Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the October 2020 edition. We are eager to hear feedback and suggestions from our community.
October has been an exceptionally eventful month. We have made rapid progress advancing both our Dshop e-commerce platform and our new yield-earning stablecoin, the Origin Dollar (OUSD).
Importantly, we announced that Origin Token (OGN) will serve as the governance token for the OUSD protocol. This gives our token holders the ability to create and vote for proposals as OUSD eventually transitions towards decentralized governance. In addition, OGN holders will participate in future OUSD monetization mechanisms.
Unfortunately, the macro altcoin market has turned bearish, and OGN performance has been negatively impacted alongside many other top altcoins. That being said, the team is extremely excited about our product roadmap and BD/sales pipeline for the rest of Q4 and Q1. We are very confident in long-term value creation for OGN holders.
Even though OUSD is barely one month old, we’ve already completed several iterations to improve the product. Most importantly, we’ve dramatically increased our APY from a modest launch number of 2–3% to now 10–20% in the last several weeks.
This was made possible by adding several strategies to both increase yield and add diversification beyond our initial Compound strategy.
We’ve added Curve’s 3pool for trading fees and CRV rewards tokens as well as Aave’s lending pools to build a significantly more sophisticated and balanced product. In the coming months, we anticipate completing integrations with Uniswap, Balancer, dydx, and other platforms to further optimize OUSD.
We’re also highly focused on security and gas efficiency so that we can soon cross the chasm to more mainstream crypto users. This month we also made improvements to our rebasing techniques and automatic rewards token liquidation process on Uniswap.
Perhaps most importantly, we announced how OGN and OUSD will work hand-in-hand going forward. We believe OUSD has massive value accrual potential for existing OGN holders. Expect to hear updates in this area in the next several weeks as we expect to significantly increase OUSD’s circulating supply. Thereafter, OGN holders will participate in any upside from fee generation on the OUSD protocol.
Our Dshop team also continues to make rapid strides. After hearing feedback from many of our early merchant partners, we’ve now added customization capabilities to all Dshops. Dshop partners can now select from one of four base themes, then further enhance and customize their storefronts.
We’re excited to deepen our partnership with Blockchain.com by having OGN listed on their new exchange. Blockchain.com Ventures has been one of our earliest and most valuable investors, and we’re excited for even deeper integrations in the coming months to bring OGN and OUSD to their broad global market.
Going forward, we’ll also begin to ramp up efforts to make OUSD available to global audiences on both centralized and decentralized exchanges/swap sites. This month, we collaborated with VirgoX to make OUSD available to their stablecoin exchange. In a few short days, users of the new stablecoin automated market maker, SnowSwap, will be able to stake OUSD to earn the protocol’s incentive and governance token, SNOW.
Going forward, we expect to intelligently use liquidity mining and other incentive mechanisms to drive usage of both OGN and OUSD.
In an effort to add additional flexibility and customization capabilities to Dshop, we partnered with cryptocurrency payment provider Uphold. Uphold has powered over $4B in transaction volume across dozens of countries, so we are excited to work closely with them to make it increasingly easier for buyers and sellers to transact with cryptocurrencies. In addition, Dshop is now listed in the Uphold app store.
DeFi users are amongst the most passionate, with many projects developing cult-like followings. You can now participate in the movement with more than your capital by using the loldefi Dshop to support your favorite DeFi projects, using a variety of ERC-20 tokens in the process.
Circulating supply remained virtually flat this month at just over 130M tokens in circulation. Similar to other quarters, we’ve been able to maintain over a 20% delta from our initially projected circulating supply.
As usual, we’ve had multiple community events and mentions this month. Here are a couple quick highlights.
Pantera Capital’s partner, Paul Veradittakit, wrote a detailed report on OUSD while Dapp.com also recognized OUSD as the number 1 interest-generating DeFi project of the week.
Josh, my co-founder, was featured on the MikoBits YouTube show, where he discussed Origin’s vision and products in detail.
Learn more about Origin:
Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the September 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.
Origin’s primary focus in September has been to launch our new DeFi project, the Origin Dollar (OUSD). Last week, we successfully introduced the world to the first stablecoin that passively and automatically earns yields while it’s still sitting in users’ wallets.
We believe this new Origin product will bring DeFi to the masses while driving increased adoption of our commerce products and benefiting Origin Token (OGN) holders.
We also crossed 100 deployed Dshops in September (with many more in the pipeline) and are excited about our upcoming Q4 product roadmap that will further drive both growth and retention on the platform.
On the token economics front, we executed our first OGN buyback. In the future, we anticipate additional buybacks and other initiatives targeted at reducing our circulating supply.
We built OUSD to both build upon and compete with Tether (USDT), the dominant stablecoin with over $15B in circulation. Like Tether, OUSD is a great medium of exchange. In addition, OUSD earns savings automatically for users directly in their wallets. All they need to do is buy and hold to earn great DeFi yields.
To enable peer-to-peer commerce at scale, we need to create compelling reasons for buyers and sellers to use the Origin Platform over established incumbent products.
We believe one of the best points of attack is creating a superior payment rail. With last week’s launch of OUSD, Dshop merchants will now be able to begin earning interest as soon as they receive buyers’ payments. In contrast to being charged 2.9% in credit card fees, they will earn at competitive DeFi savings rates instead.
Perhaps an even greater opportunity exists in powering peer-to-peer transactions on third-party solutions. In the future, we anticipate integrating OUSD payments into Shopify, WooCommerce, and other platforms, creating new entry points into the Origin ecosystem for many buyers and sellers that currently don’t understand blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies.
OUSD also significantly lowers the hurdles for mainstream crypto users to participate in Decentralized Finance (DeFi). DeFi adoption is accelerating rapidly, with nearly $11B of total value locked (TVL), and will become one of the most disruptive technology categories of our generation.
However, most DeFi products are highly complex to use. Users are required to stake or lock up their tokens to earn, and in many cases there are 3–5 steps required to fully engage with and maximize earnings on individual products.
OUSD is a dead simple decentralized app (DApp) in comparison. No OUSD lock-ups are ever required to automatically earn competitive yields. Again, all you need to do is to buy and hold to participate.
Our work is just beginning with OUSD. In the last week, we’ve already made a number of updates to our smart contracts, including adding the ability to liquidate and reinvest rewards tokens and better support liquidity pools.
Going forward, the team will be focusing on increasing the expected APY of OUSD while minimizing risk and rolling out governance and incentive programs to bootstrap capital deposits and usage.
Existing OGN holders will be able to stake their OGN to participate in governance and earn incentives for driving value to OUSD. Many community members have asked for more details, and we will release specifics in the coming weeks.
This month we also announced our inaugural OGN Buyback campaign. As an active participant supplying liquidity to DeFi platforms like Uniswap, Balancer, Kyber, and other swap exchanges, Origin is able to benefit from trading fees and rewards tokens.
We’ve decided that we will be using all proceeds from these existing and future activities to buy back OGN on the open market. At Origin, we are very committed to building out a strong token ecosystem over the long-term and believe the greatest value creation is ahead of us.
In this first campaign, we purchased 475,102 OGN worth $123,625.38. In the future, we anticipate additional campaigns to signal our commitment to our community.
This month, we were able to keep circulating supply relatively flat when compared to August.
There are currently 129.2M tokens in the circulating supply. This is 33.7M tokens lower than what was expected at this juncture based on our modeled token release schedule, approximately a 20% difference.
Through incentivizing token holders to lock up their tokens, future buybacks, and other planned programs in the future, we believe that our circulating supply will continue to increase at a more gradual trajectory than previously anticipated.
This month we were proud to announce that with your support we were able to raise $17,000 through our Stay at Home Store powered by Dshop. 100% of the proceeds are being donated to CEPI which is working to find a vaccine for COVID-19. Additionally, we donated 50,000 surgical masks to Montefiore Hospital in NYC.
With the Origin ambassador program coming into its second month, we’re grateful to the hard work our Originators have put into numerous campaigns and initiatives. In Korea, we began the month holding a first-of-its-kind Telegram quiz designed to educate community members on Origin. Our Latin American ambassadors ran a crypto treasure hunt that saw hundreds of participants scour our blog and website for clues. The eventual winner completed the hunt in 6 hours and 4 minutes and took home a prize of $80 worth of OGN.
Finally, together with our Turkish ambassadors we’ve also started a brand new Turkish Telegram channel. Turkey is known for being a major crypto hub and we’re excited to reach new fans. If you’re from the region, be sure to stop by and say hello!
As the month came to a close, we were fortunate to have been hosted by LunarCRUSH for a live webinar where we discussed community building at Origin as well as made the first public reveal of OUSD. The full webinar can be found on YouTube. Thank you to Jon Farjo for reaching out and making it happen.
We also want to thank our entire community who got behind OGN in two community votes on Harvest Finance resulting in OGN being added as an asset for yield farming. Not only did we win, but we came in first place by a wide margin both times. We’ll be looking to leverage this enthusiasm further as we look for more opportunities to list OUSD and OGN on DeFi platforms and lists.
Lastly, thank you everyone for supporting Origin’s Educational campaign for the Spanish community. Between July and August, we held 10 webinars where we educated our community on various topics including fundamentals of blockchain technology, use cases of cryptocurrency, DeFi, e-commerce, Fintech and much more. Here is a quick recap prepared by our Spanish Community Manager.
We are overjoyed that Daniel Von Fange joined Origin full-time this month. Daniel (aka DVF) has been one of our earliest open-source contributors. My co-founder Josh initially learned to code and sharpen his entrepreneurial instincts with DVF in high school. We wouldn’t be where we’re at without his past and present contributions.
Currently, DVF is hard at work making OUSD a success with a focus on security and oracles. We can’t wait to see his contributions take our product to new heights.
If you’re interested in working alongside DVF, Yu Pan (Origin’s R&D engineer and one of the original PayPal founders), and other 10x engineers, we’d love to meet you. We’re looking for an experienced senior Solidity engineer to join the team as soon as possible. DeFi experience is a huge plus.
Learn more about Origin:
Today, we’re taking a bold step forward in pushing DeFi (Decentralized Finance) to the masses. We’re excited to launch the Origin Dollar (OUSD) as a superior stablecoin for the Ethereum network. OUSD automatically earns competitive yields from DeFi protocols while it’s still sitting in your wallet.
Because of OUSD’s novel design, no staking or lockups are required to participate in lucrative DeFi strategies. Similarly, you don’t need to unstake or unlock your OUSD when you want to transfer it to another wallet. This both saves you gas fees and makes it much more convenient to switch between earning and spending. Your earnings compound continuously and are reflected in your ever-increasing OUSD balance, while still being available for payments, commerce, and peer-to-peer transactions.
Block by block, second by second, OUSD grows passively for you without requiring you to use other platforms. Both sophisticated DeFi experts and novice users passively earn returns without the typical hassles and complexities of yield farming.
OUSD is a natural extension of Origin’s mission to enable peer-to-peer commerce. We believe having a reliable and desirable stablecoin that leverages the best parts of DeFi while enabling buyers and sellers to transact seamlessly will accelerate the growth of our decentralized commerce platform. OUSD is built by our existing team of cryptocurrency and fintech veterans at Origin Protocol. Team members include serial entrepreneurs with multiple exits, early cryptocurrency investors, early employees at YouTube, engineering managers at Google/Dropbox, and one of the original Paypal co-founders.
The contract address for the OUSD token is: 0x2A8e1E676Ec238d8A992307B495b45B3fEAa5e86 (ousd.eth)
OUSD has several essential properties:
We recommend reading through the OUSD docs to get a comprehensive understanding of how the protocol works.
In 1999, Origin’s R&D engineer Yu Pan, along with his fellow PayPal co-founders conceived of creating “the new world currency”, complete with interest yielding strategies and debit cards without having to connect to traditional banking systems. Several pivots and an eBay acquisition later, PayPal dropped its ambitions in this area.
Almost two decades later, Tether introduced the concept of a USD-denominated stablecoin in 2014. Since then, stablecoins have proven themselves as an ideal way of transferring value without exposing users to the price volatility of free-floating currencies. Today, more value is transferred via Tether than with Bitcoin. Stablecoins also play an important role in decentralized commerce as they offer a more practical medium of exchange for both buyers and sellers. The idea of launching our own stablecoin has been something we’ve discussed many times in the past, but until now we’ve never had a good answer on what we could do better than the existing players. We’ve designed OUSD to be the yield-generating asset that has the potential to become a new world currency in the spirit of PayPal’s initial vision.
“OUSD combines the automated farming of Yearn, the elastic supply of Ampleforth, and the ease-of-use of Tether.”
One of the problems in DeFi today is that users have to constantly choose between holding an easily spendable coin and earning yields by locking their tokens up in smart contracts. For example, users that lock up USDC in Aave cannot spend a portion of that USDC simultaneously. Expensive Ethereum gas fees serve as “switching costs” each time those users want to switch between spending mode and savings mode.
To make matters worse, yields from lending and trading activities change rapidly. Sophisticated DeFi yield earners are familiar with constantly having to rebalance their portfolio of assets across many competing platforms. This is time-consuming and expensive as gas fees once again eat into yields. Often the advertised APYs ignore important factors like impermanent loss, and it is time-consuming to calculate real ROIs as APYs are unstable and constantly fluctuating. There isn’t an easy unit of account. Despite the explosion of growth and billions of dollars of capital being locked up in smart contracts across DeFi platforms, it is still way too difficult for many cryptocurrency users to participate.
With OUSD, there’s no need to unwind complicated positions when you want to spend your OUSD. You can transfer it freely without having to pay gas to unlock spendable capital. In addition, OUSD gives you access to compelling opportunities across DeFi with none of the hassles. The OUSD smart contracts deploy your underlying capital to a diversified set of yield-earning strategies, rebalancing over time to achieve strong yields while diversifying risk. Earnings automatically accrue in your wallet and compound continuously while you hold OUSD. Again, no staking or lockups are required, making your OUSD as easy to transfer as any other ERC-20 token. OUSD also serves as an ideal unit of account. DeFi investors no longer need complicated spreadsheets to calculate their earnings as they can easily see their constantly updated OUSD balances in real-time.
This is all possible because OUSD works differently than most ERC-20 tokens. Instead of the price increasing as the value of the assets under management increase, the value of one OUSD remains constant at $1. Instead, our smart contracts increase the monetary supply of OUSD when yield is earned by the protocol. This automatically updates the balance in every token holder’s wallet in real-time. Again, every OUSD is backed by another stablecoin deposited or earned by the protocol.
Think of it as interest accruing in your bank account. The value of a dollar doesn’t change. You just get more of them over time as you earn interest.
Beyond being used as a yield-generating product, OUSD will be integrated into existing and future Origin commerce applications. Beginning today, Dshop merchants and marketplace sellers will be able to accept OUSD as a form of payment. For merchants that have traditionally been skeptical of receiving cryptocurrency payments, being able to accept a yield-bearing instrument that beats traditional savings accounts is a powerful motivator. Today, PayPal boasts over 305M consumers and 22M merchants and processes over $200B of payments in a single quarter. Our aspirations are to begin penetrating that customer base with OUSD and future commerce applications built on top of the protocol.
Today’s launch of OUSD will showcase a simple lending strategy built on top of Compound, one of the “money legos” that we’re using to build our platform. We’re taking a more conservative strategy for the first couple of weeks while we ensure our smart contracts are secure and safe. Thereafter, new strategies will be frequently deployed that increase yields while minimizing risk and dependencies. We intend to directly integrate with Compound, Aave, dYdX, Uniswap, Curve, and Balancer, and are also evaluating more complex strategies like Yearn Vaults and new platforms.
While we have made our best efforts to attempt to ensure the security of our work, the OUSD contracts have not yet been formally audited. Trail of Bits will be performing an in-depth audit next month, and we encourage people to exercise caution until their review is complete. The smart contracts may contain bugs that could cause the loss of funds. We’d hate for anyone to lose any money, so please take this warning seriously.
OUSD is designed to be a decentralized protocol governed by many stakeholders all over the world. We believe that the minters and holders of OUSD should collectively determine important protocol decisions. It is our intent to relinquish control and governance to the community as soon as possible.
That being said, in the very early days, it is imperative that the core engineering team can act quickly and decisively to build the foundational parts of the protocol. For peace of mind, we will be adding a 48-hour timelock in the near future after we have verified everything is working as intended, including the upgradeability of our smart contracts. This will enable the community to audit any protocol changes that are pending.
Decentralization will progress across four phases:
In the next few weeks, we will be providing more specifics regarding decentralized governance and incentives for OUSD users that help bootstrap the network.
In addition, we also want to ensure high participation from our existing Origin Token (OGN) holders and community of close to 500,000 members. Existing OGN holders will be able to stake their OGN to participate in governance and earn incentives for driving value to OUSD. More details will be provided in the near future.
The strong connection between OUSD and the rest of the Origin commerce platform will fuel growth in both initiatives.
Today’s launch is just the start of a new chapter for the Origin Platform and ecosystem. We’ll be sharing additional details on why we built OUSD and how we plan to incentivize both existing and new Origin community members. We’ll also provide the results of our smart contract audits and be fully transparent about how we’re updating OUSD’s yield-earning strategies. We’ll update our community with our plans and timing to gradually relinquish control of OUSD to the community and to create deeper integrations with our commerce products.
For those interested in diving into the technical details of how it works, the OUSD docs are a great place to start. We encourage developers to audit and contribute to our Github (100% open-source). Our team hangs out in Discord if you have questions or need help getting started.
Visit OUSD.com to begin experiencing the future of money for yourself.
Learn more about Origin:
We all spend a large percentage of our lives at work. One of my favorite things about being a startup founder is getting to pick the people you want to work alongside all day, every day. You want to work with people who are driven, intelligent, and creative. You also want to work with people who bring unique perspectives, are highly ethical, and are constantly teaching you new things. Daniel Von Fange exhibits all of these positive traits and more.
We’re thrilled to announce that one of our earliest open-source contributors has agreed to join the Origin team full time. We’ve been trying to recruit Daniel for years and couldn’t be more excited to have him finally make the jump to joining our team full-time. Daniel was actually one of the very first people to play with our DApp, even before it was live on the Ethereum testnet. He’s been contributing to our efforts ever since, first as an open-source contributor and then as a part-time contractor.
Josh Fraser front left, Daniel Von Fange front right. Circa 2003.
This latest addition to our team is particularly special for me as I’ve been friends with Daniel since high school. In fact, he was one of the first people I met who shared my interest in computer programming. Daniel figured out long before I did that our shared hobby should be turned into a financially profitable endeavor. I asked Daniel for tips on how I could earn money coding just like him, and he responded by offering me my first paid gig as a software engineer. Daniel offered me $150 to write a PHP script for one of his clients. I had no idea what I was doing, but Daniel patiently walked me through the code and still paid me even though he ended up doing the majority of the work! It’s great to be able to repay that favor many years later.
Welcome Daniel Von Fange!
Daniel is joining our team as a Senior Engineer, with a strong emphasis on security and data analysis. Daniel is a highly-respected contributor to our team, particularly when it comes to keeping our smart contracts safe and thinking through all the possible attack vectors. He has a unique talent for spotting vulnerabilities that no one else sees. Daniel has also earned a reputation on our team for being able to gather massive amounts of data and create dynamic visualizations at lightning speed. We look forward to having him share some of his research on this blog in the future. We’re incredibly lucky to have him on our team. Welcome aboard, Daniel. It’s long overdue!
Learn more about Origin:
Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the August 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.
On the heels of last month’s launch of self-serve Dshops, we continued to focus on pushing our decentralized e-commerce store platform to new audiences.
As we’ve been working with an increasing number of Dshop customers, we’re also making rapid progress on our feature offering. More details on recent updates are below.
Our partnership with Google Cloud will encompass several chapters. To start, we’ve integrated our technology offering with the Google Cloud Marketplace.
Merchants that want to self-host their Dshops can select Google Cloud infrastructure, generating revenue for the cloud provider. We will be working with Google to market the Dshop deployer broadly to increase the install base of Dshop merchants across many different verticals (e-commerce, digital goods, rentals, other services).
We’ve also partnered with Google on a blockchain data initiative. Because blockchain data is difficult to index, data analysis of important data is also difficult and time consuming.
Our collaboration with the Google BigQuery team will bring Google Search-like capabilities to blockchain data. Expect updates on this second phase and future partnership developments in the future.
New additions to the Dshop network of crypto projects include CoinList, Oasis, and Akropolis. We’re excited to see so many companies in our space embrace Dshop as their preferred e-commerce solution.
This month we released several Dshop feature enhancements. Perhaps most importantly, we performed critical localization work and now support 4 languages (with more coming) and dozens of currencies. As we anticipate a lot of growth in non-US markets, this small but important update enables our business development teams to attract merchants from new regions, increasing Origin’s global footprint.
In response to merchant requests, we’ve added several supported payment types, including manual payments and PayPal. We’ve designed these payment options to be modular. Merchants should be be able to swap in new payment methods at any time. We will likely support non-ERC-20 cryptocurrency payments such as Bitcoin and Litecoin in the near future.
Rounding out the last release is more integrated support for Printful, the default dropshipping add-on for Dshop.
There are currently 124M Origin Tokens (OGN) in the circulating supply. This is close to 36M lower (22%) than the originally projected 160M tokens from our Binance research report.
This month’s increase to circulating supply was larger than most months as we had a large investor unlock. We anticipate a more tapered increase in circulating supply over the next two months and always target staying under our previous projections. Full details are available at our OGN dashboard.
There are currently approximately 40.9M OGN locked by 414 individuals and entities.
Additionally, Intotheblock is currently showing that 93% of OGN holders are in the money, with the majority of holders holding for 1 to 12 months.
Last week, Origin participated in Korea DeFi Roadshow 2020, hosted by MakerDAO. Coleman, head of business development at Origin, spoke about Origin’s role in the DeFi ecosystem with live translations provided by Mila, our regional manager of Korea. Check out this blog post (in Korean) for more details of the event and press coverage we received as a result.
Overall, we are very excited about recent development in DeFi and look forward to contributing to the burgeoning ecosystem. Coleman further shared our DeFi perspectives recently.
Together with Kyber Network, our Dshop partner, we were thrilled to launch a trading contest on Kyberswap for our OGN holders. $8,000 worth of prizes were distributed to 100 lucky winners. Thank you everyone for participating in the contest — we look forward to launching many more exciting community initiatives in partnership with DEXes like Kyberswap. For all of our Kyber Network fans, please continue to support the Kyber Dshop.
Also this past month, we launched our first global Origin Genesis Ambassador Program. After our initial success of the Origin Genesis Ambassador program in Korea, we decided to launch a global program and recently welcomed 30 ambassadors from all around the world. Our ambassadors (aka ‘Originators’) have teamed up with our amazing community managers to brainstorm and launch various marketing initiatives with a focus on spreading our vision of enabling decentralized commerce. We are excited to welcome these new evangelists of Origin that will help us continue to grow our community.
To show our appreciation of our Dshop merchant partners, we are featuring new merchants every week on our social media platforms. We are committed to helping our merchant partners succeed in every way possible. If you are a merchant, and would like to get featured, please email us at [email protected] with a short description of your business, your profile photo or a short video highlighting what Dshop means to you, and why you’ve decided to use it to grow your business.
Lastly, we are committed to interacting and answering questions from our community on a regular basis. Our core team members have participated in various AMAs this past month, collaborating with Huobi Global Russia, Satoshi Club Spanish, and Pantera ICO for our Korean community. If you want to collaborate in exciting community outreach & marketing initiatives, we want to hear from you.
Learn more about Origin:
Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the July 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.
We’re really excited to recap that Origin’s Dshop platform is now open for business. Merchants anywhere in the world can now use our self-serve solution to launch their own decentralized stores. We expect hundreds of merchant partners to use Dshop in the coming months.
In addition, one of our big focuses in July was to bring increased transparency to OGN’s token economics.
We’ve updated the OGN token dashboard with new data. Over 40M OGN has been voluntarily locked up by the team, investors, and others.
The two co-founders have pledged not to sell any tokens for at least the rest of 2020. We have sold 0 OGN to date.
We’ve done our best to minimize circulating supply increases. Current circulating supply is at 81.0M.
We also announced the deepening of our relationship with Coinbase. We’re excited to be listed in Coinbase Custody and look forward to working closely together in the future.
Finally, as DeFi continues to gain momentum, both we and our community have bolstered up OGN’s liquidity on platforms like Uniswap, Kyber, and Balancer. At Origin, we are very optimistic about the future of DeFi. We’re requesting that our token holders participate in this disruptive movement by adding liquidity to our DeFi pools. This is also a great way to earn trading fees.
Dshop is now self-serve
Yesterday we launched the first public version of the Dshop platform. This initiative is the first in a series of launches that we anticipate will increase the number of Dshop instances by several orders of magnitude.
Previously, Dshops were all manually configured and deployed by our engineering team. Each time we signed a new partnership, we had to go through this time-consuming process.
Now, Dshop is taking sign ups from any merchants that want to participate in the decentralized commerce movement. Sign up now to launch your decentralized store in less than a day.
We’ve taken the past few months to collect early feedback from our earliest partners, and are excited to further refine the platform going forward. Our next milestone is to have 100 functional Dshops deployed, followed by 1,000, and 10,000 beyond that.
This month, we decided to sunset the Origin Deals experiment. We were delighted that our early test users were really engaged with the product and also optimistic about the viability of the business as Origin Deals was running at breakeven. However, as we mapped out the future of the product we realized it didn’t fit with our our goal of building a powerful and flexible software platform that enables other developers to build applications. To make Origin Deals successful in the long-run, we’d need to instead focus on operations, fulfillment, and customer service. This isn’t in our team’s DNA, and continuing to push forward in this direction would change the trajectory of the project.
Finally, as we surveyed the blockchain landscape, we’ve realized that there are other higher-impact opportunities that we’re interested in pursuing. We’re reallocating our resources to build a new exciting product that will be announced later this quarter.
The decision to shut down Origin Deals does not impact our core business or change our mission to enable peer-to-peer commerce on the blockchain. As the aggregate amount of OGN locked up in Origin Deals is still quite small (there were only a couple hundred users in the Beta), we do not anticipate any material impact to our circulating supply.
At Origin, we’ve always prided ourselves on operating in a highly public and transparent fashion. We’ve mentioned in the past that we’re actively working on improving our token economics as well.
This month, we will end the month with just over 81M tokens circulating. The originally projected supply was 117M OGN. Current circulating supply is therefore 30.8% lower than initially modeled.
We’re constantly working on ways to incentivize long-term believers and holders of OGN. To lead by example, Josh and I have committed to not selling any OGN until at least 2021. Currently, neither one of us has sold a single token.
Josh details our rationale in this public commitment to our investors and community. We’re not doing this simply to be benevolent. As the two co-founders, we both very much believe that the best is yet to come. We’re well on our way to building a highly impactful technology platform, but we also recognize that the greatest value creation and capture will happen later in Origin’s lifespan.
Following suit, other team members and many of our top investors have also voluntarily locked up OGN for 1-year terms. Cumulatively, there are over 40M tokens locked up today.
We’ve also added updated metrics to the OGN token dashboard. For example, you can now easily see the total number of unique wallets that have used our smart contracts. You’ll also see that we’ve intentionally distributed ownership of our tokens amongst our private sale investors so that no one party has too much control.
We were pleased to announce that OGN is supported in Coinbase Custody. Coinbase Custody is the premier custody solution that global institutions trust. Coinbase has previously posted that OGN is on the list of new assets being considered for listing on Coinbase’s exchange products.
As decentralized liquidity pools and exchanges gain traction, we’ve been eager to increase the number of platforms that support OGN. We’ve also been working hard to make sure the decentralized platforms have adequate liquidity to support users that prefer these non-custodial solutions.
As mentioned above, we’d be very appreciative towards community members that help by adding liquidity to the various DeFi pools. You can do this by going to Uniswap, Kyber, and Balancer. In turn, you’ll get your share of trading fees as more and more traders use these DeFi protocols.
This month, we brought on Amy Hockings as our first full-time customer support hire. Amy had already been working with us as a community manager for almost the entirety of Origin’s existence, and both sides were excited to move forward with a new and expanded role.
In partnership with Solana, Cosmos, and other key blockchain industry leaders, our Community Manager Moises has launched educational-focused virtual seminars for our Spanish-speaking community. We are thrilled for this opportunity to educate users about different use cases of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. This is a significant step towards entering the crypto ecosystem in Latin America and serving regions where our technology can provide improved financial access. For more details, check out this blog post.
To celebrate our token listing on Huobi, we launched our Origin Holder Airdrop campaign earlier this month. The first round ends on July 31st (GMT +8) and the second round starts on August 1st (GMT +8). For each round, 250k OGN will be rewarded to OGN holders to OGN holders based on the amount of OGN they are holding. For more details, visit our website.
Lastly, our first global ambassador program, Origin Genesis is here. We are looking for 10 dedicated Originators who will work closely with our community team and help us spread our mission. Sign up here today!
August will be an eventful month for us. Look forward to several exciting updates in the next few weeks.
Learn more about Origin:
Now that thousands of people are set to become OGN token holders from participating in Origin Rewards, we thought it would be a great time to give a few public reminders on how to access the OGN earned from creating profiles, referring friends to the Origin platform, and buying and selling on Origin’s marketplace.
Origin Token (OGN) is an ERC-20 token that any Ethereum wallet can receive and hold on the blockchain. Please note that sending OGN to an exchange’s ETH address may result in the loss of your tokens. On most popular wallets, there is built-in support for OGN at the application level. Please note that as of May 2019, OGN tokens are currently non-transferable, so you cannot move them between different wallets until your tokens are unlocked in the future.
If you look on Etherscan you will see that there are dozens of smart contracts that pretend to be Origin’s ERC20 token. The most common scam here is asking people to participate in a fake token sale, but there are probably others. Always be safe and double-check the address matches. The only official address for Origin Token (OGN) is:
0x8207c1FfC5B6804F6024322CcF34F29c3541Ae26
For convenience, you can also reference this smart contract using our ENS address: origintoken.eth.
Origin Marketplace App
Origin's mobile app currently supports ETH, DAI, and OGN at the application level. To see your OGN balance or wallet address, just tap on the wallet tab on the bottom of your screen. You can also display or copy your wallet address by tapping (+). Using Origin’s official mobile app is the easiest way to interact with our marketplace and tokens.
MetaMask
You should see OGN in your MetaMask wallet if you had OGN sent to your address. Click the hamburger menu to display your ERC-20 tokens. If you don’t see OGN listed, you can search for “OGN” and add it. You can add OGN to MetaMask even if your balance is currently 0.
Trust Wallet
You should see OGN in Trust Wallet if you had OGN sent to your address. To add OGN manually, tap on the + sign in the top right corner and search for “OGN”. Click the (+) next to OGN to add support for OGN tokens.
Coinbase Wallet
You should see OGN in your Coinbase Wallet app if you had OGN sent to your address. Please note that Coinbase Wallet app and Coinbase’s mobile app are different products. Do not use your ETH deposit address from Coinbase’s mobile app to receive OGN. You cannot manually add OGN with a zero balance on the Coinbase Wallet app.
MyEtherWallet
You should see OGN in your MEW if you had OGN sent to your address. If you don’t see your balance, search “OGN” under Tokens to display it.
MyCrypto
To see your OGN balance in MyCrypto, click “Scan For Tokens”. Click “Save” to save the found tokens.
imToken
You should see OGN in your imToken wallet if you had OGN sent to your address. To add it manually, tap the (+) button next to “Assets” and search for “OGN”. Tap (+) to add OGN to add support for OGN tokens.
Bitberry
You should see OGN in your Bitberrry wallet if you had OGN sent to your address. To add it manually, tap the green (+) button and search for “OGN”. Tap “Add” to add OGN to add support for OGN tokens.
Hardware wallets and others
For other wallets that may not have built-in support for OGN, you may be able to add it from our token smart contract address. If you want to use a hardware wallet, we recommend connecting them with MyEtherWallet, MyCrypto, or MetaMask to view your OGN token balance.
Common questions and problems
If you don’t see any OGN in your wallet, make sure you are using the same wallet you registered with for Origin Rewards. Also remember that Origin Rewards payouts happen after each month’s campaign ends. If you are earning OGN from the May campaign, you will not get your tokens until early June.
Here are Origin’s important smart contract addresses and their respective ENS shortcuts:
OGN Token:
0x8207c1FfC5B6804F6024322CcF34F29c3541Ae26
origintoken.eth
Origin Marketplace:
0x819Bb9964B6eBF52361F1ae42CF4831B921510f9 (initial)
0x698ff47b84837d3971118a369c570172ee7e54c2 (updated)
originmarketplace.eth
Origin Identity:
0x8Ac16c08105DE55A02E2b7462b1EeC6085fA4d86
originid.eth
We’ve registered each address with an Ethereum Name Service (ENS) shortcut to make them easier to find and verify. Make sure that you are interacting with these contracts and not other contracts when using Origin. Please reach out to us on Discord or email us at [email protected] if you have questions.
Learn more about Origin:
Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the June 2020 edition.
As Q2 comes to a close, we’re pleased to recap a month that was filled with significant achievements on both the product and business fronts.
Huobi Global, one of the top cryptocurrency exchanges globally, chose Origin for its first listing of 2020. Huobi had been on a listing hiatus since November of last year, so we were especially excited to be their inaugural listing of the year.
Recently, we announced that 8 new partners had signed on and launched their decentralized storefronts on our Dshop platform. Our first cohort of partners on Dshop is composed of some of the top names in our industry. We’re looking forward to onboarding more household names in blockchain as well as a more diverse set of partners in Q3.
We grew our number of paying users and GMV in Origin Deals by three-fold this month. The Beta is giving us a lot of data to continually improve the product and prepare for a public launch.
In an effort to continue our tradition of being highly transparent with our community, we released our Origin Token Dashboard. This allows token holders to check up stats regarding OGN in real-time.
We are focused on significantly increasing our product traction in Q3 and are very excited about our upcoming roadmap.
Kyber, Ternio, Zerion, and several others joined Brave and Contentos as early adopters of Dshop this quarter. Each of these partners are now able to sell products on stores hosted completely on IPFS and Ethereum.
At Origin, we think about driving adoption in orders of magnitude. To start, we focused on prototyping a single Dshop to showcase the flexibility of our decentralized e-commerce platform. Next, we spent significant time acquiring our next 10 customers. This involved a lot of manual provisioning and handholding before we could successfully deploy these stores. Looking forward, we will be focusing on growing the number of Dshops from 10 to 100 and then to 1000 stores. We have several exciting upcoming launches to push us towards these next milestones.
In mid-June, we partnered with Huobi to bring OGN to a broad base of new token holders and traders. OGN was listed on both the main Huobi Global exchange and Huobi Korea. The response from both Huobi and Origin community members was overwhelmingly positive. This is not surprising as Huobi nearly matches Binance in trading volume and is one of the most dominant exchanges in Asia and globally.
Source: Blockfyre research (using CoinMarketCap data)
As part of the listing, we also collaborated with Huobi on several rewards program for our loyal token holders. The OGN Net Increase competition rewarded 400 traders. A full list of winners can be found at the end of this official post from Huobi.
The OGN Holder Airdrop will reward Huobi traders that HODL OGN over a two-month period (July 1, 2020 to August 31, 2020). 500,000 OGN will be rewarded to OGN Holder participants.
We encourage everyone to register and then participate. OGN payouts will have yields comparable to our future staking programs.
We also conducted two AMAs with their global and Turkish communities. A transcript of the global AMA can be found here.
Our objective is to always keep our circulating supply lower than our originally projected supply. The circulating supply at time of writing is 74,395,115 OGN. This is close to 29% less than the projected supply of 104M tokens.
Sign up on our mailing list on our website to get the latest updates about our circulating supply and announcements related to OGN.
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Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the May 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.
In May, the team has been heads down laying the foundation for several exciting initiatives that will be announced in the next quarter.
On the technology side, we’ve been focused on iterating quickly on our products based on customer feedback:
We’re working hard on making it easier to launch new partner stores on the Dshop platform. We’ve re-tooled our backend infrastructure to simplify the deployment process. This month we also launched the Contentos and Solana Dshops. We’re looking forward to deeper partnerships with both companies going forward.
On Origin Deals, we’ve been learning a lot from our early Beta users. Some of our most passionate early adopters have made 30+ transactions already since we opened our doors to select users in mid-April, locking up Origin Tokens (OGN) every single time. We’ve been working on new features to further engage these power users as we get closer to opening up the product to the general public.
Regarding token economics, our current circulating supply is at 58.82M, or 30% lower than our expected circulating supply of 84.55M. This is over 25M tokens fewer than was originally modeled at network launch in our Binance Research Report. We expect that circulating supply will continue to grow at a slower-than-modeled pace throughout this year.
This month, we launched two new third-party Dshops for Contentos and Solana. With Contentos, we’re particularly excited about working with them in the coming months to launch decentralized stores for individual content creators in the Contentos network. Contentos creators will be able to monetize their channels at zero-fees through the partnership.
In addition, we completed several Dshop infrastructure updates this month. To date, launching each store has been a very involved process. Each new Dshop had to be manually provisioned by members of our engineering team before being deployed to IPFS. This created a bit of a backlog in launching third-party parties, slowing down our customer and partner acquisition processes.
However, we will soon be moving to a new model that will allow for rapid creation of individual Dshop instances. This will greatly accelerate our ability to onboard new partners that have already signed up to launch decentralized e-commerce stores.
Expect additional updates in this area in the coming weeks. If you’re interested in launching your own decentralized store, please get in touch and request a demo.
Elsewhere, we’ve seen exciting early data from the Origin Deals Beta. Here are some of the early customer testimonials we’ve received.
“…cool, group orders are looking good. very smooth experience.” — Jagdish (35 purchases)
“Origin is the most used token for me. It provides a real utility instead of just speculating on the price. I think this is a real use case for tokens besides DeFi.” — HT (32 purchases)
“It’s either I use Amazon or Origin, but Origin saves me 20%. It’s a no brainer.” — Mike (18 purchases)
We’ve re-launched our Origin Deals browser extension and expect this to further improve the conversion funnel. Previously, Origin Deals customers could only purchase one item at a time by shopping on the Origin Deals website. This was an awkward experience. Now, we’re letting users do most of their work on Amazon, shopping as they normally would and adding multiple products to their carts.
They are then able to check out on Origin Deals and save up to 20% by locking up OGN. This simplifies the purchase process, and we are already seeing positive feedback and increased OGN lock-up amounts from this small but meaningful update.
Our goal with Origin Deals is to create a great product for our customers while creating the right incentives for using and locking up OGN. At the same time, we’re working to make OGN more accessible to the masses across multiple geographic markets. OGN is currently listed on over a dozen exchanges, including Binance, Upbit, Bittrex Global, Uniswap, and Kyber.
June is already looking to be very busy for the entire team. We already have multiple exciting releases slated for the month. Stay tuned.
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