Olympus

Olympus is a decentralized finance protocol built around OHM, a token backed by an on-chain treasury of assets that the protocol itself owns and manages. Rather than renting liquidity by paying incentives to third parties, Olympus pioneered the idea that a protocol should own its own liquidity outright.

The project launched in 2021 and became one of the most discussed experiments of that cycle. Its original bonding mechanism let users sell assets to the protocol at a discount in exchange for OHM, moving liquidity provider tokens and other assets permanently onto the protocol's balance sheet. The very high staking yields advertised in that early phase were funded by token issuance and proved unsustainable, and the protocol later restructured substantially.

The current design

Olympus now describes itself as programmable monetary infrastructure, with mechanisms aimed at solvency and stability rather than at rapid expansion. These include protocol owned liquidity, Cooler Loans that let OHM holders borrow against their tokens at fixed terms backed by treasury assets, convertible deposits, a yield repurchase facility that uses treasury income to buy OHM, and range bound stability, which defends a price band using treasury reserves.

The common thread is that the treasury is used actively to manage the token rather than sitting idle, which the project frames as a programmable central bank without discretionary human decisions.

Supply

OHM has no fixed maximum supply. Total supply currently sits at roughly 19.83 million tokens with around 14.95 million circulating. Supply expands and contracts through the protocol's mechanisms rather than following a preset schedule, and the treasury backing per token is the figure most relevant to understanding it.