The Defiant

OlympusDAO’s Success Inspires Dozens of Forks

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. In crypto, this manifests as forks, or copies of a project’s codebase. In that sense, OlympusDAO must be feeling pretty flattered.

By: Owen Fernau Loading...

OlympusDAO’s Success Inspires Dozens of Forks

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. In crypto, this manifests as forks, or copies of a project’s codebase. In that sense, OlympusDAO must be feeling pretty flattered.

A slew of forks (over 30, according to DeFi influencer mewnyfish) of the OlympusDAO codebase have emerged.

OlympusDAO’s protocol-owned liquidity model has been a catalyst for the DeFi 2.0 movement, and its success is inspiring copycats. At a $4B market cap, the project’s OHM token has vaulted into the 50th slot among digital assets as of Oct. 25 after going up over 200% in the last 30 days, according to Coingecko.

Wonderland Leading

Leading the pack of forks in terms of market cap is Wonderland, whose TIME token has gained over 340% in market cap the last 30 days. That has landed it in the 131st spot in terms of market cap among all digital assets as of Oct. 26.

Wonderland is on the Avalanche blockchain and is basically a one-to-one fork of Olympus, a contributor to OlympusDAO who wished to remain anonymous told The Defiant.

Some, like Ryan Watkins, senior research analyst at Messari, the data and research company, doubt any of the forks have a real purpose.

“OlympusDAO forks don’t make any sense to me,” the analyst said on Twitter. “The difference is about means and ends. OlympusDAO accumulates assets to bootstrap a new currency – OHM is the end.”

Watkins sees other forks as simply ways to acquire assets for a treasury, without a real use case beyond that. Yet, that hasn’t stopped some of the forks from succeeding.

This contrasts with forks which deviate far from their originator, like how decentralized exchange (DEX) Sushiswap has differentiated itself after forking Uniswap’s codebase. Sushi has shipped products like Miso, the token launch toolkit, and will launch an NFT marketplace next week whereas Uniswap has doubled down on becoming DeFi’s de facto exchange.

DeFi AlphaPremium Content
Start for free

Differentiated Fork

In the case of OlympusDAO, Daniele Sesta, who co-founded Wonderland, as well as the collateralized debt position protocol Abracadabra, told his 101,000 Twitter followers that he has plans to differentiate the forked product.

Being a fork, Wonderland uses the same bonding mechanism as Olympus to purchase TIME at a discount in exchange for key liquidity pairs like TIME-AVAX and TIME-MIM. Like Olympus, Wonderland also has a staking mechanism which offers to take the tokens off the market in exchange for rebases of the token. This process equates to a 68,227% APY as of Oct. 25, according to the project’s website.

So far, Wonderland has achieved a treasury of over $219M, which isn’t too far behind OlympusDAO’s $622M as of Oct. 25.

The treasury is what backs tokens with the Olympus model and theoretically prevents OHM, for example, from falling befow the backed level of $1 per token.

It’s not clear exactly how Sesta plans to differentiate Wonderland, but the co-founder put out a tweet saying the forked project will ship a launchpad for DAOs for distributing and raising funds by using OlympusDAO’s model. Sesta called the product a “tool to empower DAOs and bypass VC funding completely,” on Twitter.

Wonderland is also part of the growing MIM ecosystem, which will allow for different synergies than OlympusDAO.

Olympus-Rivaling Discord

Klima is another Olympus fork that has gained momentum.

Klima’s Discord rivals Olympus’ in membership count — the former has just over 33,000 while the original protocol’s notoriously strong community has just over 34,000.

It’s not just Discord numbers, though — Klima’s KLIMA token has actually jumped TIME to the 109th slot by market cap as of Oct. 26 despite launching less than a week ago.

What’s driving the momentum? Klima’s stated goal is to “accelerate the price appreciation of carbon assets.” The project says on its website that the KLIMA token is backed by one tonne of carbon. So basically, if the KLIMA token increases in value, so will the cost of producing carbon, incentivizing people to find cheaper alternatives to the element which contributes so much to climate change.

As far as the Olympus forks go, Klima may be the most differentiated.

Olympus Unphased

Still, Wonderland, Klima and the other forks, like RomeDAO and TempleDAO, will need to do much more in order to sustain themselves and their treasury. Forking code is easy, forking OlympusDAO’s contributors, massive treasury and DAO holdings used to pay contributors, is hard.

Because of that, Wartull, the Olympus community manager, isn’t phased by the forks.

“Many new and existing projects are trying to copy the Olympus model,” Wartull said on Twitter Oct. 25. “I’m never too fazed by this, especially since they’ll have to compete with numerous other copies out there.”

Subscribe to DeFi Daily Newsletter and Get Smarter on DeFi & Web3.

80k+ investors informed every day.