Category: Crypto

Olympus is Creating the Most Well-Designed Currency in the World

~ Travis Wiedower

Olympus wants to create the best currency in the world. It has been designed very well over the past four years to incentivize good behavior from investors and guarantee purchasing power via long-term price predictability. Its north star is to be fully decentralized, programmatic, and codified on public blockchains—a true cryptocurrency in every sense of the original term, and unlike any other “cryptocurrency” that exists. OHM is the token, and Olympus is the protocol behind OHM.

Olympus has seven mechanisms in place to achieve this goal. I will walk through all seven, and then I will explain how they interact and reinforce each other. All in all, these seven mechanisms have been designed to create a flywheel that I believe is going to be difficult to stop.

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My Ethereum Investment Thesis: Fundamentals and Flows

~ Travis Wiedower

I am invested in Ethereum for similar reasons that I am invested in Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Shopify. I want to own the platforms that internet businesses are built on top of. One of the reasons I am attracted to these types of platforms is that customer stickiness is very high. When a company has built their business on Amazon Web Services, switching to a competitor is risky, time consuming, and expensive.

Just as important though, the businesses built on Shopify have a vested interest in making Shopify better and more successful. And this same dynamic is seen with Ethereum. Ethereum is by far the most popular blockchain in the crypto economy, and thus has the most projects and people working to make it successful.

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How to Value Bitcoin

~ Travis Wiedower ~ 8 Comments

I’ve done a lot of reading up on crypto currencies and blockchain the past month—not because I want to invest in it, but because I find it fascinating and potentially life-changing. Just last week I was traveling internationally and I can’t tell you how many times I thought to myself “this would be so much easier if everyone was using a Bitcoin app on their phones.” I have no idea if Bitcoin is the MySpace or the Facebook of the cryptocurrency future, but it’s fun to learn about either way. One thing I haven’t seen much of is people attempting to value Bitcoin.

I’ve read plenty of logical sounding arguments for why Bitcoin will be $20,000 or $50,000 in 10 years, but those people rarely mention the discount rate that needs to be slapped on those estimates. Even if you’re a Bitcoin bull, you have to admit it’s an incredibly risky asset and there’s a chance it’s worth $0 at some point in the future. Given that, a high discount rate is required. When I value profitable, growing public companies that have little debt on their balance sheet I use an 11% discount rate. Thus, I’d say any discount rate on a Bitcoin valuation needs to be significantly higher than that—maybe 30-40%—though I wouldn’t fault anyone for going even higher.
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