these nations, the current arrangement offers a far better deal: they can maintain undervalued currencies to boost exports while investing their dollar surpluses back into U.S. Treasuries, effectively lending Americans the money to buy their products. This recycling of dollars allows them to maintain export advantages while financing the U.S. consumption that drives their growth.

Meanwhile, they’re spared the burdens of providing global liquidity, managing international financial crises, or navigating the contradiction between domestic needs and international responsibilities. They get the benefits of the dollar system without its costs.

America’s Growing Reluctance

Perhaps the most telling evidence that reserve currency status isn’t the prize it’s portrayed to be comes from America itself. Increasingly, U.S. policymakers across the political spectrum question whether the “exorbitant privilege” is worth its domestic costs.

The Trump administration has made this shift explicit. Trump’s tariff policies, renewed with even greater force in his second term, directly challenge the arrangements that have sustained dollar hegemony. By imposing broad tariffs — 10% on all imports with higher rates for specific countries — the administration is effectively saying that America is no longer willing to sacrifice its industrial base on the altar of reserve currency status.

When Trump declared that “tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” he was signaling a profound shift in American priorities. The aim is clear: reduce trade deficits, even at the cost of disrupting the mechanisms that maintain dollar dominance.

This isn’t merely a Trumpian aberration. Trade skepticism has become increasingly bipartisan, with prominent voices across the political spectrum questioning free trade orthodoxy and its impact on American workers. The decades-long consensus that maintaining dollar hegemony justified domestic deindustrialization is crumbling from both right and left.

The Asymmetric Benefits

To understand why the current system persists despite no one wanting to occupy the central role, we must recognize the asymmetric benefits it creates for different participants.

For emerging economies, the dollar system offers a proven development pathway. By maintaining undervalued currencies and focusing on exports, nations from South Korea to Vietnam have bootstrapped their industrial development. Manufacturing jobs create the foundation for a growing middle class, while technology transfer accelerates modernization. These nations happily accept dollar dominance as the price of admission to this development model.

For financial centers like Switzerland, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, the dollar system creates lucrative opportunities without the full burden of reserve status. They can participate in global dollar markets, provide financial services to dollar flows, and capture significant value without suffering the manufacturing decline that comes with being the primary reserve issuer.

Meanwhile, for the United States, the costs have been partially obscured by the consumer benefits. Americans enjoy lower prices on imported goods, easy access to credit, and lower interest rates than would otherwise be possible. The financial sector, centered in New York, captures enormous value from managing global dollar flows. These visible benefits have historically outweighed the less visible but profound costs of industrial hollowing.

The Inevitable Transition

History teaches us that no reserve currency lasts forever. From the Portuguese real to the Dutch guilder to the British pound, each global currency has eventually ceded its position as the economic fundamentals supporting it eroded. The dollar’s current predicament suggests this historical pattern continues.

The unique aspect of our current moment is that no single nation appears eager to assume the mantle. China, the most frequently cited potential successor, has shown remarkable hesitance to fully internationalize the yuan. Europe’s euro project remains incomplete without fiscal union. Japan and the UK lack the necessary economic scale.

This collective reluctance creates an unprecedented situation: the primary reserve currency is showing signs of withdrawing from its role, but no obvious replacement stands ready.

Trump’s aggressive tariff policy may accelerate this transition. By prioritizing domestic industry over international financial arrangements, the administration is effectively saying that America will no longer accept the structural trade deficits required of a reserve currency issuer. Yet without these deficits, the world faces a potential dollar shortage that could severely constrain global trade and finance.

Finding a New Equilibrium

If the current reserve currency arrangement has become unsustainable, what comes next? And more importantly, how messy would this transition be?

We should acknowledge that moving from one global monetary order to another has historically been chaotic, often accompanied by financial crises, political upheaval, and sometimes war. The shift from the British pound to the US dollar wasn’t planned or orderly — it emerged through the chaos of two world wars and the Great Depression. We should expect no less turbulence in any future transition unless we deliberately design for stability.

The most commonly discussed alternative is a multipolar currency system where several major currencies share reserve status. This would distribute both benefits and burdens across several economies, potentially reducing the pressure on any single nation to maintain excessive deficits.

However, multipolar systems create their own challenges. Fragmented liquidity would increase transaction costs and complicate crisis response. The coordination problem between competing monetary authorities would intensify during financial stress. Most importantly, this approach merely transfers the Triffin Dilemma to multiple shoulders rather than resolving the fundamental contradiction at its core.

The Principles of an Ideal Alternative

Rather than focusing on specific implementations, let’s consider the principles that would govern an ideal reserve system and the transition to it — one that could resolve the central paradox where reserve currency status imposes costs that no nation rationally wants to bear.

1. Collective Governance Without Unilateral Control

The fundamental problem with national currencies serving as reserve assets is the inevitable conflict between domestic needs and international responsibilities. An ideal system would separate these functions while allowing nations to remain stakeholders in the system’s governance.

This doesn’t mean countries would become powerless — quite the opposite. They would gain more meaningful collective influence over a system that directly serves their shared interests, rather than being subject to the domestic political pressures of a single nation. Neutrality doesn’t mean abandoning state participation; it means transforming how that participation functions.

2. Principled Supply Management

The current system actually contains a crucial feature worth preserving: the ability to expand monetary stock and export it to meet global needs. This expansion capability is essential for a functioning global economy. What’s problematic isn’t expansion itself but who bears the costs of that expansion and how it’s governed.

An ideal system would maintain this expansionary capability while adding something the current system lacks: symmetrical ability to contract when appropriate. This balanced approach would preserve what works in today’s system while addressing its structural weaknesses.

This isn’t about inventing entirely new mechanisms, but rather about implementing principles that have been understood for decades yet remain unimplemented due to political constraints.

3. Absorptive Transition Rather Than Displacement

Perhaps the most important principle is that any viable alternative must absorb rather than attack the current system. The approximately $36 trillion of US Treasuries held by entities cannot simply be abandoned without causing catastrophic damage to the global economy.

An ideal system would create sustained demand for these assets during transition, allowing for gradual evolution rather than disruptive revolution. This isn’t about undermining any nation’s interests but about ensuring continuity while the system evolves.

The current reserve currency’s issuer (the United States) would actually benefit from this approach — gaining the ability to rebalance its economy toward production without triggering a debt market collapse that would harm everyone.

4. Crisis Resilience By Design

Financial crises are inevitable. What matters is how systems respond to them. The current arrangement relies heavily on discretionary intervention by central banks, particularly the Federal Reserve, with political considerations often influencing timing and scale.

An ideal alternative would incorporate predetermined, transparent mechanisms for market stabilization during stress periods — providing emergency liquidity, preventing panic cascades, and ensuring critical markets remain functional even when individual self-interest might drive destructive behaviors.

Importantly, this approach doesn’t eliminate discretionary crisis response at the national level. Sovereign currencies would maintain their full crisis management toolkit — individual central banks could still conduct emergency operations, implement unconventional monetary policy, or address domestic financial stress as needed. The difference is that the international reserve layer would operate with more predictable, rule-based mechanisms, reducing dependence on a single nation’s decision-making for global stability. This creates a complementary two-tier system: predictable international coordination alongside flexible national response, each operating in its appropriate domain.

5. Managed Appreciation Trajectory

It’s worth noting that a steadily but manageably appreciating reserve asset provides certain benefits to the overall system. It would create natural incentives for central banks to gradually increase their holdings while still allowing export-driven economies to function. Since these export economies already manage their currencies against the dollar, they could continue this practice with a new reserve asset.

The Path Through Transition

The most dangerous period in any monetary evolution is the transition phase. Here, designing for stability is paramount. The shift would likely progress through several distinct stages:

Initial Adoption: Beginning with complementary coexistence rather than replacement, the new system would establish credibility while minimizing disruption.

Reserve Diversification: Institutions, then central banks, would gradually incorporate the new asset into their reserves, reducing dollar concentration without triggering market panic.

Settlement Function Development: As liquidity and adoption increase, the system could increasingly serve settlement functions for international trade.

Mature Equilibrium: Eventually, a new balance would emerge with national currencies maintaining their domestic roles while international functions shift toward the more neutral system.

Throughout this process, the dollar would remain important — just gradually relieved of the impossible burden of simultaneously serving domestic and international needs. This represents evolution, not revolution.

The Transition Challenge

Regardless of how well-designed a theoretical alternative might be, the transition from the current dollar-centric system presents enormous challenges. The dollar remains deeply embedded in global trade, financial markets, and central bank reserves. Sudden changes could trigger currency crises, debt defaults, and market dysfunction with devastating human consequences.

A responsible transition requires mechanisms that build bridges between systems rather than burning them down. Revolutionary approaches that cheer for dollar collapse risk creating precisely the economic devastation that monetary systems should prevent. However flawed the current arrangement, billions of people depend on its continued functioning even as alternatives develop.

The most viable path forward involves gradual evolution rather than abrupt revolution. New systems must demonstrate their advantages through practical utility rather than ideology, gaining adoption through positive incentives rather than forced disruption.

Prosperity Considerations

The ultimate measure of any monetary system is not its ideological purity but its practical impact on human prosperity. The current reserve currency arrangement creates asymmetric benefits and burdens that increasingly appear unsustainable. A well-designed alternative could potentially create more balanced prosperity by:

- Allowing the United States to rebalance toward production without currency crisis

- Providing export nations more predictable monetary conditions without political complications

- Giving emerging markets protection from the collateral damage of policies designed for other economies

- Reducing the geopolitical tensions created by financial weaponization

The prosperity question ultimately revolves around balancing stability, adaptability, and fairness — creating a system that provides sufficient predictability for long-term planning while remaining responsive to changing conditions and distributing benefits more equitably than the current arrangement.

Conclusion: The Burden No Nation Can Bear Alone

The truth about reserve currency status contains important nuances. It’s not that literally no one wants it — parts of the financial sector certainly benefit and therefore support it. Rather, it’s that the benefits are concentrated while the costs are distributed across the broader economy. This inherent structural imbalance makes it unsustainable over time, regardless of which nation bears the burden.

Trump’s policies signal that America may no longer be willing to accept these distributed costs to maintain this global role. Yet the system persists because, despite its flaws, everyone depends on someone performing these functions.

The historical irony may be that after decades of other nations being accused of “manipulating” their currencies to avoid the dollar’s role, America itself may be the one to finally step away from the burden of reserve currency status. This creates both danger and opportunity — the danger of disorderly transition and the opportunity to design something fundamentally better.

The challenge before us is not merely technical but philosophical — redesigning the foundation of global finance to serve human prosperity rather than national interests. If we succeed, we might finally resolve the paradox where essential global monetary functions cannot be sustainably provided by any single nation alone.