June Review — It’s in the Fundamentals

OlympusDAO
5 min readJul 7, 2021

June was a pretty great month. From the launch of the FRAX partnership, to FOHMO 2, to the continued development of the DAO, a lot is happening on Olympus. We’d like to take this opportunity to go over some protocol metrics for the month that we consider important.

Data Source

The data used in this article is taken from The Block’s DeFi revenue page, which you can find here, and sh4dow’s Dune Dashboard, which you can find here.

Tl;dr

  • Treasury Risk-Free Value +$5.5m (↑117%)
  • Treasury Market Value +$18.2m (↑120%)
  • 5th highest revenue in DeFi in first 3 months
  • Lowest Market Cap/Revenue ratio in DeFi (3x lower than next lowest)
  • Lowest Market Cap/Protocol Revenue ratio in DeFi (12x lower than next lowest)

The Charts n’ Numbers

First up we’ve got the Risk-Free Value of the treasury. This number measures the USD value of our treasury without price risk — in other words, it is the minimum value of the treasury, barring an exploit or loss of peg on DAI or FRAX.

RFV more than doubled in June, rising from $4.3m to $9.8m.

The realized value of the treasury. This value is agnostic to the market and contains no price risk.
RFV brought into the treasury each day.

Market value rose similarly, going from $15.1m to $33.3m. The market value of the treasury is a more volatile metric because it includes the market value of treasury-owned LP shares, which change in value along with OHM price.

The market value of the treasury. This value is exposed to the market and carries price risk.
Treasury market value gained or lost each day.

Both of these have led to a considerable increase in backing per token.

Realized backing per token

Despite balances increasing by 67%.

The index measures the increase in balance of an OHM staker (i.e. 3.6 OHM staked on June 1 became 6 OHM on June 30).

We can combine the previous metrics to determine monthly revenue. This is the amount of capital taken in by the protocol, measured as market value at the time of acquisition. In the case of networks like Uniswap, Sushiswap, and Bancor, revenue comes from trading fees. For Aave and Compound, it comes from interest. For Olympus, it primarily comes from bonds.

Revenue brought in by DeFi protocols in the month of June.

Annualized, this ranking looks like this:

Annual revenue of DeFi protocols if each month was equal to June. (June revenue * 12)

While pure revenue is a great metric, it doesn’t tell the whole story. This metric includes both fees accruing to the protocol, and fees accruing to users (liquidity providers, lenders, etc). If we want to look at this data to analyze the value accrual of the network itself, its more accurate to use Protocol Revenue (revenue excluding what gets paid to users).

Protocol revenue (profits) brought in by DeFi protocols in the month of June.

You can see that, for the month of June, Olympus had the highest protocol revenue in the industry. Annualized, it looks like this:

Annual profits of DeFi protocols if each month was equal to June. (June protocol revenue * 12)

Pretty wild, huh?

Finally, let’s put it in the context of network values. Here we have the market caps of each protocol.

The market capitalization of DeFi protocols. (Token Supply * Price)

Here is the market cap to annualized revenue ratio: (if a protocol has a market cap of $1b and will take in $100m this year, this number would be 10).

Revenues of DeFi protocols compared to their market capitalizations.

Market cap to annualized protocol revenue, which measures how much value is accruing to the token, relative to the market cap of the token.

Profits of DeFi protocols compared to market capitalizations. MC/APR can be considered the DeFi equivalent of Earnings Per Share.

Note that the first 3 show zero, but they are actually infinity because their revenues do not accrue to their tokens.

Passive Revenue

Our trading pools alone brought in over $300,000.

Revenue from trading fees on the OHM/DAI and OHM/FRAX pools. Data pulled from Croco Finance, which can not display data before June 8 so the time period for this image is slightly skewed from the rest.

We earned an additional $50,000 from accrual of $SUSHI rewards, despite the token depreciating by over 30%.

Value of $SUSHI earned by the protocol deploying into the Onsen program.

Analysis

It is pretty amazing to see Olympus bringing in the highest protocol revenue in the industry only 3 months into its existence.

However, it makes sense:

Olympus is a primary currency issuer. It is in the same business as protocols like Maker, which issue currency (DAI) as loans, but lower on the stack. Currency issuance is historically one of, if not the, most lucrative business in the world.

This makes us different from any other protocol in the industry. The sole purpose of Olympus is to accrue value to the network and OHM token, unlike other protocols that must balance value accrual between the holders of the token and the users of the protocol. The value fragmentation and incentive misalignment that is inherent to any class-based network is absent from ours.

Moving Forward

Our focus as we go forward will continue to be increasing the utility of OHM and the revenue of the network. Luckily, these go hand in hand, so our incentives are always aligned toward what is best for the network.

In June, we added our second asset, FRAX, and have seen incredible growth in our holdings and the size of their network. We also saw the introduction of OHM’s first lending protocol, with the creation of the Olympus Fuse Pool. We intend to continue forward on this path, with prospective integrations on several new lending platforms. We also plan to pursue new routes for treasury allocation, starting with a $1m deposit on Aave. A recent proposal from a THORChain contributor opens doors toward cross-chain integrations as well. Overall, we’ve got our hands full expanding OHM’s use and influence in the industry.

Closing

We’d like to take this moment to thank the Ohmies for their tireless efforts in building this protocol. This is truly a community effort, and we would not be where we are today without all of you. We look forward to blazing the path ahead together.

As always, (3, 3) and see you in OT.

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