I remember the first time I heard about OlympusDAO. It was just crazy, and I was convinced that it was a scam in some kind of way. How could a project like this operate with a 15,000% APY? It was just crazy. Since then, the APY has dropped to 7000% (which is still just crazy), but compared to all the OHM forks currently available, whereof many have APYs above 100,000%, the current OHM APY seems quite conservative in fact.
But, let me return to the question itself: What are these projects about and why don't they want to peg the token price to the dollar?
The goal is to become a stable currency!
This is where things gets messed up in the heads of many (and also in mine). OlympusDAO (and its forks) is trying to be a currency to back the value of your assets, as a kind of safe haven. But, why doesn't it want to peg it to the dollar then? The answer is easy... the Dollar is constantly losing its value. What costs 1 USD today, will cost 2 USD in one year from now. In other words, if your crypto is measured in USD, the value will drop with time, simply because your Dollars become less and less worth.
That is why OHM is a treasury-backed currency, meaning that the value of the token isn't backed by the Dollar, but by a mixture of lots of different cryptocurrencies. As a result, this will stand stronger and keep its value in way better ways than the Dollar itself.
I recently read this article about HectorDAO and there it is explained quite a in detail how this works. HectorDAO is an OHM fork, but with a quite productive developer team, meaning that they are taking the work further and that they are working hard to develop the platform (not only copying the original OHM code). Of course, it is also explained interesting things about HectorDAO. And if you are in for a crazy APY, then you might want to know that HectorDAO is currently operating with an APY exceeding 300,000%. Of course, it is expected to drop quite a lot with time, but this is a bonus for the early investors wanting to join the fun!