The shifting World of Defi
The world of Defi has experienced a shift lately. Away from the world of traditional Defi, seen made popular on platforms such as AAVE, Maker and Curve Finance. Where crypto holders could stake their tokens to higher APYs than in a traditional savings account in a bank. But the world of crypto moves fast and some people like to make money fast.
Traditional DeFi pays you to lend liquid assets to the platform. Being a Liquidity Provider is risky and therefore you get a yield out of it. So enter Defi 2.0. Enter the DAO rebase token.
In comes Olympus DAO
It started with Olympus DAO also known as OHM, which has found a home on the Ethereum network. OHM, the original DAO rebase token, was launched in late March of 2021, to much hype. Within days after it’s launch, it had nearly tripled in price. From $384.40 to $1,042.21 within only the first 4 days.
To attract capital, these protocols pay very high APYs. Around it’s peak OHM paid an APY around 8000%. These payments are usually done 3 times a day (every 8 hours), in the form of rebases.
Rebase is a mechanism by which your staked token balance increases automatically. When new tokens are minted by the protocol, a large portion of it goes to the stakers. Rebases are a form of auto-compounding, where holders of the token are rewarded on a continuous basis.
The OHM hype did not last long. Olympus DAO is currently down 75% since it’s all time high back in the spring of 2021 and has been on a rollercoaster ride ever since, along with the holders of the popular rebase token. It’s current APY is hovering just under 4000%. It has fallen victim to market volatility once again, like much of the crypto market, it has seen a steep dip in price. But many OHM HODLers remain faithful and believe that it will rebound and do not want to miss out on those tasty returns in the form of rebases.
Grab that Fork
Speaking of tasty returns, let’s discuss some of the forks of OHM. What are OHM forks? OHM is open sourced and it’s code is housed on Github, where anybody can copy the code and customize it for their own rebase token and copy it they have. Some of these OHM-a-bees are not forking around either with their insane APYs.
Sitting right behind Olympus DAO, with the second highest market cap in rebase tokens is, Time Wonderland. Time Wonderland founded by enthusiastic founder, Daniele Sesta, an Avalanche core developer, who is also the founder in other projects, such as Popsicle Finance and Abracadbra money, home to Magic Internet Money, also known as MIM. The nice thing for many, is that Wonderland is on the Avalanche ecosystem, which has very low gas prices, making interacting with Wonderland a cost effective solution compared to Olympus, which is on the gas guzzling Ethereum Mainnet,
Although Wonderland has only been in the market since this past September, it’s popularity and price grew pretty fast. From it’s launch price of $723.98 in September it jumped all the way up to it’s all time high in just over 2 months, to $10,063.72 on November 7th.
Many people aped in to Time Wonderland at a fast pace. With APYs going between 50 and 90,000%, many found to hard to resist. The project was quite popular and with due cause too. Many were seeing a return on their investment pretty fast when the good times were rolling. With some able to cash out their initial investment within just a few weeks.
Especially if they took advantage of some of the minting rewards. Where stakers could provide liquidity in the form of minting other tokens, such as AVAX and MIM and buy Time at a discount. The only issue was this, was stakers would have to manually collect their rebase rewards 1 to 3 times a day. Which involved accessing the Time Wonderland site and paying the gas fees. Which is not that costly though, since it is on the gas friendly Avalanche chain.
The insanely high APYs has had many questioning if the model is sustainable, with some even calling it a Ponzi and even worrying about a rug pull. But, so far the APY has stayed high, above 70,000% and currently just over 80,000%.
Wonderland has amassed a cult like following over the past few months, with some very happy stakers, boasting of their returns on Twitter and YouTube. Out of all of the OHM forks, Wonderland has the most YouTube videos dedicated to the protocol.
Bu then things changed and really fast as they do in crypto. The crypto market dipped and then it dipped and it still has yet to rebound. Time Wonderland was not immune to these dips and is currently down almost 70% since it’s all time high in early November.
But that has not stopped it’s ambitious founder Daniele Sesta from tweaking and making deals. He remains optimistic that the protocol will not only thrive, but survive. He recently proposed to take over Sushi swap, after some internal conflict issues, and Chief Technology Officer Joseph Delong’s resignation. His focus has not shifted from Time Wonderland either.
Wonderland recently launched a forum over at wonderlandforum.xyz. Where the Wonderland community can partake in discussions, submit requests for comments from the development team and Time holders can vote on proposals. Time Wonderland is proving it self to be a DAO in the true sense. Where the community can alter the direction of the protocol. Not something that you see in the traditional capitalist system.
Danger Ahead
Now if you want to talk about insanely high APYs, speak no further than Snowbank, also found on the Avalanche ecosystem. At it’s launch it boasted an AYP of 3,446,609,594,082,559,000,000,000,000%
Just launched on November 8th, the same day as it all time high of $5,697.30, it has been down a rocky road. Thanks to guilt by association.
Snowdog DAO, a decentralized reserve meme coin based on Avalanche, failed spectacularly after being live only 8 days. Launched as an 8-day experiment scheduled to end with a giant buyback, Snowdog attracted a lot of attention in the crypto community. The development team said that they created the “game theory experiment” to create awareness for Snowbank.
“We believed that the combination of a decentralized reserve meme coin that would die after 8 days, with the perspective of a giant buyback would create interest and bring exposure to the Snowbank project.”
However, the buyback failed spectacularly within seconds of launching, with hundreds of users losing the majority of their funds. A single address managed to make almost $10 million by swapping Snowdog for other cryptocurrencies, removing a quarter of the treasury’s buyback power. Snowdog crashed 90%. Effectively taking Snowbank with it.
Snowbank is currently down 95% since it’s all time high and has been on an apology, we can fix it campaign ever since. Although, they still brag a crazy APY of 380,532.8%
Degens want a little bit out that Midas Touch
Another day, another fork, another few commas added to the APY. Just stealth launched on the Avalanche chain on December 6th, to the launch price of just under $200, Midas DAO has been garnering a low of attention among degens. With a sick APY of 3,071,895,085,266,758,500,000,000,000% , now say that 5 times fast. This baby of the bunch has been holding stable and trading around the $400 mark for the past week. Pretty impressive considering current market conditions.
Found on the Avalanche chain. Trading under the symbol CROWN, Midas claims to be OHM on steroids, with a steady flow of revenues from Metaverse, Play to earn gaming & interest bearing tokens. But you need to take an extra step to obtain this rebase token, which can be found on Trader Joe. To purchase some crown. You need to provide the fast rising stable coin MIM also known as Magic Internet money.
But, with a current 5 day return on investment of 123.4305% , it makes this extras step seem quite worth it. There are two main strategies for market participants: staking and bonding. Stakers stake their CROWN tokens in return for more CROWN tokens, while Minters provide MIM or LP tokens in exchange for discounted CROWN tokens after a fixed vesting period.
There is one thing to note. here is a 2 epoch warm-up staking period, where users must be staked for more than 2 epoch/rebase before claiming any rebase rewards. Users will accumulate rewards while in the warm-up period but will not be able to claim them for 2 epoch. When 2 epoch has elapsed your staked balance can be claimed from the warm up contract and you will automatically receive the rebase rewards thereafter.
Midas DAO remains very active on Twitter, have already been burning tokens and have a game plan in place. With a road map extending to Q2 of 2022. By the end of December, they claim that they will be adding bearing interest tokens in treasury and also using their treasury in Yield Aggregators.
With upcoming plans in January to add Metaverse and Play to Earn assets in the treasury. As far the rest of Q1 of 2022, they have plans for a Governance DAO, a Partnership Announcement and a listing on a centralized exchange, either Gate.io or Kucoin. Then in Q2 of 2022, they have plans for a Play to Earn Outline presentation.
Midas DAO contracts are 1:1 fork of Olympus DAO on the Avalanche Network. Although there has yet to be an audit on Midas DAO, according to their Discord, audits may occur at a later stage and they point you to the Olympus DAO audits.
Although one key component is missing. Who are the founders and the team behind this project. They are not listed in their docs, on their Twitter or their Discord. Even searching for their team and founders on discords yields no results, only questions asking who the founders are, so far left unanswered.
But, the one thing that has been yielding so far, have been the gains from this project. Same goes for the hype, they’ve been issuing rewards for holders, which can be found out about through their Twitter account. Add that on top of the really nice returns holders have been seeing through rebases.
Will the Midas Touch result in to turn more people’s investment in to gold? Only time will tell...
Nobody has a crystal ball in crypto So always do your own research
There are many other forks of Olympus DAO, will they last? Only time will tell. Many seem to think that Olympus and Time Wonderland are here to stay, they just have to ride through current market conditions. Many of the OHM forks are down right now. But new ones are being launched every week. They tend to do well within the first few days. Especially due to insanely high APYs and many people aping in for the high APYs and thus big returns, which tend to go down after a few days.
The ones with the highest APYs can be found on the Avalanche ecosystem, with some others on the Binance Smart Chain. If you are curious about some of the other DAO – OHM Forks that have rebasing tokens. Head over to CoinGecko, click on all categories and look for the subsection Rebase Tokens.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/rebase-tokens
Is now a good time to get in to some of these DAO – OHM forks?
Not financial advice, but if you’re a total degen, you could ape in to some of the newer protocols, try to make a quick buck in the first few days, if you can get your initial investment back, take that out or all of it out and jump into the next protocol. What’s hot this week, might not be hot next week. But due to current market conditions, this can be quite risky. Some of these protocols are just copy and paste jobs of the original DAO, Olympus. All the way down to the documents, with just a few lines pasted here and there.
Always Do your own research, look at who the founder and developers are, what have they worked on? Do they have a LinkedIn account? Are they on Github? Do they have good backers? Are they investing in good projects? It is always a good idea to go to the website and read their documents. Follow them on Twitter, join their discord server and join their Telegram.
Do they have a game plan? Does it seem like a project that will still be around in 6 months? Are the founders and developers doing AMAs, available for interviews on YouTube or podcasts? If not, that is not a good sign. Don’t go all in a project based on what somebody on Twitter and YouTube is doing. Take in many resources, viewpoints and opinions and make your own decision. Because chances are, many of these people are not financial advisors and this space is still in it’s hatching phase.
It might be best if you want to be smart to wait for market conditions to cool off. Some recommend holding some of your money in stable coins during times like these or just hold on to tokens that you believe will weather this storm. You could take the conservative route and so some single staking with the coins you have faith in or pick up some UST and stake it on Anchor on the Terra Ecosystem for a small APY of 20%. Apollo Farm does currently offer an APY around 148% for the UST-Anchor pair and the nice thing is, you only have to provide UST to the pool and they do the rest for you. This APY has been remaining pretty consistent for recent weeks, so if you are looking to make a safe play during these volatile times, this is a good bet.
But, we know some of you are all about them gains! Once it looks like the storm is over and some of the DAOs are recovering. If you want to get your feet wet with a protocol that seems to be withstanding the volatility storm, just invest a little, see if it does well, if you feel safe, invest a little more. Never invest more than you are willing to lose.
Notes:
If you are curious about some of the other DAO – OHM Forks that have rebasing tokens. Head over to CoinGecko, click on all categories and look for the subsection Rebase Tokens.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/rebase-tokens
Note: APYs are as of 12/18/21 at 9AM MST
Safer bets:
Anchor Protocol: Earn around 20% APY on UST (Stable coin)
https://www.anchorprotocol.com/
Apollo Farm: 148ish% for the UST-Anchor pair:
https://app.apollo.farm/
DAOs mentioned in this video:
DAO/Fork: Olympus (DAO OHM)
https://www.olympusdao.finance/#/
APY: 4,998%
#1 in Marketcap
Network: Ethereum
DAO/Fork: Time Wonderland (TIME)
APY: 81,853.1%
#2 in Marketcap
Network: Avalanche
DAO/Fork: Snowbank (SB)
https://dapp.snowbank.finance/#/stake
APY: 375,728.1%
Network: Avalanche
DAO/Fork: Midas DAO
APY: 3,071,895,085,266,758,500,000,000,000%
Network: Avalanche
The original recipe for the rebase token:
Olympus DAO code on Github:
