Overview
Cooler Loans is a lending protocol created by OlympusDAO that provides fixed-rate, fixed-term loans to gOHM holders. Users can borrow DAI against their gOHM collateral at predetermined interest rates, with loans funded directly from the OlympusDAO treasury. The mechanism is elegantly simple — it gives OHM holders a way to access liquidity without selling, while the treasury earns yield on its reserves.
The protocol's design is intentionally narrow. Rather than trying to be a general-purpose lending platform, Cooler Loans serves a single use case: allowing OlympusDAO stakeholders to borrow against their governance tokens. This focus results in clean, auditable smart contracts with limited attack surface.
Cooler Loans represents an interesting experiment in protocol-owned lending, where the treasury acts as the lender rather than relying on external capital. The fixed-rate structure protects borrowers from rate volatility. However, the protocol is entirely dependent on OlympusDAO's health and the value of OHM/gOHM as collateral.
Risk Factors
- Entirely dependent on OlympusDAO ecosystem health and OHM value
- Extremely narrow use case — only gOHM collateral, only DAI borrowing
- OHM itself remains controversial with a complex rebasing history
- Treasury-backed lending has limits — large-scale borrowing could stress Olympus reserves
Conclusion
Cooler Loans is a well-designed, purpose-built lending facility for the OlympusDAO ecosystem. The 2.7 score reflects solid mechanism design and risk management within its narrow scope, against the inherent risk of total dependency on OlympusDAO and OHM's uncertain trajectory.