We are ecstatic to announce that Coinbase, the world’s most prestigious cryptocurrency exchange and leading on-ramp for retail users, announced they will be listing Origin Tokens (OGN) at 9AM PT on Friday April 9th on Coinbase Pro. OGN-USD and OGN-BTC order books will launch in three phases, post-only, limit-only and full trading.
Coinbase was recently approved by the SEC for a direct listing on the NASDAQ and will be premiering its COIN stock on April 14th, 2021. A cryptocurrency exchange going public on the US stock market is a historic moment for the entire industry, and we are overjoyed to be a part of this movement that will further increase adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies.
It is hard to overstate how important this milestone is for Origin and our global community. Coinbase is by far the most common way US retail customers start their journey into crypto, and the spotlight on Coinbase will greatly increase when they go public. Throughout the last few weeks alone, we’ve received thousands of requests from US individuals looking to purchase OGN, and now these users will have a quick and seamless way to participate in the Origin community. In addition, millions of people will learn about Origin for the very first time simply by being exposed to the OGN trading pairs on Coinbase. Notably, the OGN-USD pair provides a direct fiat onramp for our many US supporters. We are now one momentous step closer to achieving our mission of bringing NFTs, decentralized commerce, and decentralized finance (DeFi) to the mainstream.
At Origin, we have been building cryptocurrency products for nearly four years. Origin was founded in 2017, and we released our early marketplace application to the Ethereum mainnet in 2018. Since then, we have built products in the decentralized commerce space with a focus on NFTs as well as in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space.
We have worked with some incredible corporate partners including Samsung, Google, and Amazon. Origin has been covered in outlets like The New York Times, TechCrunch, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal. We have already broken records with our NFT launches and are working with world-famous creators such as Jake Paul and Lupe Fiasco to launch more NFT collections. In the next few weeks, dozens of additional creators will launch on our NFT Launchpad. Despite all of these past accomplishments, we believe the future is even brighter for Origin, and we will not rest and will keep pushing ahead to bring our products to mainstream users in the coming months and years.
The Origin Token (OGN) is the governance and value accrual token for the entire Origin Platform and suite of products. OGN holders will be able to make and vote for proposals to determine how our various commerce and DeFi protocols are governed. Part of the value transacted across our products will be captured and accrue to OGN as well.
Deposits of OGN will be enabled from today. Trading will go live at 9AM PT on Friday April 9th.
This corresponds to the following times across our global community:
To trade OGN, you will need to sign up for an account on www.coinbase.com and pass Coinbase’s AML (anti-money laundering) and KYC (know-your-customer) checks.
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 generationally-significant company that will create impact and value for our customers for decades to come. When Origin was founded, we chose to implement four-year vesting schedules for all team members to ensure all our employees were incentivized to create long-term value. We took this practice from our experience as serial entrepreneurs and operators at some of the most successful startups of all time, working with some of the most successful founders of all time. Our founding engineer, Yu Pan, was a co-founder of PayPal alongside Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and others. Much of our team has worked together in the past as some of the earliest employees at YouTube before moving onto Google and other iconic tech companies like Dropbox.
As a reminder to our community, Origin’s two co-founders, Matthew Liu and Josh Fraser, volunteered to start new four-year unlock schedules beginning in January 2020 despite having already vested more than half of their tokens. To date, neither co-founder has sold a single token.
The entire Origin team and investor base are aligned to act in the long-term interests of the project. Full details about our projected and actual circulating supply as well as other important token metrics are accessible at our OGN dashboard.
Many cryptocurrency projects consider a Coinbase listing to be their crowning achievement. While we are beyond thrilled to have OGN trade on the world’s premier exchange and bring our project to millions of new mainstream cryptocurrency users, we see today’s milestone as just one crucial step in our path forward. We believe the best days of Origin are yet to come, and we will work tirelessly until hundreds of millions of customers are using our products. Look forward to new partnership announcements regarding OUSD, Dshop, and our NFT Launchpad as well as additional exchange listings for OGN and OUSD.
Learn more about Origin:
Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the April 2021 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. Please email [email protected] if you are a creator looking to launch NFTs on Origin.
It has been another extremely busy month at Origin filled with headline-making NFT drops and the listing of OGN on Coinbase. We have been inundated with interest from the crypto community as well as mainstream attention due to our NFT partnerships with household name celebrities. Now, retail users and people learning about crypto and NFTs for the first time can access OGN on Coinbase. This is an extremely important synergy and crucial to the long term success of Origin.
Origin launched a number of high-profile NFT drops in April. We recently completed the first-ever NFT drop by Grammy Award-winner Lupe Fiasco and announced a drop by another Grammy Award-winner in One Republic’s Ryan Tedder. Origin also completed a viral meme NFT drop by DudeWithSign and a drop by the legendary visual artist and designer behind OBEY and the Obama Hope posters, Shepard Fairey, in collaboration with the award-winning hip hop producer Mike Dean. In addition, we announced another music NFT drop with Bassjackers and completed a huge NFT drop by mega-influencer Jake Paul centered around his super viral knockout of Ben Askren. We were able to get mainstream media coverage in Forbes, Rolling Stone, and Variety.
Origin also saw a spate of exchange listings for OGN, including Coinbase and Coinbase Pro, Crypto.com, and the launch of an OGN perpetual futures contract on Binance. These are all mainstream, globally recognized exchanges. The ability for retail users to easily buy OGN in the US via the Coinbase App or for institutional traders to hedge or trade with OGN derivatives on Binance means that OGN is a rapidly maturing digital asset.
This month we saw a modest increase in OGN staking numbers, from nearly 78 million tokens staked to over 79 million tokens staked. Some additional investor tokens and team tokens were unlocked this month but the market absorbed them well. Almost 100 million OGN have been removed from circulation, an amount equivalent to over 35% of the listed circulating supply or 47% of the true circulating supply.
Circulating supply is currently at 284M compared to a projected 299M tokens. The circulating supply number includes the 79M that is currently staked in our staking program, reducing the actual float further.
To date, neither Origin co-founder has sold a single OGN token and they have no plans on selling any tokens anytime soon.
Origin participated in a number of community events this month, including an event with our partner Chainlink for the Korean community. We have been very active on Clubhouse, so please make sure to follow @matthewliu, @joshfraser, and @williamt to connect with us there.
We are also thrilled to announce that Andrew Kang is joining the Origin community as a DeFi and NFT advisor. Andrew is one of the foremost thinkers in the DeFi space and his fund Mechanism Capital are among the most prominent investors in the space.
Origin is pleased to welcome two new hires this month, Chase Colman and the aforementioned William Tong! Chase will be bringing her amazing project management and organizational skills and William will be utilizing his incredible networking ability and passion for NFTs to the team. We actually met William in a fairly nontraditional manner while Chase was a referral from our very own VP of Engineering, Franck. William was one of the most consistent and helpful community members of the NFT scene on Clubhouse. Both Chase and William stood out right away due to the energy and professionalism they exude and we made them offers immediately. We are proud to be able to identify talent from all channels from social media to the open source developer community. Origin does not believe in being constrained by only hiring from job postings and based on pedigrees and resumes.
We are still on the lookout for a Talent Relations Manager. If you are interested in NFTs and have worked in the media or entertainment industry before, especially in a client-facing role with top talent, we want to speak to you. We’re also still looking for an experienced Senior Growth / Marketing Engineer and a Senior Solidity Engineer. Check out our job postings, and come join us or refer your friends!
Learn more about Origin:
Buy Origin Tokens (OGN): Coinbase, Binance, Huobi, Upbit
Track OGN token metrics: originprotocol.com/dashboard
Get Origin Dollars (OUSD): ousd.com/mint
Stake your OGN to earn: ousd.com/stake
Learn more on our company website: originprotocol.com
Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the March 2021 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. Please email [email protected] if you are a creator looking to launch NFTs on Origin.
NFT mania is in full swing and Origin has established itself as a leader in the space. We’ve seen continuous mainstream coverage of NFTs from outlets like the New York Times and CNBC. Perhaps the breakthrough moment of NFTs capturing the public imagination was the recent Saturday Night Live sketch that went viral on Twitter. It isn’t surprising that NFTs are bringing crypto into the mainstream since NFTs are the confluence of art, culture, speculation, and the increasing financialization and digitization of content. NFTs represent an incredibly exciting opportunity that is growing exponentially. We believe Origin Protocol will power many of the biggest NFT drops this year. Origin is building a fully-featured NFT platform and poised to capture this huge market.
To follow up our record-breaking NFT launch from last month, we have announced that we are hosting the first-ever NFT drop by Lupe Fiasco, a Grammy Award-winning and multi-platinum musical artist. Not only is Lupe one of the biggest names in hip hop, he is a notable entrepreneur and social activist who was recently appointed an Artist in Residence at MIT. Lupe was named GQ’s Man of the Year and was also a Henry Crown fellow in the past. Lupe has also been a crypto investor and involved with NFTs for years. We think it is key to work with artists and creators that understand crypto and have established roots in the space.
Another important development this month was the raising of the collateral factor from 0% to 45% for OGN on Cream Finance. This means that users not only can earn interest from depositing OGN as collateral, but they can also now borrow up to 45% of the value of their deposited OGN. OGN holders can now access additional liquidity without having to sell OGN. For example, OGN holders could deposit OGN onto Cream and borrow USDT to mint OUSD and earn yield passively without decreasing their OGN position at all. This is a game-changer for OGN and a significant milestone for our integration into the wider DeFi ecosystem.
OGN also saw another major exchange listing on Gate.io, following up our listing on HitBTC from last month.
In OUSD news, we announced the completion of a third security audit of the OUSD smart contracts and code. Leading security firm Certora performed a formal software verification of OUSD. This kind of security audit is designed to uncover different edge cases and give unique guarantees about the security of our platform than a typical audit. We remain committed to making OUSD the easiest and most secure way for the average person to get exposure to DeFi.
We are also now working with Chainlink exclusively for real-time price feeds for OUSD. We are very excited to collaborate with them and share in their incredible community.
This month we saw a huge increase in OGN staking numbers, from 38 million tokens staked to nearly 78 million tokens staked. Part of the increase in participation is due to our partnership with Binance, who announced a proxy staking program for OGN this month. This means that almost 110 million OGN have been removed from circulation, an amount equivalent to over 40% of the listed circulating supply or 56% of the true circulating supply.
Circulating supply is currently at 273M compared to a projected 291M tokens. The circulating supply number includes the 78M that is currently staked in our staking program, reducing the actual float further.
We are also proud to state that Origin’s founders have sold zero OGN tokens and have no plans of selling tokens anytime soon. Unlike many crypto companies, we are focused on long-term value creation and not short-term speculation.
Origin was recently a featured guest on the Binance AMA series. If you missed out, you can check out the transcript of the event. We highly value our relationship with Binance and will continue to work with them on many fronts.
Origin has seen an explosion in social media activity and mentions by influencers. This extends to mainstream influencers outside of the crypto space. We are very excited to help usher crypto into the mainstream.
Due to the incredible amount of inbound we are receiving from artists and creators, we are looking to hire a Talent Relations Manager. If you are interested in NFTs and have worked in the media or entertainment industry before, especially in a client-facing role with top talent, we want to speak to you. We’re also still looking for an experienced Senior Growth / Marketing Engineer and a Senior Solidity Engineer. Check out our job postings, and come join us or refer your friends!
Learn more about Origin:
Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the January 2021 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.
Happy new year to the entire Origin community! At the close of last year and in the beginning of this year, we have seen unprecedented coverage of cryptocurrencies by the mainstream media and an inflow of capital from institutions.
The narrative all points to traditional capital flowing into cryptocurrencies as the US Fed continues to print money with reckless abandon, devaluing the US dollar and driving more and more institutions to invest in Bitcoin. Meanwhile, Robinhood showed this week that the equities markets are rigged for hedge funds and institutions. The time for decentralized cryptocurrencies and associated technologies to take the world by storm is now. We believe 2021 is going to be a great year for OGN and the broader cryptocurrency market.
This month, our team has been working at a furious pace to enact our “V-shaped recovery” from last November’s OUSD hack and subsequent decrease in OGN market performance. We have made tremendous ground in re-launching OUSD and winning back the confidence of our hundreds of thousands of OGN community members. We believe we have now positioned ourselves for a strong growth trajectory for the rest of this quarter in terms of both token performance and product traction.
OUSD is back and stronger than ever. We’ve now surpassed the all-time high in circulating supply prior to the hack ($7M+) and are showing great trajectory to increase OUSD adoption faster than ever. New and existing users can automatically earn at a current APY of over 50% just by holding OUSD in their wallets. You can mint OUSD in a matter of minutes at www.ousd.com. Alternatively, you can purchase at low gas costs and minimal slippage on our Uniswap pool where we’ve supplied ample liquidity.
To provide more detail, OUSD was re-launched shortly after the new year began with a comprehensive set of engineering changes and security processes to ensure user funds are safe and that we are never hacked again.
Notably, OUSD has now been audited by both Trail of Bits and Solidified. Two additional audits have been scheduled in Q1, including with OpenZeppelin, one of the top auditing firms in our industry.
Further, last week we launched our first partnership with a DeFi coverage provider, Cover Protocol. OUSD holders can buy smart contract coverage to cover any losses that might result from any bugs or vulnerabilities in the OUSD contracts, including economic exploits (such as flash loans attacks). In addition, anyone who wants to make a financial bet on the security of our contracts can earn a yield by providing coverage. We anticipate adding additional coverage providers in the near future. We’ll also be focusing on forging new OUSD partnerships and implementing integrations with wallets, exchanges, and other DeFi platforms. As another example, OUSD has been re-listed on VirgoX in concert with the successful re-launch of the protocol.
Perhaps most importantly, we stood by our commitment to make affected users whole. We launched our compensation plan that returns 100% of the pre-hack value of OUSD to affected users. Two-thirds of users were compensated fully in OUSD immediately, with the remaining users receiving OGN that will earn interest at 25% a year before being unlocked.
The Dshop team has continued to make substantial progress as well even though there have not been any public announcements this month. The team is hard at work on several exciting product advancements that will be launched in February and March to serve new categories of merchant partners that will accrue value directly to OGN.
This month, we wanted to highlight that the number of locked and staked OGN continues to rise. Currently, there are nearly 40M OGN locked through voluntary investor and team lock-ups (on top of the normal lock-up schedule) and 35M staked tokens in the OGN staking program launched last month.
Circulating supply is currently at 207M compared to a projected 245M tokens. The circulating supply number includes the nearly 35M that is currently staked in our staking program, reducing the actual float further.
Recently, our long-time partner and supporter, Luca De Giglio from TripsCommunity, conducted an interview with me around OUSD. We discussed bringing DeFi to the masses as well as what cryptocurrencies mean for the travel and hospitality industries.
We’re looking for an experienced Senior Growth / Marketing Engineer and a Senior Solidity Engineer. Check out our job postings, and come join us or refer your friends!
Learn more about Origin:
Five weeks ago, we announced an unprecedented plan to compensate more than 700 beta users who lost funds in the Origin Dollar (OUSD) exploit. We pledged to relaunch OUSD with multiple external audits and security improvements in the new year. We shipped a new version this month and have already seen over $2 million of OUSD minted. Today, we’re proud to announce that claims can be made for 100% of eligible balances in the form of staked OGN and liquid OUSD earning a staggering 54+% annualized yield.
Compensation can be claimed on the OUSD DApp by submitting one or two Ethereum transactions. The first transaction is to claim liquid OUSD, which is available to all eligible users. This is the only transaction necessary for approximately two-thirds of users since their losses were less than 1,000 OUSD each. When this claim is submitted, OUSD will be transferred from the compensation contract to the user’s wallet and begin earning a highly competitive yield immediately.
The second transaction is to claim and stake OGN — the highly liquid governance token of OUSD, Dshop, and the rest of the Origin Protocol. This transaction is only necessary for holders whose losses exceeded 1,000 OUSD. By claiming and staking OGN, users will immediately begin accruing additional OGN at a rate of 25% over the next 365 days. Once this staking period is up, the full amount OGN will unlock and become eligible to stake again for additional interest.
For more details on the compensation structure and how eligible balances are calculated, please refer to the original announcement. As a reminder, all claims for both OUSD and OGN must be made within 90 days (by 4:35:08 UTC on April 20, 2021). Claims can be made at ousd.com/compensation
With the relaunch of OUSD and the rollout of our compensation plan, we’re committed to ensuring that every possible security precaution is taken to protect users’ funds. We recently completed multiple audits of our smart contracts with Trail of Bits and Solidified. We’re also implementing formal verification with Certora and engaging OpenZeppelin to conduct ongoing reviews of improvements that we make to the protocol. Every aspect of our engineering and product development process has been overhauled with a security-first approach ranging from automated tooling and stricter code reviews to a bug bounty program and an optional insurance offering. We’re thoroughly reviewing and learning from other exploits in the industry and confirming that our code is not subject to the same vulnerabilities. Our top priority is to make OUSD the safest way to earn highly competitive yields from DeFi.
Many compensation recipients will now become holders of OGN — the governance token for OUSD and the entire Origin network. By participating in the OGN staking program, these token holders will not only receive interest in the form of additional OGN over time, but they also stand to benefit from the growth of OUSD. Since the relaunch, OUSD has consistently produced a double-digit annualized yield through its automated lending strategies, reward token farming, exit fees, and exchange rate spreads. We will soon be adding a mechanism for a portion of this yield to accrue to OGN. As the adoption of OUSD grows, so should the value to holders of OGN. This will be the first of many levers that will eventually be controlled by decentralized governance, which we hope to roll out later this year.
OUSD will continue to improve with the safest yield farming strategies as they evolve. We’re working on bringing back our Curve 3pool strategy with additional security improvements to help sustain a high risk-adjusted APY. We also look forward to integrating with additional projects across the DeFi ecosystem and will soon be moving forward with a solution to offer optional insurance coverage. We’re excited to be turning the corner after a difficult couple of months and know that OUSD is stronger now having gone through it. Thank you for your patience and belief in our effort to bring DeFi to the masses.
Learn more about Origin:
The following is a full post-mortem on the recent Origin Dollar (OUSD) hack which took place on November 16, 2020. Since the exploit, we spent considerable time learning from the technical failures, upgrading our OUSD smart contracts, and introducing enhanced security measures and processes at the company. With our OUSD relaunch, we wanted to share some of our latest engineering updates with the community. Going forward, we are committed to making security our number one priority while offering competitive returns to our OUSD holders.
OUSD suffered a loss of 7 million dollars on November 16th due to a missing validation check that allowed a reentrancy bug. This validation bug was introduced during a gas-saving refactoring that copied some functionality but did not copy the validation. Shortly after the incident, we released a detailed plan to provide compensation equal to 100% of the value deposited to OUSD at the time of the exploit. We are more motivated than ever to make OUSD a success as a mainstream, yield-generating stablecoin.
There’s the Swiss cheese theory of disasters — in a complex system, multiple holes in defenses have to line up in order for a disaster to happen. The loss of funds could and should have been prevented.
The bad news was that we had a failure at multiple layers and allowed the Swiss Cheese disaster to occur. The good news is that we now have a much stronger and longer list of security measures and protocols to prevent this from happening ever again. While the malicious attack created a setback for both us and our users, we believe that in the long-term OUSD will now be more anti-fragile. We are stronger now and will be resilient and defensive against future attempted exploits.
The actual fix to the bug that caused the loss of funds was only a single line of code.
However, rather than just making that fix, and relaunching, we’ve spent over a month taking a hard look at our processes and code, with the aim of never letting this outcome happen again!
First of all, we fixed the missing validation check.
We also added reentrancy checks to the OUSD Vault that would prevent a similar bug in the future from being able to be exploited.
We now have two completed code audits and have committed additional fixes to the remaining smaller issues that were found. Trail of Bits was in the middle of auditing our contracts when the attack happened. They completed their audit and identified several minor issues in addition to the one catastrophic bug. We have since resolved each of the issues they highlighted.
Given the gravity of the situation, we decided to retain a second auditing firm to give the contracts another look. We worked with Solidified who reviewed the entire system as well as our new staking and compensation contracts that Trail of Bits didn’t have a chance to review.
We intend to continue working with respected security auditing firms to review our work. We’ve lined up a future audit with OpenZeppelin to review additional upgrades in Q1 of 2021. While audits still can’t guarantee correctness, they have proven to be useful in identifying potential issues.
We’ve also retained Certora to begin formally verifying the various security properties of our contracts. They will help us define a set of automated rules to ensure our contracts satisfy their specifications. These verification checks will be run as part of our CI process to catch future bugs that break our contract specifications.
We now have automated checking for common errors on each code change using GitHub actions to run Slither rather than on an ad-hoc basis. In addition, we are manually running a suite of Echidna fuzzing tests on each contract pull request. These tests can automatically detect and warn our team about common security issues. We’ve also greatly extended our test suite for additional code coverage.
PR reviews that touch contracts are now more rigorous than before. We’re requiring two engineers for each contract PR, and are slowing it down to make sure the reviews are thorough, with detailed checklists associated with each PR.
We’ve taken a security week to focus on contract security and conducted our own internal audits in addition to having a second external audit. We’ll be taking another security week in the near future.
In addition, we’ve made sure features don’t bump security in our planning process.
Previously, two engineers were informally reviewing every DeFi hack. However, the one hack that would have alerted us to a problem with our contracts, Akropolis, only got a quick read rather than the thorough reviews that had been happening after other attacks. As a result, we didn’t see the missing validation that allowed a similar attack on OUSD.
We’ve formalized an engineering rotation for reviewing attacks on other projects as well as ensuring we deep dive into each of these reviews, including reviewing the affected contract’s source code ourselves.
We’re also conducting internal retrospectives on “near-misses” — problems that didn’t affect users but got further than they should have.
Although we responded to the OUSD attack within minutes of it occurring, we want to be faster next time. We now have automated monitoring to Discord for large transactions and failing transactions.
We’ve added a fast pause functionality, allowing two multi-sig holders to pause minting and redeeming. This will give us the ability to respond faster to incidents and hopefully reduce the scale of any vulnerabilities.
We will also continue to have a bug bounty program with up to $250,000 offered for identifying major vulnerabilities.
We’re exploring working with Nexus Mutual, Cover Protocol, and other insurance providers to make DeFi insurance available to OUSD holders. Origin intends to deploy significant capital as the initial coverage provider. We’ll be sharing more details in the near future.
With the OUSD relaunch, we look forward to making DeFi much simpler. We believe OUSD will make money a whole lot better for everyone, even individuals that currently don’t understand cryptocurrencies or DeFi.
We know we hit a magical combination of yield and ease of use with OUSD’s initial launch. We had just begun to hit our inflection point with a million dollars a day being deposited in the two days before the hack. We look forward to regaining that momentum in the very near future. Going forward, security will be our highest priority for OUSD.
Learn more about Origin:
Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the December 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.
Happy holidays from the entire Origin team. We wish all of our token holders the best during the holiday season and wanted to communicate our excitement for the beginning of 2021.
December marks the beginning of our “V-shaped recovery” after November’s OUSD hack. We’ve been hard at work to rebound from that unfortunate setback and are more motivated than ever to take Origin and OGN to new heights in the coming weeks and months.
Here’s a recap of this last month.
This month we launched OGN staking to enable OGN supporters to earn yield while holding OGN. Our initial staking program offers three staking periods and respective yields:
Since launch a few days ago, we’ve locked up an additional 4.4M OGN, bringing total locked tokens to ~45M OGN. You can review additional token metrics at the OGN dashboard. You can also find OGN staking data on stakingrewards.com, one of the most trusted sources for information on staking opportunities.
The code for the OGN staking contract can be reviewed on our Github and on Etherscan. Further, the contracts were audited by Solidified, a respected third-party smart contract auditing firm.
This month, we spent considerable time analyzing the data regarding the OUSD hack. We then released a detailed plan to provide compensation equal to 100% of the value deposited to OUSD at the time of the exploit.
Approximately two-thirds of our users will receive full compensation in the form of OUSD when we relaunch the product in the very near future. The other affected users will receive 25% of their compensation in OUSD upfront and 75% of their compensation in OGN that is locked for a year. This OGN will be staked via the newly launched OGN staking program, providing an additional 25% yield on an OGN-basis.
Detailed calculations for each affected wallet are published in this compensation file for public review.
We are extremely excited to bring the OUSD product back online. We have now gone through multiple additional security audits and closed all known vulnerabilities.
OUSD will be relaunched imminently.
As a reminder, OGN is the governance and fee accrual token for OUSD. Over time, we believe fees generated by OUSD will deliver large amounts of direct financial value to OGN token holders.
OGN circulating supply is currently at just slightly over 200M tokens. It’s important to note that the recent increase in circulating supply includes 40M of OGN that we pre-funded to the OGN staking contract. While this OGN is now included in circulating supply, it is not actually OGN that is exchanging hands on centralized and decentralized exchanges. It is locked until staking users stake OGN and accrue interest over time. This 40M also includes all of the OGN that will be locked for the next year as part of OUSD compensation plan.
We welcomed TrustToken to our Dshop family earlier this month. TrustToken fans can now enjoy official TrustToken merchandise with $TUSD, $TRU, $OGN, $ETH, $DAI and credit card payments. We’re excited to introduce decentralized commerce to the TrustToken community.
We also recently launched our third Origin Genesis Ambassador Program in Korea. Please join us in welcoming 10 new ambassadors who will help us drive various efforts in community engagement, user growth and marketing.
Learn more about Origin:
On November 17, 2020, malicious hackers attacked the OUSD smart contracts and were able to drain over $7M USD of user deposits (including $1M of deposits from Origin’s founders and company treasury). A couple of days later, we committed to making our users whole over time even if we were unable to recover the lost funds. We take pride in the fact that we chose to compensate our users when many other DeFi projects that were also hacked have chosen not to do so or elected to provide IOUs that have indeterminate payback time horizons. Today, we’re providing an update on the compensation plan with detailed specifics and are gathering feedback from affected users. In the next few weeks, we will launch the compensation plan and allow users to claim funds.
We have updated our calculations with a slight change affecting a few eligible accounts. Please review the updated file and contact us on Discord if you have questions about a change in your eligible balance.
It’s been a couple of weeks since the OUSD hack occurred, and we’ve taken time to carefully analyze how our users have all been impacted. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we worked to develop a detailed plan for providing compensation equal to 100% of the value deposited to OUSD at the time of the exploit. Depending on your OUSD holdings as well as your activity before and after the hack, you will be compensated in various ways.
Approximately two-thirds of affected users will receive full compensation in the form of newly minted OUSD (fully backed by stablecoins, audited, and relaunched with new security measures in place). The remaining affected users — mostly larger depositors — will receive 25% of their compensation in OUSD upfront and 75% of their compensation in Origin Tokens (OGN) that are locked for one year. To further compensate these users for the time value of money and not having all their funds available upfront, locked OGN will earn interest at 25% over the year. This means that for the OGN portion of compensation, users will receive 1.25x the value in OGN one year after the compensation program goes live in the upcoming weeks. As a reminder, OGN is the governance token for OUSD, Dshop, and the rest of the Origin platform and is currently a highly liquid token on top exchanges like Binance, Huobi, Upbit, Uniswap, etc.
We set out to develop a compensation plan that was fair to our Beta users but also did not compromise our company’s runway or harm existing OGN holders. It’s important to stress that, while the out-of-pocket portion of this compensation will be a substantial one-time expense for Origin, we remain well-capitalized with plenty of runway to ensure the success of OUSD and our other e-commerce products. Given the traction that OUSD was experiencing in the weeks leading up to the hack, we’re confident that OGN holders are best served by us regaining momentum with OUSD and accruing value to OGN through future revenue-generating fees. We chose a one-year lock-up to ensure that a large amount of OGN reserved for compensation does not immediately hit our circulating supply. Additionally, the founders and Origin itself will not receive any compensation as a part of this plan despite having lost over $1 million in the hack.
100% OUSD up to the first 1,000 + 25% OUSD after the first 1,000
75% OGN after the first 1,000 OUSD
First, 100% of eligible losses up to 1,000 and 25% of eligible losses above 1,000 will be paid in the form of restored OUSD. Once we deploy the compensation contracts, users will be able to claim this portion from the OUSD DApp. The additional 75% of eligible losses will be paid in the form of OGN, which will be locked for one year and earn 25% interest. As a result, the eventual compensation received will be approximately 118.75% (assuming no change in OGN price). The amount of OGN will be determined using the current trailing 7-day average closing price according to CoinMarketCap, which was $0.1492. Users will need to initiate their one-year OGN lock-up periods by submitting claims on the OUSD DApp. After one year, they will be able to collect their OGN, including the 25% interest.
Here are a couple of examples:
User A held 900 OUSD at the time of the hack. He will be able to claim 900 OUSD immediately.
User B held 11,000 OUSD at the time of the hack. She will be able to claim 3,500 OUSD along with 50,268 locked OGN, which will grow to 62,835 OGN within one year. This is calculated by first allocating OUSD towards the 1,000 minimum, then splitting the remaining 10,000 compensation at 25% OUSD (2,500 OUSD) and 75% OGN (50,268 OGN at today’s price).
We plan to deploy the compensation contracts by mid to late January, and claims for compensation will need to be made within the following 90 days.
Our priority is to compensate users who held OUSD in any form at block 11272254 (immediately prior to the hack). This includes OUSD held directly in wallets, automated market makers (AMMs), staking contracts, and centralized exchanges. We’ve collected all of the relevant snapshots to find everyone’s effective, pre-hack balance. While most people continued to hold OUSD after the hack, others sold some or all of their OUSD in an effort to recoup their losses. This is understandable considering the circumstances. We don’t want to punish these users, particularly considering that some sales occurred automatically on the AMMs. However, we also don’t want to reward this activity by additionally compensating these users when they’ve already recovered some or all of their losses. Therefore, we’ve made adjustments to some accounts based on their post-hack sales of OUSD. This brings us to an “eligible balance” for each account that represents the adjusted amount of OUSD that is eligible for compensation.
Here’s an example of an adjusted account:
User C held 50,000 OUSD and then sold it all on Uniswap for 10,000 USDT after the hack. The eligible balance will be 40,000. Compensation will be paid in the form of 10,750 OUSD and 196,045 locked OGN, which will earn an additional 49,011 OGN within one year. Again, these are calculated by first subtracting the 1,000 OUSD minimum from the 40,000 eligible balance then dividing the remaining 39,000 between OUSD and OGN at 25% and 75% respectively.
Liquidity providers and speculators suffered additional losses in the form of USDT, USDC, and WETH, which were traded for OUSD during and after the hack. We’re unable to offer any compensation for these losses. If you’re currently providing liquidity to an automated market maker, we recommend that you withdraw it.
We’ve made substantial security improvements to the OUSD smart contracts. Trail of Bits is reviewing our fixes for the issues that were discovered during their initial audit. Our contracts are also being audited a second time by Solidified. Once these audits are complete and any additional improvements are made, we’ll be relaunching OUSD prior to the rollout of compensation. All existing OUSD balances will go to 0 at the time of the relaunch. Users who were affected by the OUSD hack will then be able to claim their OUSD and OGN (in some cases) from the ousd.com DApp.
As with most of our product development at Origin, the code for calculating OUSD compensation is open-source and auditable by anyone. We’ve set up a new GitHub repository with all of the relevant Python code for retrieving data from the blockchain and calculating the eligible balance for each account. We’ve also published preliminary results from our calculations and encourage everyone to review them for accuracy.
Verifying your eligible compensation
You can see your OUSD eligible balance as well as your specific compensation in OUSD and OGN terms by checking for your Ethereum address in this data file.
We want to hear your comments on how this compensation plan compares to other recent hacks and your expectations. We have set up a Google Form for you to submit your feedback and any inaccuracies that you find in our calculations of the compensation due to each eligible account. We are excited to move on to the next chapter for OUSD and appreciate the extraordinary support that we’ve received from our users and community.
Learn more about Origin:
Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the December 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.
Happy holidays from the entire Origin team. We wish all of our token holders the best during the holiday season and wanted to communicate our excitement for the beginning of 2021.
December marks the beginning of our “V-shaped recovery” after November’s OUSD hack. We’ve been hard at work to rebound from that unfortunate setback and are more motivated than ever to take Origin and OGN to new heights in the coming weeks and months.
Here’s a recap of this last month.
This month we launched OGN staking to enable OGN supporters to earn yield while holding OGN.
Our initial staking program offers three staking periods and respective yields:
Since launch a few days ago, we’ve locked up an additional 4.4M OGN, bringing total locked tokens to ~45M OGN. You can review additional token metrics at the OGN dashboard. You can also find OGN staking data on stakingrewards.com, one of the most trusted sources for information on staking opportunities.
The code for the OGN staking contract can be reviewed on our Github and on Etherscan. Further, the contracts were audited by Solidified, a respected third-party smart contract auditing firm.
This month, we spent considerable time analyzing the data regarding the OUSD hack. We then released a detailed plan to provide compensation equal to 100% of the value deposited to OUSD at the time of the exploit.
Approximately two-thirds of our users will receive full compensation in the form of OUSD when we relaunch the product in the very near future. The other affected users will receive 25% of their compensation in OUSD upfront and 75% of their compensation in OGN that is locked for a year. This OGN will be staked via the newly launched OGN staking program, providing an additional 25% yield on an OGN-basis.
Detailed calculations for each affected wallet are published in this compensation file for public review.
We are extremely excited to bring the OUSD product back online. We have now gone through multiple additional security audits and closed all known vulnerabilities.
OUSD will be relaunched imminently.
As a reminder, OGN is the governance and fee accrual token for OUSD. Over time, we believe fees generated by OUSD will deliver large amounts of direct financial value to OGN token holders.
OGN circulating supply is currently at just slightly over 200M tokens. It’s important to note that the recent increase in circulating supply includes 40M of OGN that we pre-funded to the OGN staking contract. While this OGN is now included in circulating supply, it is not actually OGN that is exchanging hands on centralized and decentralized exchanges. It is locked until staking users stake OGN and accrue interest over time. This 40M also includes all of the OGN that will be locked for the next year as part of OUSD compensation plan.
We welcomed TrustToken to our Dshop family earlier this month. TrustToken fans can now enjoy official TrustToken merchandise with $TUSD, $TRU, $OGN, $ETH, $DAI and credit card payments. We’re excited to introduce decentralized commerce to the TrustToken community.
We also recently launched our third Origin Genesis Ambassador Program in Korea. Please join us in welcoming 10 new ambassadors who will help us drive various efforts in community engagement, user growth and marketing.
Learn more about Origin:
