Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the April 2020 edition. We are eager to hear feedback and suggestions from our community.
April was a very strong kickoff for Origin’s Q2 2020. The team has been firing on all cylinders and has accomplished a lot in a short amount of time:
We introduced two products that increase the utility of Origin Tokens (OGN). First, we added Origin Commissions to Dshop, our decentralized e-commerce platform. More recently, we released Origin Deals in Beta, enabling users to lock up OGN to access massive discounts on Amazon.com.
Together with our new partner Brave, we released the Brave merchandise store. Brave is the first marquee partner using the Dshop platform.
OGN was listed on two additional top-tier exchanges, Upbit (Korea’s top exchange) and Bittrex Global.
To combat COVID-19, we scrambled to procure masks for members of our US community. In less than 3 weeks, we’ve distributed thousands of masks to individuals, including many frontline healthcare workers. We are donating 100% of the proceeds to CEPI to help find a vaccine.
Finally, we wanted to point out that OGN’s token release schedule has been modified downwards, with 8.83M fewer tokens circulating in April than projected (33.52M actual vs. 42.35M projected).
In the next quarter, we anticipate that OGN will have significantly lower circulating supply than the modeled numbers in our original token release schedule. You can read this post for full details.
In the Binance research report published in January, we modeled out 42.35M and 84.55M OGN in circulation for April and May respectively. April will close with 33.52M tokens in circulation, a 21% reduction compared to the modeled amount. May’s differential will be even larger, with an estimated decrease of 25M tokens (30% reduction) compared to the modeled amount.
The decrease in actual circulating supply can be attributed to several reasons:
First, the majority of team and advisor tokens that have been unlocked have not entered circulating supply. An even larger share of tokens are not yet vested as our team members are all on 4-year vesting schedules. Our team is committed to growing the Origin network over the long-term.
Hundreds of our investors have similarly signaled their belief in our project over the long-term by electing to lock up their tokens for a year. We’ve locked up an additional 12.21M tokens in this way.
We’ve chosen to hold back the entirety of our Foundation Reserves that unlocked in April, accounting for a further reduction in 4.71M tokens.
Finally, we’ve changed the Origin Rewards program to more selectively reward ecosystem participants that are adding large amounts of value to the platform. This means an ongoing reduction in OGN that is distributed through this program.
Product launches
At the end of last year, we introduced Origin Commissions as a new way for sellers to incentivize application developers to promote their listings in exchange for OGN. These “affiliates” would earn OGN commissions whenever they referred new buyers to sellers in their applications. In truth, this program never really took off because the barrier to entry was too high.
This month, we’ve upgraded Origin Commissions to work with our Dshop platform. Now sellers can offer OGN commissions easily on their decentralized storefronts. Affiliates can sign up in a self-serve way and promote merchant listings easily across social media, blogs, and publisher sites. This greatly increases the accessibility of Origin Commissions. Now bloggers, influencers, and fans will be able to participate in the program and earn OGN without needing to know how to code.
You can become an Origin affiliate by referring buyers to our StayAtHome shop that is selling KN-95 and surgical masks. We’ve sold thousands of masks already and encourage our community members sign up and earn OGN by spreading the word and helping people get the masks that they need.
Two weeks ago, we introduced a new Origin experiment, Origin Deals, that utilizes OGN in a novel way. Users are able to lock up small amounts of OGN for 120 days in exchange for unlocking significant discounts on Amazon products (up to 20%). As we iterate and improve on our Beta, it’s our goal to further decrease the circulating supply of OGN with Origin Deals.
With the accompanying browser extension (Chrome, Firefox, Brave) you can see how much you can save on millions of products on Amazon by using Origin Deals.
Both of these product launches are focused on creating additional utility for OGN while better servicing important participants in our ecosystem (sellers and promoters with Origin Commissions and buyers with Origin Deals).
We are thrilled that Brave signed on to be our first marquee partner for Dshop. Users can now purchase official Brave products via a privacy-focused, decentralized application (DApp) hosted on IPFS.
Brave is one of the premier companies in the cryptocurrency industry. Over 13M people use the Brave desktop and mobile browsers every month. In addition, the Brave team created the Basic Attention Token (BAT) and have built a large and thriving community. We look forward to future collaborations with the Brave team as we deepen our partnership over time. We are also eager to unveil new Origin partners in the rest of Q2. If you’re interested in setting up your own decentralized store, please reach out.
Last week, OGN was listed on Upbit, a tier-1 exchange. This further strengthens our foothold in the important market of South Korea where we are also listed on Coinone and GOPAX and are partnered with the iconic global technology company, Samsung.
Similarly, Bittrex Global opened up BTC and ETH trading pairs for OGN on their new global platform. As one of the early mainstays of the cryptocurrency trading market, Bittrex is an exchange we are excited to be working with.
As we continue to tackle new geographic markets, we expect OGN to be listed on multiple additional exchanges.
In these extraordinary times, we extend our best wishes to all the members of the global community. COVID-19 (aka the coronavirus) has disrupted the daily lives of billions of people and currently endangers millions of the most vulnerable members of society, including the elderly, those that have existing health issues, and the impoverished in the third-world. We stand together with the rest of humanity. Together, we will beat this pandemic.
Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the March 2020 edition. We are eager to hear feedback and suggestions from our community. Please email [email protected] for support requests and [email protected] for general inquiries/comments.
Like other teams around the world, the sudden and aggressive arrival of COVID-19 has required our team to adjust to the “new normal” and take decisive actions to ensure the safety of our team members and the continued growth of our business. See below for more details.
Here’s a quick summary of what happened in March:
We’ve been heads down working on several new products that are built on top of the Origin Platform. While we are not quite ready to unveil our new creations to the world yet, we encourage you to install the Origin browser extension (Chrome / Firefox / Brave). We’ll be releasing one of the Beta products we are most excited about via the browser extension in the near future.
We also formed new partnerships and increased the number of ways that users could trade Origin Tokens (OGN) by listing on Crypto.com, Kyber, and Tokocrypto.
Due to the onslaught of COVID-19, all Origin team members are currently working from home (and have been for the last several weeks). Thankfully, because we’ve always had a distributed team, we were ready to embrace this change and are just as productive today as we were before the virus took the world by storm.
Further, we want to assure all our token holders and our community that we remain very well-capitalized. We’ve run as a lean startup from day one and have been disciplined about how we deploy capital across hiring, marketing, and community building. While many startups now face uncertain financial futures, we have multiple years of runway and our financial position remains strong.
Our team is also evaluating several ways to take a more active stance to help those in need.
In the past month, we’ve made several updates to Dshop, our decentralized e-commerce platform that allows merchants to create a full-featured store that is hosted on IPFS and the Ethereum blockchain.
We’re happy to report that we are now better-equipped to launch more e-commerce stores on behalf of partners. If you are interested in running a store on Dshop, please get in touch with our business development team ([email protected]).
As mentioned above, we’re rapidly prototyping several new products on the Origin Platform. We’re planning to release early previews of these products from within the Origin browser extension. If you’re excited about seeing what’s next, download the extension on Chrome, Firefox, or Brave to be amongst the first to get invited to our newest releases.
We partnered with Crypto.com, and OGN is now available in the Crypto.com app. We’ve long been fans of Crypto.com as their mobile app and MCO Visa card make cryptocurrencies more accessible to mainstream users. The 1M+ users of the Crypto.com app can purchase cryptocurrencies with multiple fiat currencies (USD, GBP, EUR, SGD). This makes it much easier for more everyday users to buy and sell OGN.
We also listed OGN on Kyber Network, the leading decentralized exchange protocol. Our community members can now convert OGN to and from 70 different ERC-20 tokens and ETH.
Finally, OGN was also listed on Tokocrypto, one of the only regulated and government-approved Indonesian exchanges. While many outside of Indonesia may not have used Tokocrypto previously, we wanted to open up a dedicated market for our fast-growing Indonesian community that is approximately 4,000 members strong.
Please join us in welcoming Max Unger, our new Head of Community! Max has been a longtime cryptocurrency investor and operator that has built communities for EdenChain and OKEx. He has also worked with the likes of RedNova, the marketing and incubation entity for Du Capital, to build communities for their portfolio projects. We first got introduced to Max in early 2018 when he invested in Origin as part of our Strategic Round. As we’ve gotten to know Max over the past two years, we became convinced that we wanted his expertise on our team, particularly around building thriving, engaged communities in the cryptocurrency space.
Thank you everyone for participating in our recent February Origin Rewards campaign. We announced the winners earlier this month where we gave away 15,000 OGN to our community.
We also had an overwhelming response to our March Origin Rewards campaign. Our community is our greatest asset, and we could not be more thankful for your continuous support. Please continue to download and experiment with our Origin browser extension as your feedback will be invaluable to us. Stay tuned for new opportunities to earn OGN in next month’s campaign.
Despite the global pandemic slowing down our ability to engage with our community members in person, we’re still committed to evangelizing the Origin Platform and OGN around the world.
In China, we’ve kickstarted weekly online meetups with top projects that are also still active:
On March 19th, we partnered with IPFS.Fund to discuss decentralized storage use cases and adoption. We invited Zhou Huan, founder of IPFS.Fund to speak at the event.
A week later, we collaborated with Algorand, Conflux, and Taraxa to discuss the current macro environment and its impact on cryptocurrencies.
As more people are staying indoors, we’ll be looking at new ways to engage and grow our community through virtual events and our existing online channels.
Circulating supply did not increase this month and remained at 28M OGN (Coinmarketcap). Moving forward, we are working on new initiatives to lock up OGN and be more frugal in our OGN distributions. For example, we’ve purposefully scaled back OGN rewarded in Origin Rewards the past several months in an attempt to maintain a lower-than-expected circulating supply vs. our modeled token release schedule from the Binance research report on Origin.
Prior to the global pandemic, all of our core team members gathered together for our quarterly strategic planning offsite. It was a great opportunity for us to celebrate the milestones we’ve achieved to date in 2020, and more importantly, plan the future direction of Origin. As a distributed team, we always appreciate the time we get to spend together in person. We spent four days co-working, brainstorming, and finalizing key product and business initiatives that will drive the direction of our company in the upcoming quarters.
With the continuous support we’ve been fortunate to receive from our global community, we are truly excited about what we will accomplish in the future. Thank you, everyone, for supporting our vision and allowing us to be where we are today. During this extremely difficult time with COVID-19, we extend our best wishes to everyone in our global community. Let’s stay strong and healthy.
Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the February 2020 edition. We are eager to hear feedback and suggestions from our community.
In February, the Origin team accomplished several milestones on the product and business development fronts.
Earlier this month, we announced that our flagship Marketplace app was integrated into the Samsung Blockchain Wallet. This paves the first step to getting Origin into the hands of hundreds of millions of users in the future.
More recently, OGN was listed on two longstanding Korean exchanges, Coinone and GOPAX. This makes the Korean won the first fiat onramp for trading OGN.
We also continued to foster our regional communities across the United States, China, Korea, Russia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the rest of the world, growing our community member and token holder/trader numbers across the board.
Earlier this month, the Origin marketplace app launched in the Samsung Blockchain Wallet. Samsung’s foray into blockchain is a huge step forward for not only Origin, but our entire burgeoning industry.
As Samsung deploys more of its handsets with built-in wallet management and DApp discovery to its existing customer base that numbers in the hundreds of millions, it is positioning itself as one of the most important players in bringing cryptocurrencies and accompanying technologies to the mainstream.
Samsung currently owns over 40% of Android market share, and we couldn’t be more excited to be one of the earliest DApps available in their Blockchain Wallet. This was an exciting collaboration for our entire Origin team as we share in the tech giant’s desires to put real-world use cases for cryptocurrency and blockchain-powered applications into the hands of people all over the world.
This month, our Origin Rewards campaign focused on driving sales through our Origin merch store that is built on our decentralized e-commerce platform.
We’ve made progress in adding several features to the platform in preparation of launching new internal and third-party e-commerce applications on Origin in the coming months.
On February 18th, OGN was simultaneously listed on GOPAX and Coinone, two of the most reputable exchanges in South Korea. As part of these exchange partnerships, we’re excited to add our first fiat pairs, allowing OGN to be purchased directly with the South Korean won (KRW) on both exchanges. South Korea is one of the biggest and most active markets for blockchain and cryptocurrency technology development and trading in the world. We believe this is an important milestone for Origin as we aspire to distribute OGN to a broader number of holders in the Korean market.
Collaborating with global and Asian partners to evangelize Origin’s mission and technology continues to be a focus of ours on the community front.
Recently our China team partnered with the MakerDAO team to conduct an online meetup. We believe the Maker team is onto something generationally impactful by leading the charge into both DeFi and decentralized stablecoins.
We are now just also beginning to turn our attention to Japan. With recent regularity clarity slowly opening up the Japanese market, we’re excited to work with local partners and regulatory bodies to make OGN available to Japan sometime this year.
Hear Gumi Crypto’s Ray Zhang discuss the Origin team and why his Japanese VC/crypto-fund backed Origin.
Erica Kang of KryptoSeoul and BUIDL recently relocated from the explosive market of Korea to tackle on fast-growing blockchain opportunities in Vietnam. As a long-time supporter of our project, we’re thrilled to have this ally helping us promote Origin to the important Southeast Asian region.
To round out the month, we also conducted AMAs with Atomic Wallet and Coin98 this month.
Circulating supply is currently 28M OGN (Coinmarketcap) after a slightly larger-than-expected release for the January rewards campaign due to overwhelming participation during our launch month (released in mid-February).
The February Origin Rewards campaign release will be far smaller, adding 15k OGN to the circulating supply in early to mid-March. This is less than 5% of the originally modeled increase in the Binance Research Report for the upcoming month.
In the coming months we will be exploring ways to further limit circulating supply, with the goal of having a lower actual vs. modeled circulating supply for the foreseeable future.
We’ll be announcing our March campaign for Origin Rewards in a couple of days along with a new product announcement. We’re looking forward to sharing more details and other exciting updates soon. As always, thank you for your support. It means the world to us.
Learn more about Origin:
Welcome to the monthly Origin Token (OGN) holder monthly update. For the past two years, our team has been communicating with our pre-sale token purchasers through confidential monthly investor updates. Now that OGN is freely tradable and widely held by thousands of holders, we are making our monthly updates public to the entire community.
Our overall format is to provide a high-level summary (aka TLDR) followed by deep dives into various topics like product, token economics, and community.
We are eager to hear from our community. Please email [email protected] for support requests, and [email protected] for general inquiries/comments.
The start of the new year has been a particularly eventful month for our team and our community.
Most notably, we became Binance’s first token listing of 2020. This was also the first direct listing of Origin Tokens (OGN) on any exchange.
Coinciding with the enthusiasm for the launch, we reached new highs of 150k MAUs (monthly active users) and 50k DAUs (daily active users) on www.shoporigin.com during launch week.
Our community size also swelled to over 300k members. Our Telegram, Blockfolio Signal, and Twitter have grown to approximately 60k members each.
On the product and technology side, we continued to push forward on our Origin Rewards product.
Again, as a result of OGN’s initial launch, we saw a record number of Rewards monthly participants (50k+).
We expect these numbers to taper off now that our initial listing is over. We are also re-calibrating OGN rewards to ensure that we maintain healthy activity with Origin Rewards while managing our circulating supply carefully to prevent excess tokens from being distributed in the program.
We’ve also removed many fraudulent users from the program, including users that attempted to sign up for Origin Rewards multiple times in an attempt to claim extra OGN.
We believe that the strong interest we’ve seen for Origin Rewards supports our thesis that having a freely tradable token greatly improves the crypto-economic incentives needed to further expand the Origin network.
In the middle of the month, we launched OGN as a payment token on our flagship marketplace app. This will be the first of many applications that support OGN as a medium of exchange between buyers and sellers.
We also made good progress on our decentralized e-commerce store creator this month. Currently, the Origin merchandise store is the first application built on this product, and our next release will enable the creation of many more e-commerce store applications on the Origin Platform.
This has been a strong month for our engineering team, but we did face a few lowlights with our launch, experiencing technical load that brought down our marketplace app on several occasions. Users in China and other international countries also complained that our apps were not always accessible even when they were using VPNs. We’ve been working to stabilize our IPFS instances and deploy bug fixes.
Currently, there are approximately 23.4M OGN tokens circulating which is slightly lower than our 23.8M projected number in the Binance research report on Origin. We recently put out a blog post clarifying some of the confusion around OGN’s circulating supply, which was not properly tracked in the past on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko (both are now up to date).
We want to reiterate that no team members or advisors (both past and present) have sold any tokens to date. The first team unlock will happen in April of 2020. Both Josh and myself, the two co-founders, will not have any tokens unlocked until June of 2020.
As a reminder, you can view an interactive version of our token release schedule on the report from Binance Research.
Our community has doubled in size since the beginning of this month, with strong growth in the strategic regions of China, Korea, and Southeast Asia.
While we were somewhat slower to act than we should have been to the massive swell in our community, we soon course-corrected and have increased our staffing and created several new region and topic-specific Telegram channels to better communicate with valuable members of our community. These official new channels include:
Our community team has also been evangelizing Origin far and wide. Most recently, Anna presented alongside the Binance team in Bali to an overwhelmingly supportive crowd of over 100 people.
Josh and I were also honored to share some of our latest updates on TV with HKB News. This segment was broadcast on Korean television on January 16th. You can also watch the interview online.
We’ve also conducted numerous AMAs in China, Korea, Indonesia and Vietnam, with several being conducted in local languages. These include:
Through the holidays and into mid-January, we ran the Origin 2020 Kickoff social media contest. We rewarded over 100 members of our community with USDT prizes for their creative images, videos, and memes about Origin.
1st Prize Winner: @arayawisnathika (Twitter)
As part of our ongoing testimonial series, Evan Tana, founding general partner at 122 West Ventures made this great video talking about why he invested in Origin as he explained the important role of crypto-economic incentives in bootstrapping the network.
Finally, we wanted to give a special community shoutout to one member of our community that hunted us on Product Hunt and got us listed on BetaList, Mahesh Shrestha.
As always, we are forever grateful for the support that our token holders and broader community have given us.
Look forward to more exciting updates next month.
Learn more about Origin:
There has been some confusion lately about our token release schedule and circulating supply that we’d like to clear up. Specifically, some people have been asking why our circulating supply showed higher on CoinGecko than what was communicated in our Binance report. This discrepancy, unfortunately, led some members of our community to conclude that Origin team members must be selling tokens, increasing sell pressure, and causing a decline in the value of OGN.
First, we’d like to reassure our community that no Origin team members are selling OGN on Binance or any other exchange. There has not been a single token sold by any team member or advisor (including former employees and advisors). 100% of our employees and advisors (both past & present) are currently locked up. We chose to implement this team and advisor lockup to follow best practices from the public equities markets. Just like in an equity IPO, insiders are prohibited from selling. In our case, team members and advisors do not even have access to their vested tokens until 3 months after our Binance listing.
Furthermore, Matt and I, the two co-founders of Origin, have both signed up for brand new 4-year unlock schedules starting from our Binance launch even though we had already vested over 50% of our tokens over the past 2 years. Matt and I will actually be the last people to receive any OGN out of the many stakeholders that have contributed to the creation of the Origin Platform. We believe this is the right way to operate a long-term and mission-focused project. Both Matt and I believe wholeheartedly in our mission and are committed to working on Origin for a very long time.
There were a number of factors that led to our circulating supply showing as higher than it should have on CoinGecko and other websites:
We overfunded the wallets that are used to programmatically distribute tokens to our presale investors. We did this by accident without thinking through the potential consequences to public perception. Since we instructed our investors to give us deposit addresses at Binance if they wanted to trade at the open, this wallet shows hundreds of deposits to Binance. These deposits are all attributable to previous investors, but we understand why people might have questioned what we were doing sending so many tokens to Binance from an Origin owned wallet.
We forgot to tell CoinGecko about a wallet containing OGN allocated for partnerships that should remain untouched for at least 1–2 years. This oversight has since been corrected with CoinGecko.
As required by top exchanges as a best practice to ensure an orderly and liquid market for OGN, we pre-funded our liquidity provider to ensure adequate liquidity. After the initial launch, a large percentage of those tokens were returned to be available for future investor distributions.
To remove any remaining doubts, we have returned all extra tokens to our Foundation Reserves, a multi-sig wallet that owns our ERC-20 contract. This puts our current circulating supply at 2.34%. Note this actually puts us slightly below the 2.38% amount that was modeled out in Origin’s Binance report.
Both CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap now show our correct circulating supply and we expect both sites to show the correct value going forward.
We want to apologize for the confusion we caused. We know our community is counting on us to operate with full transparency, and we’re sorry we gave you any cause to doubt us. Going forward, we will be more careful about making sure our circulating supply matches what we have publicly shared in our Binance report and will communicate any material changes in advance.
On that note, we want to let you know now that we anticipate that our February distributions for Origin Rewards will be slightly higher than predicted and previously communicated in the Binance report. This is due to the overwhelming success of our Holiday Rewards campaign which drove an enormous amount of buzz around our launch. While tens of thousands of people participated in this campaign, the absolute number of tokens as a percentage of our total circulating remains quite small. We also expect this slightly larger distribution (vs. modeled) to be a one-time event associated with our launch.
We’ve heard some criticism from our community for giving away small amounts of OGN to many members of our community. However, creating a widely distributed ownership base is intentional! Don’t forget that the value of OGN is largely derived from the strength of our community. When we founded Origin we promised that we would give our early users a stake in the network. We remain committed to that promise today. We will continue to incentivize as many people as possible to use our platform and share it with their friends. We will also be increasingly careful to ensure no one receives an unfair stake or benefits without contributing meaningful value to the network.
We hope that this post addresses many questions that we have received from the community of late. We look forward to engaging publicly and transparently with our many global supporters. Thank you and look forward to additional updates soon.
Learn more about Origin:
We’ve had an overwhelming response to our Holiday Special Origin Rewards campaign that started during the 2019 holiday season! The entire Origin team has been working around the clock to support the swell of new users that have joined the Origin Platform. Due to so many new members joining our community, the allocated OGN budget for the Holiday Campaign has been reached earlier than expected. The campaign will be ending 24 hours from now (12am UTC on January 14th, 2020).
We allocated a total of 1 million OGN to our special Holiday Rewards Campaign. We’ve since exceeded that target number based on the record levels of new users signing up. However, in celebration of our recent Binance listing, we’ve decided to keep the campaign running for one more day. You have 24 hours to verify your profiles and refer your friends to sign up on our flagship app or web DApp! As a reminder, OGN earned for tasks from Origin Rewards will be distributed to you the following month after completing the task. Rewards for the Holiday Special campaign will be rewarded in February.
This special Origin Rewards campaign has been an enormous success. We’ve been blown away by the response of our community. In the last week, we’ve seen tens of thousands of people join our main Telegram group, and new regional Telegram groups have formed in Indonesia and Vietnam. Our Twitter has tripled in follower count, and we’ve seen strong growth in our WeChat, Facebook, and Instagram as well. All around the world people have been sharing Origin with their friends and family and getting them signed up as new users on the Origin platform.
We’re excited to announce that we have now over 100,000 unique wallets that have created profiles on the Origin platform, and more than twice that number of members across our global community channels. These users are signed up and ready to buy and sell on the Origin Marketplace. This is a major milestone, not only for Origin, but for the entire web3 community. Peer-to-peer commerce is finally here.
We know there have been some difficulties verifying your Telegram accounts as Telegram has been limiting the number of users that can verify their accounts with us. Thank you for your understanding and patience. We will be looking at these issues and taking this opportunity to fix them before our next Origin Rewards campaign.
As a reminder, you still have a couple more days to win up to $1,000 in our social media contest that is running through 11:59pm Pacific Time on January 15th. In total, there are $3,750 USDT worth of rewards that are still up for grabs. We’re constantly impressed by the creativity of our community, and we’ve already seen some amazing submissions. Keep them coming!
We want to extend a huge thank you to our community for making our holiday campaign such an amazing success. Thank you to everyone who shared Origin with their friends. We plan to offer new opportunities to earn OGN in upcoming Origin Rewards campaigns. Look for new opportunities to earn OGN in our February campaign!
Learn more about Origin:
We are ecstatic to announce that Binance, the world’s top global exchange by users and spot-trading volume, will be listing Origin Tokens (OGN) on January 8, 2020 at 7PM (United States PT), coinciding with the 1.0 launch of the Origin Platform.
Today, we are one step closer to achieving our mission of enabling true peer-to-peer commerce.
At Origin, we envision a future where global marketplaces exist without traditional middlemen, allowing buyers and sellers to transact with each other directly. The sharing economy alone is expected to reach $335B USD in bookings per year by 2025 and is ripe for disruption. Origin-powered peer-to-peer marketplaces are inevitable and offer the following advantages over traditional marketplaces:
Lower Fees: Buyers and sellers can typically share 20–30% in savings when middlemen are removed.
Better Incentives: Everyone can own a stake in the Origin network (by holding OGN) through referring new users, driving transactions, promoting listings, and building applications on the Platform.
Increased Access: Markets are accessible to the two billion people around the world that are currently unbanked.
Censorship Resilience: Peer-to-peer marketplaces are difficult to ban or shut down, enabling more free and open commerce.
After over a year in Mainnet Beta, we are releasing our 1.0 Platform on that will enable many different types of peer-to-peer marketplace and e-commerce applications in the future.
This past year, we’ve had tens of thousands of users use our flagship mobile applications and web DApp (decentralized application). Thousands of commercial transactions between buyers and sellers have been processed by the Origin Marketplace smart contract.
We’ve also launched multiple vertical marketplaces, including a gift card exchange, crypto art marketplace, video live-streaming app, and a crypto merchandise store. Our partners like Trips Community, ZoidShop, and HubrisOne have also launched partner apps on the Origin Platform. Most recently, we’ve launched a decentralized e-commerce store creator in addition to our Marketplace creator.
We’ve also distributed Origin Tokens (OGN) to 7,000 stakeholders that are now incentivized to promote and grow the network. If you’re not an OGN holder yet, you can earn your first tokens by signing up for Origin Rewards. You can earn OGN by verifying your profile, promoting Origin on social media, referring new users to the Platform, and making purchases on our apps.
To trade OGN, you will need to sign up for an account on www.binance.com and pass Binance’s AML (anti-money laundering) and KYC (know-your-customer) checks.
Currently, Origin Tokens (OGN) earned through Origin Rewards or purchased in our three fundraising rounds (Advisor, Strategic, and CoinList) have been locked for usage on the Origin Platform.
Immediately before our initial listing on Binance at 7PM on the 8th, your OGN will be unlocked and freely transferable. You will be able to deposit your OGN to your Binance deposit addresses at that time.
Binance has also published a detailed research report on Origin and OGN. We encourage all prospective token purchasers to read this research report.
If you have additional questions or need help with this process, please email us at [email protected].
At Origin, we are committed to building a successful platform that enables peer-to-peer commerce over the long-term. At the outset of the company, we elected to implement four-year vesting schedules (with one-year cliffs) for all our team members. As serial entrepreneurs and operators that have seen multiple successful outcomes, we wanted to borrow this best practice from traditional startups long before vesting schedules became more commonly used in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industries.
Today, we are doubling down on our commitment to build for the long-term. On top of our existing four-year vesting schedules, our team members will be locked up for an additional three months after our initial listing. Our advisors have agreed to extend the vesting of their tokens for twelve months after the same three-month lockup. Origin’s two co-founders, Matthew Liu and Josh Fraser, have elected to start new four-year unlock schedules beginning from the initial exchange listing date despite having already vested more than half of their tokens.
Previous token purchasers have also opted to extend their lockups from a previous 3-month release schedule to a revised 2-year release schedule.
The entire Origin team and investor base are aligned to act in the long-term interests of the project. The full token release schedule is modeled below.
Over the past 2.5 years, the Origin core team, over 170 open-source developers, dozens of volunteers (including community managers, translators, and influencers), 800+ investors, and over 100,000 broader community supporters and fans have been working hard to officially launch the Origin Platform and make Origin a success.
See investors like the founder of YouTube and partners of Pantera Capital speak about Origin
We are extremely thankful for everyone’s contributions and continued support. We are still in the early chapters of the Origin story. While our 1.0 Platform launch and initial listing on Binance are hugely important milestones, we expect to look back ten years from now to view these as just the precursors to much greater achievements and deeper social impact.
What we are working on is bigger than what our team alone can accomplish. The road ahead will be full of new obstacles, but we couldn’t be more excited to be working with our investors, partners, open-source developers, and community members to bring peer-to-peer commerce to the masses.
With deep gratitude,
The entire Origin team — Matt, Josh, Coleman, Yu Pan, Micah, Kay, Franck, Mila, Tom, Anna, Nick, Domen, Shahul, Zaur, Mike, Aure, Holly, June, Yeongin, and Leslie.
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This article was originally written on Medium in 2019. The information below may be out of date.
At Origin, we have always believed that our success will be 50% dependent on the impact of our technology and 50% on the strength of our community. Behind every great blockchain company is a supportive, engaged, and collaborative community. A strong community believes in and is excited to share the company’s vision and values; it can also guide the company in making better decisions when it comes to product development and innovation. Perhaps even more importantly, a strong community that has aligned interests with the project can act as the strongest advocate for the project in acquiring end users, developers, and enterprises in the future.
From day one, Origin has strived to build a global brand while ensuring it’s locally relevant to our users in China, which is one of the most important markets to us. Two years on, we are lucky to have a loyal and vibrant Chinese community that has embraced our mission to enable true peer-to-peer commerce.
Today I couldn’t be more thrilled to announce a new addition to the Origin China team, Leslie Song, who will focus on dramatically increasing our online and offline community-building efforts in China.
Leslie has deep insights into the cryptocurrency and blockchain trends in China and brings with him a wealth of experience in working with blockchain startups from all around the world, such as Kava, Algorand, MakerDao, and Blockstack. As a partner to these projects, he has often helped them build thriving Chinese communities from scratch.
Now at Origin full-time, he will take his years of experience building thriving communities to a new level, being singularly focused on actualizing our ambitious community vision and executing our initiatives in China.
After graduating with a Masters in Chemistry from Nanjing University, Leslie spent a year working as a Community Manager at BugBank（漏洞银行）before moving on to Bihu（币乎）, the largest Chinese crypto community. At Bihu’s Content Officer, he helped dozens of overseas blockchain projects manage and grow their Chinese communities. In many cases, he grew community sizes from a handful of initial members to tens of thousands of loyal followers in short periods of times.
During his two years at Bihu, Leslie also forged strong relationships with numerous local and global projects, crypto influencers and media, and is now widely recognized as one of the figureheads in the Chinese cryptocurrency space.
When asked why he chose to join Origin, Leslie replied, “I believe in giving contributors to sharing economy marketplaces more rights; Origin can empower them and strengthen their voices in the ecosystem”. Having Leslie onboard gives us even more confidence that we will realize the Origin mission of enabling peer-to-peer commerce and and create the game-changing Internet marketplaces and e-commerce applications of tomorrow.
When he is not organizing blockchain meet ups, collaborating with journalists, talking to community members one-on-one, or running successful online airdrop events, Leslie can either be found on the basketball court or letting his hair down (literally) at a rock concert.
It is Leslie’s authenticity and his raw enthusiasm for life, building long-term and meaningful relationships, and his desire to positively impact the world that we first bonded over. I believe his upcoming work at Origin will help inspire our global community (and even our internal team members) to build a much stronger and more vibrant community in China. Once again, welcome to the Origin team, Leslie!
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Korea is an incredibly important market for us. Koreans have an incredible enthusiasm for cutting-edge tech and they are already a leader in the global blockchain space. Adoption of Origin and other blockchain technology is only accelerating in the region.
Ryan Kim is a partner at Hashed, the largest blockchain accelerator in Korea. In this video, Ryan shares why Hashed decided to invest in Origin Protocol and continues to support the project today.
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