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Olympus Founder Zeus Gives First Podcast Interview in 4 Years

Olympus Founder Zeus Gives First Podcast Interview in 4 Years

His candid take on how Olympus survived the bear market to keep scaling OHM

DeFi Dad & Nomatic
May 01, 2025

Olympus was once the most talked about protocol in DeFi.

On a new episode of The Edge Podcast, the mastermind anonymous Founder known as Zeus, recounted:

“It took 6 weeks for debt in the system to go from $10M to $300M, and then over the course of the following 6 weeks, $280M worth of that debt got liquidated, so you saw a massive wipeout. This situation, it’s unsettling, but I just walked away being impressed in that for anything else, what would have happened is the asset would have gone to $0 and all of those lenders would have lost a lot of money. They just wouldn’t have gotten paid back… but the power of protocol-owned liquidity, of treasury-backing, of the design of the system itself, means that we had this big unwind and flush-out, but all those creditors got repaid. You know it came at a significant cost to us… but it did demonstrate to me, wow this this thing is actually insanely resilient to survive that.”

Following the crypto market meltdown in 2022, Olympus seemed to disappear from the spotlight. But now, it's back with a $275M treasury and a thriving loan product called Cooler Loans offering users the ability to borrow sUSDS from the OHM treasury, up to 95% of the value of the liquid backing of their gOHM collateral, at a fixed rate of 0.5%. Today, they have just under $100M DAI + sUSDS borrowed through Cooler Loans.

Borrowers enjoy non-liquidatable fixed interest loans backed by gOHM

In his first podcast appearance in 4 years, Zeus joins us to unpack Olympus’s comeback story, why preserving purchasing power remains their north star, and how new innovations like Cooler Loans are helping them to scale a decentralized, programmatic, policy-controlled money that aspires to compete with the likes of BTC and ETH.

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