Co-founding Origin has been one of the most impactful and fulfilling decisions I’ve ever made. Reflecting on the past six years, it’s humbling to take stock of how far we’ve come. When I first invested in crypto back in 2012, I had an inkling of blockchain’s potential. However, I could never have predicted the blistering trajectory that has taken the space to over $1T in market cap in a decade. I’ve been blessed to play my small part in furthering the space with Origin’s various products.
There are few experiences as richly rewarding as building in crypto. Between sleepless nights, black swans, and bull runs, this space is highly unpredictable but always stimulating. I have learned an immense amount and picked up invaluable insights that will guide me through the rest of my career as an entrepreneur and builder.
While it would be impossible to condense all these lessons into a single post, a few learnings have been fundamental in shaping my vision.
In its first iteration, Origin Protocol allowed anyone to buy or sell anything on-chain. My cofounder Josh and I set out to disrupt Web2 marketplaces with the aspiration of allowing anyone to buy or sell any real-world asset on-chain.
However, we quickly learned that it was not very practical for the time. The marketplace protocol we were building was too early; Ethereum was still in its very nascent stages. The user base and user experiences were too immature to scale the exchange of goods and services other than purely digital crypto assets.
Disruptive ideas are built off of enabling technologies. These building blocks serve as the foundation that then opens up the “adjacent possible”.
Today, through a series of pivots, we've evolved our sets of products to be more complementary with existing crypto natives that are in the space – the early adopters that are transacting and using crypto well ahead of the mainstream. Over time, it’s become increasingly clear that it's too early to focus on mainstream use cases. When you try to serve everyone, you end up serving no one.
Paul Graham talks about well-shaped ideas, and Chris Dixon is a proponent of building products that serve as the thin edge of the wedge. These are all ways of saying the same thing. Instead, we should be focusing on highly motivated users that have urgent problems to solve today.
Since DeFi Summer, we’ve seen hundreds of protocols fall by the wayside chasing yield while neglecting risks. Spinning up high-yield projects is easy, the real challenge lies in ensuring longevity.
2022 showed us the dangers of short-sighted greed. The multi-billion dollar implosions that rocked the market saw many investors lose their life savings to exploits, malpractice, and unsustainable mechanics.
Building a strong foundation means being proactive about security and sustainability.
With Origin DeFi, we strive to uphold crypto’s most crucial tenets. The team has done tremendous work to create robust and rewarding yield platforms with zero compromise. Thanks to rigorous audits and tireless effort, OUSD is one of only six digital assets to claim a AAA rating from InsurAce. Both OUSD and OETH are open-source, decentralized, and non-custodial, offering users maximum transparency into their mechanics.
Working in blockchain teaches you quickly that there’s no room for complacency. Proactive mechanics have made our flagship products highly insulated from black swan events. These failsafes have shielded our users from many unexpected events, such as April’s USDC depeg.
Origin’s diverse, global audience is a massive point of pride.
Despite starting Origin in 2017, we chose not to do an ICO in the traditional sense. Instead we had an advisor round, which acted as our seed round. Following that, we had a strategic round which served as our series A. We intentionally wanted to raise from a very global and diverse set of investors.
We also didn't want any particular token purchaser to have an outsized share and control of the protocol because we wanted it to be sufficiently decentralized. We manually onboarded over 200+ entities and individual purchasers with full KYC/AML and accreditation. Overall, around 800+ entities and individuals joined the round before our token launched.
Since then, we’ve cultivated thriving regional communities around the world, with regular international events and multilingual content.
This diversity is crucial to understanding user needs and gaining unique insights into opportunities and pressing challenges facing ordinary people. This is especially important since much of the projected future growth in crypto will be in regions like South America, Africa, and other regions that can leap frog traditional financial systems and infrastructure. Our team of talented community managers actively cultivates regional communities, presenting invaluable feedback for further innovation.
Attaining global reach is no small undertaking, but the challenge has been immensely rewarding. Siloing your audience to a specific region only hinders potential, especially in a space built to serve everyone.
Realizing that our initial vision for Origin was too early for the tech was a tough pill to swallow. However, moments like this empowered us to adopt a culture of rapid adaptability.
Crypto is a constantly shifting industry. When you’re competing with a cohort of relentless visionaries, remaining lightweight is essential. Much of the infrastructure we take for granted today simply did not exist back in 2017.
We’ve learned that if you want to remain at the forefront, you need to constantly evolve along with the space. This principle allowed us to take liquid staking by the horns with Origin Ether. In a few months, we brought an incisive product to market that continues to deliver incredible value for users. Today, Origin Ether is approaching $100M of TVL while delivering higher risk-adjusted yields than the top liquid staking tokens like stETH, rETH, and frxETH.
If a product is serving you more than your users, it’s time to revisit why you build in the first place.
From the outset, we planned with a focus on the future. Projects that chase short-term hype burn through their runway and end up rudderless. Our commitment to building enduring products has driven us to create a strong foundation for sustained success.
Value creation and value capture oftentimes happen in the later years of a company or project. They often happen in years 7, 8, 9, and beyond. That’s what’s really exciting to me about the future. In the next cycle, there will be new users and institutions entering the market. This means there is ample opportunity to engage with these new customer segments and an inflow of capital.
It’s going to require some zigging and zagging on the way, but I’m very bullish on focusing on this long-term, compounded growth in this upcoming cycle and beyond.
One of the most exciting things about being in this industry is the unknowns. As entrepreneurs, we all like to paint a vision for the future, but the most impactful innovations are often the most unexpected.
Oftentimes I think about how some iconic entrepreneurs have approached their companies.
When they first got started it was not immediately obvious that they were going to build these transformative, generationally impactful companies. Meta is a searing example. In his early days, Mark Zuckerberg’s main goal was to build a college directory. He had no idea he would end up building the world’s social graph, a robust developer platform that powers millions of apps and the foundations of the metaverse.
Armed with the lessons we’ve learned thus far, Origin is ready to tackle fresh challenges head-on as we clear the path to mass adoption. And until that path has been cleared with tangible benefits and real-world impact, we build.
