Olympus DAO Team Ops Failure

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Olympus DAO

Olympus DAO runs a protocol with a treasury backing the assets, aiming to maintain a minimum price floor. One of their bonds backing a liquidity pool was accidentally left online when not intended, resulting in an attacker being able to exploit that at a significant profit. It's unclear if any losses were covered by the project.

This is a global/international case not involving a specific country.

About Olympus DAO

"The Decentralized Reserve Currency. Olympus is building a community-owned decentralized financial infrastructure to bring more stability and transparency for the world."

"Olympus is a decentralized reserve currency protocol based on the OHM token. Each OHM token is backed by a basket of assets (e.g. DAI, FRAX) in the Olympus treasury, giving it an intrinsic value that it cannot fall below. Olympus also introduces unique economic and game-theoretic dynamics into the market through staking and bonding."

"OlympusDAO is an experimental project in the cryptosphere. The DAO manages a token treasury that's used to back the OHM currency. The purpose of the treasury is to make sure the token maintains a certain floor price. If the token drops below that price, the assets in the treasury can be sold to buy back OHM tokens — with the goal to bring its price back above that mark."

"The DAO uses a process for helping the token to stay above that mark called Bonding. The DAO buys assets from investors (to go into the treasury) and issues OHM tokens to replace them. These bonds usually get a 5-10% discount and the tokens are handing out after a vesting period, which is currently set to five days."

"Olympus DAO mistakenly believed they had shut down the OHM/DAI bond but didn’t actually do so. This mistake enabled someone to spend $50,000 to receive $1.43 million of Olympus (OHM) tokens when they should have received far less."

"Earlier today someone bonded an OHM/DAI bond that was presumed to be closed off. This enabled the user to have a substantial discount resulting in the user receiving 1697 ohm instead of 59 ohm. After this occurred, we took immediate action and the bond contract has been shut down in the meantime," wrote an admin named Wartull.

"Somebody used [the SushiSwap OHM/DAI pool] bond to sell $50,000 of OHM/DAI LP tokens for 1,697 OHM, worth $1.43 million. Instead, they should have received only around $52,000 to $55,000 of OHM. The OHM tokens they received will be distributed over five days."

"According to the update, there was a safety limit in place that stopped the user from being able to withdraw even more tokens. The OlympusDAO community is scheduled to host a community call on Thursday to discuss the incident."

This is a global/international case not involving a specific country.

The background of the exchange platform, service, or individuals involved, as it would have been seen or understood at the time of the events.

Include:

• Known history of when and how the service was started.
• What problems does the company or service claim to solve?
• What marketing materials were used by the firm or business?
• Audits performed, and excerpts that may have been included.
• Business registration documents shown (fake or legitimate).
• How were people recruited to participate?
• Public warnings and announcements prior to the event.

Don't Include:

• Any wording which directly states or implies that the business is/was illegitimate, or that a vulnerability existed.
• Anything that wasn't reasonably knowable at the time of the event.

There could be more than one section here. If the same platform is involved with multiple incidents, then it can be linked to a main article page.

The Reality

This sections is included if a case involved deception or information that was unknown at the time. Examples include:

• When the service was actually started (if different than the "official story").
• Who actually ran a service and their own personal history.
• How the service was structured behind the scenes. (For example, there was no "trading bot".)
• Details of what audits reported and how vulnerabilities were missed during auditing.

What Happened

The specific events of the loss and how it came about. What actually happened to cause the loss and some of the events leading up to it.

Key Event Timeline - Olympus DAO Team Ops Failure

Date	Event	Description
November 23rd, 2021	Main Event	Expand this into a brief description of what happened and the impact. If multiple lines are necessary, add them here.

Technical Details

This section includes specific detailed technical analysis of any security breaches which happened. What specific software vulnerabilities contributed to the problem and how were they exploited?

Total Amount Lost

The total amount lost has been estimated at $1,380,000 USD.

How much was lost and how was it calculated? If there are conflicting reports, which are accurate and where does the discrepancy lie?

Immediate Reactions

How did the various parties involved (firm, platform, management, and/or affected individual(s)) deal with the events? Were services shut down? Were announcements made? Were groups formed?

Ultimate Outcome

What was the end result? Was any investigation done? Were any individuals prosecuted? Was there a lawsuit? Was any tracing done?

Total Amount Recovered

There do not appear to have been any funds recovered in this case.

What funds were recovered? What funds were reimbursed for those affected users?

Ongoing Developments

What parts of this case are still remaining to be concluded?

Individual Prevention Policies

No specific policies for individual prevention have yet been identified in this case.

For the full list of how to protect your funds as an individual, check our Prevention Policies for Individuals guide.

Platform Prevention Policies

Policies for platforms to take to prevent this situation have not yet been selected in this case.

For the full list of how to protect your funds as a financial service, check our Prevention Policies for Platforms guide.

Regulatory Prevention Policies

No specific regulatory policies have yet been identified in this case.

For the full list of regulatory policies that can prevent loss, check our Prevention Policies for Regulators guide.