Introducing Olympus Give — Redirecting Yield for Good

Recent forum discussions have allowed our team to reflect and strategize the best way to highlight the power of our community and strength of (3, 3). Having such an engaged organization is at the heart of any successful DAO, and it’s our job to deliver solutions that reflect those views — continuously making Olympus stronger, more capable, and ever more appealing to new members.

It’s become clear that the best path forward is to support an individual, opt-in approach for doing good. We’re excited to tell you about Olympus Give and the impact it can have not just by helping the world, but also by insulating the DAO from potential criticism and drawing in significantly more retail interests.

The Decline of Charity

For many in the United States and globally, the pandemic has severely dampened philanthropy due to job loss, inflation, healthcare costs and increased taxes from government spending. In fact, the number of US households donating to charity is the lowest it has been in decades with less than half of family homes contributing in 2020. To make matters worse, donors are plagued by mistrust towards traditional non-profit organizations who spend too much on marketing and can have difficulty allocating funds to the appropriate causes.

Contrary to this situation, DeFi protocols such as Olympus have seen immense periods of growth in relatively short amounts of time, bringing more transparency, accessibility, and financial inclusivity to the world. Similarly, new protocols have emerged looking to introduce crypto DeFi solutions to legacy problems.

Olympus, therefore, is an excellent candidate for tackling the online philanthropy issue firsthand and providing a modern decentralized solution to a modern problem…. Meet Olympus Give.

How To Make Your $OHM Work For Others

Olympus Give, powered by OlympusDAO, allows stakers to redirect their rebases either to pre-selected Olympus Give causes or to any wallet of their choosing (e.g. a friend or family member). Through this, we can start to reverse the perception of DeFi being purely greed based with negative environmental consequences. This will be crucially important for the long term health and growth of our community. When detractors come calling, this line of defense will provide far more value than the rebases that were donated. Those who choose to donate will be helping to protect the community at large.

The steps to set up rebase donations would go something like this: Navigate to the “Give” section on our landing page. There, you’ll be able to see a number of causes which we have partnered with such as Angel Protocol’s Restore Earth, ImpactMarket, Gitcoin, Popcorn and Kolektivo. These cohort 1 partners were chosen due to their crypto nativity and their commitment to properly manage donated funds; in the future, we aspire to move towards permission-less onboarding with partner selection being fully community-driven.

In addition to this, you can donate manually to any verified wallet of your choosing — family, friends, organizations in your community. Once selected, determine how much of your existing sOHM to redirect for donation; the recipient will receive all the rebases that sOHM generates indefinitely or until the principle is pulled out.

Olympus Give Infrastructure

The framework of Olympus Give is split into two sections — Donation and Redemption.

Donation

Donations are characterized as the act of supplying a respective wallet with a grant of sOHM. Donations do not require any form of participation from the donor besides inputting their sOHM into the protocol. After that, you will essentially be making a donation with each epoch — every 8 hours! You can also withdraw the original principal of your donation at any time, essentially enabling lossless donations. NOTE: users must use sOHM after completing their V2 migration; in the future we will also allow users to donate gOHM.

Plus, Olympus does not take any fee from selected partners so you can rest assured that 100% of your donations go directly to the wallet of your choice. The singular and most important aspect of this program is to better the world through DeFi and change the way people view blockchain technology.

Redemption

The area labeled “Redeem” is where organizations or people who are the beneficiaries of Olympus Give will be able to claim their rebases. This unlocks a lot of potential to time campaigns in alignment with significant dates or events to the beneficiary. For example, the Restorative Earth campaign by Angel Protocol will line up with Earth Day 2022 (April). This fully decentralizes the process in a way that no other organization or person can provide on their own. By enabling a separate redemption section accessible to the wallets who are receiving rebases, we hope to bring transparency, security, and ease of access like no other organization can provide.

Olympus Give Community Partners — Cohort 1

With the launch of Olympus Give, we have partnered with a few organizations that we believe are doing amazing work in both philanthropy and web3 development.

Angel Protocol — Restore Earth

Angel Protocol takes a unique new approach to decentralized giving, enabling permanent DeFi endowments for nonprofits on the platform. Rather than crossing their fingers for the next grant and having little year over year predictability, NGOs can now receive continuous payouts in the form of APY gained from principal donations — using low risk but high yield protocols like UST in Anchor. Imagine the compounding power of rebasing OHM donations being further amplified and paid out over time. Perpetual revenue streams are born so NGO’s can focus on what they do best: resolving issues on the ground.

The first project to benefit from Olympus Give will be Restore Earth. The funds will go towards three earth restoration nonprofits, working on reforestation, cleaning ocean plastics, and climate change.

Gitcoin

Gitcoin Grants uses quadratic funding to help grow and sustain the critical public goods that web3 relies on. Projects their community has funded at their earliest stages include Collabland, Dune Analytics, EIP-1559, ethers.js, MetaCartel, Prysm (and other Eth2.0 clients), Uniswap, WalletConnect, Yearn, and the list goes on.

Through this work, Gitcoin has gained a lot of legitimacy (to date, it has distributed nearly $50m to web3 builders), but it can only survive if the matching pool continues to grow proportionate to the amount of funds the ever expanding list of projects in the Ethereum ecosystem need. By funding the matching pool, Olympus Give ensures that projects doing the greatest public good, according to the will of the broader Ethereum community, get the most support.

ImpactMarket

ImpactMarket is a decentralized poverty alleviation protocol that enables any vulnerable community to implement poverty alleviation mechanisms such as Unconditional Basic Income. It helps to establish a better living condition for impoverished communities by initiating donation flows from donors who contribute to a community. A beneficiary can then access the money through the Valora app and use that money, converted from the stable coin cUSD, to do anything that a family would need: purchasing clothes, food, shelter, or tools that help them create better income streams.

Kolektivo

Kolektivo is a set of community tools and support networks that enables local communities to create and manage their own regenerative economy to fuel prosperity. Kolektivo combines community currencies, digital governance, impact dashboards, and multiple DeFi primitives to create autonomous economies that help communities and nature thrive. Donations to Kolektivo will directly support the development of the Kolektivo framework and fund mutual aid projects on the ground in Curaçao, where the first version of Kolektivo is being developed, including coral reef restoration, physical rehabilitation for locals, building and maintaining community-owned tokenized food forests, and more.

Popcorn

Popcorn, who will be matching the first $50K in donations received, is a new paradigm for DeFi where yield-generating products simultaneously fund social impact beneficiaries at no additional cost to the user. These beneficiaries are nonprofits, charities, and grassroot projects working in the areas of environment, education, open source, and inequality. Members of the PopcornDAO (POP token holders) are eligible to participate in all aspects of DAO governance, including beneficiary nominations and grant elections. They determine which beneficiaries receive a percentage of earned protocol fees on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis, and are incentivized to do so with POP rewards.

Along with directly funding community-selected beneficiaries, one of Popcorn’s key goals is to be a bridge between the social impact world and DeFi, helping them onramp into DeFi and educating them about the opportunities of DeFi and web3 to achieve social impact goals through community-led and equitable means. Popcorn will introduce them not only to DeFi but all the benefits of decentralization. In summary, Popcorn’s purpose is to aid the current revolutionary shift in global systems through accessible DeFi products that align financial wellbeing with positive global impact.

In Summary

Olympus Give is a revolutionary new way for Ohmies and the DeFi community at large to change the narrative about blockchain. It gives us the power to opt in to fund projects that we believe in, either as individuals or as a community, while bringing security and transparency to those use cases. We have handpicked launch partners who are crypto native and have already redefined the game in their respective fields of philanthropy, while also giving individuals the power to redirect their yields to any wallet of their choosing. Olympus Give is one of the most powerful tools for change in the DeFi landscape today and we hope you will consider donating to important causes this holiday season.

About OlympusDAO

Olympus is a decentralized financial reserve currency that provides sustainable compounding interest through its community-owned and protected treasury. With the latest release of Olympus Pro, they offer protocol-owned liquidity as a service to empower the DeFi ecosystem.