Every month, the Origin team publishes an update to our token holders and the broader community. We hope you enjoy our December 2022 edition.
If you’re skipping the details, be sure to check out Origin’s 2022 recap at the end of the article!
With new feature rollouts for Story marketplaces and fresh strategy integrations for OUSD, we wrapped up 2022 with exciting new developments for both our flagship products. Collaborating with the team at Pudgy Penguins, Origin Story became the first marketplace to add support for the collection’s soulbound tokens. This month, Story launched new activity feeds and discord activity bots to better serve NFT collectors’ needs.
Pertaining to Origin Dollar, OGV governance unanimously voted to integrate Convex and Curve LUSD pool strategies. After months of internal auditing, OUSD now utilizes these strategies to boost yield for Origin Dollar holders.
In wake of the FTX collapse, self-custodied solutions like Origin Dollar are needed now more than ever. Our co-founder Josh Fraser spoke on the power of OUSD to an audience of over 10,000 at Benzinga’s NYC Crypto conference this month, presenting his case for DeFi. Ironically, Josh took the stage after Kevin O’Leary and Anthony Scarramucci gave their “unbiased” takes on the FTX debacle.
Our head of BD for OUSD Andra Nicolau also spoke at the conference, and she made some exciting connections we’re hopeful to announce as Origin Dollar partners in 2023. Until then, check out all we’ve been up to in our December retrospective below!
We launched a chill new feature for our partners at Pudgy Penguins.
At Origin Story, our foremost objective is to cultivate novel uses for NFTs through our diverse product portfolio. We’ve concentrated our efforts across a variety of sectors, including real estate, music, fashion, loyalty rewards, and beyond. We’ve engaged in numerous promising conversations with prominent web2 brands and eagerly anticipate announcing our partnerships with them in early 2023.
While we work to secure more “tier-A” partnerships, Story’s product team has been hard at work building new, innovative features that are applicable across industries. Our latest product update includes the integration of Soulbound tokens for Pudgy Penguins’ marketplace, powered by Origin Story.
Pudgy Penguins have been among the hottest projects in the NFT community this December, and the collection has an even more exciting roadmap in 2023. We attribute this buzz to the collection’s recent price action, alongside its new product offerings on Pudgy Penguin's marketplace. As we continuously roll out new features on partner marketplaces, Origin Story is laying the groundwork to capture massive trading volumes from our partner collections.
Origin Story integrated Pudgy’s new soulbound tokens into its white label marketplace, allowing collectors to see distributions of SBTs within the collection. These soulbound tokens are the first step in creating a more robust digital identity, and we’re excited to play an important role in its development. As Pudgy Penguins’ technology partner, Story powers their marketplace and continuously builds innovative tools for the team and their collectors.
Origin Story’s team had the pleasure of meeting with Luca Netz at Benzinga's Future of Crypto conference, where we discussed future product rollouts and new integrations on Pudgy Penguins marketplace.
Easily accessing information needed to make informed purchases is important to our users. This is why we’ve recently launched an improved activity feed across all our partner marketplaces, allowing users to filter by sales, listings, transfers, and mints.
Additionally, we’ve built a Discord bot for sales and listings of NFTs on our marketplaces. You can see this in action on Origin's Discord server in the #story-bot channel, and partners will be launching a version of this bot for their own community Discords. We expect this bot integration to drive further interest to Story marketplaces, as communities will have access to this feature directly from their NFT community’s discord.
New protocol integrations are being executed smoothly. Josh and Andra spoke on OUSD V2 live in NYC.
December was a month full of development for OUSD––from both a product and marketing perspective. From co-marketing campaigns with our new partners to in-person events, Origin Dollar is steadily blinking on the industry’s radar.
Origin Dollar yields remain competitive with treasury rates, and the recent OUSD integration with Morpho has boosted yields for OUSD holders. Our engineers have finished implementing the Morpho Aave strategy, and it will be rolling out in early January.
Our most recent upgrade unanimously passed OGV governance this month, so Origin Dollar will now be integrated with LUSD Curve and Convex strategies. Liquity Protocol issues LUSD as an over-collateralized stablecoin backed by Ether, and it has undergone audits internally, as well as by Trail of Bits. After the 48 hour timelock on the multisig transaction, the aforementioned LUSD strategies will be live for OUSD on Friday January 5th.
Users can still only post collateral for OUSD in USDC, DAI, and USDT. However, the underlying LUSD strategies expose Origin Dollar to LUSD, which we believe to hold nearly negligible additional risk. Here’s a breakdown of how Origin Dollar utilizes the LUSD Curve and Convex strategies:
The Origin team got together in New York City to raise awareness about the trustless nature of DeFi and OUSD V2. Our co-founder Josh and Head of BD for OUSD Andra Nicolau spoke to an audience of 10,000 virtual listeners and nearly 1,000 in-person attendees at Benzinga’s Future of Crypto conference alongside other industry leaders in DeFi and NFTs. Josh’s panel on “Defining Trustless Economies” where he spoke on the power of Origin Dollar can be seen below:
Watch Josh's full panel discussion here.
The idea of crypto is you don’t have to trust anyone–you trust mathematics and economic incentives. That allows us to build technology that purely relies on those two things. As long as those two things hold true, we can count on these systems to work.
- Josh Fraser
OGN Season 2 staking is still open. OGV staking now yields 54.94% variable APY.
OGN has a current circulating supply of 503,703,566. No new tokens were issued in December, contrary to our initial token model. As evidenced by the chart below, the amount of OGN in circulation is now over 100 million tokens less than what was initially modeled. In addition, 53.7M tokens are currently locked in the OGN staking pool.
The 53.7 million OGN currently staked in OGN Season 2 earn the revenue made by Story marketplaces. So far in Season 2, there is 214,509 OGN and 28.85 ether in the rewards pool. This number will continue to increase as the season progresses, and holders can stake in this pool until February 6, 2023. Once staking is locked, Season 2 will continue until 3/6/2023 when the rewards become claimable.
Over time, our goal is to increase the ETH and OGN rewards in our staking pools to encourage progressively higher staking rates. Unlike competing NFT platforms that subsidize staking rewards with wash trading fees and treasury tokens, our goal is to consistently increase the yield over time without adding significant OGN supply. This will best position OGN token performance as platform usages grows and we weather the current market conditions.
The circulating supply of OGV currently sits at 429 million. At a variable APY of 54.93%, OGV staking returns remain high. OGV stakers receive veOGV that grant governance rights over OUSD, allowing token holders to vote on Origin Dollar yield allocations and new strategy implementations. Moreover, those who stake OGV earn protocol revenue from OUSD, increasing proportionally with the TVL locked in Origin Dollar.
Most impressively, over 78% of all OGV that is circulating is currently staked to the governance portal. As we scale OUSD usage and OGV staking rates, we expect that there will be near-term catalysts for positive OGV performance and governance utilization.
Let’s zoom out for a minute.
The headwinds of 2022 didn’t stop us from building out incredible product features, accelerating our goal of onboarding the next 100 million users to DeFi. We’re proud to gather some of the teams’ favorite moments from 2022 to share with you, serving as a quick reminder of how far Origin has come over the course of the year.
At the start of the year, OGV didn’t exist, our white label marketplaces were just a concept, there was no OGN staking, and we had yet to dive into the world of NFTs for real-world assets.
2022 was certainly a challenging year for all of crypto. Asset prices dropped considerably, with BTC and ETH falling 75% from all-time highs. Perhaps even worse, consumer confidence was ruined by a series of black swan events, with the collapse of Terra Luna creating broad contagion across CeFi (centralized finance players).
Matthew Liu, co-founder Origin
“This year, we saw multiple black swan events that created a crypto bloodbath, hurt millions of users, and diminished consumer confidence in the asset class. First, UST and Luna crashed, wiping away over $60B of market cap value. Players that were exposed to UST and Luna began falling like dominoes. 3AC, one of the most renowned hedge funds in the space, quickly became insolvent and lost almost the entirety of its once $18B balance sheet. CeFi lenders like BlockFi and Celsius are now bankrupt, racking up hundreds of millions in consumer losses. Perhaps most egregiously, Sam Bankman-Fried and his cronies at FTX misappropriated over $8B of customer funds in an attempt to save their failing hedge fund Alameda Research. Millions of users are affected, and with losses across the board, we are now in a deep crypto winter.”
Matt continued, “The silver lining in this deep bear market is that there is now less noise and speculation in the space. Companies like Origin believe in a decentralized future. OUSD is a perfect substitute for centralized yield products offered by Celsius, BlockFi, FTX, Gemini, and Coinbase. It’s fully transparent and on-chain. We expect many more users to gravitate towards OUSD as the word gets out. Similarly, while speculative NFT trading volume is down considerably, the Origin Story team is working with partners to build the next wave of innovation with NFTs. In the next cycle, utility in games, real-world assets, ticketing, and other use cases will dominate the narrative. We hope to be the picks and shovels technology platform that enables hundreds or thousands of established brands, musicians, athletes, artists, and other creators to launch NFTs to the mainstream. The bear market is painful, but it is also the best time to build the foundations for the next bull market. The winners that survive the bear will be positioned to 10x-100x platform usage in the next couple of years.”
A year building in NFTs seemingly feels like a decade, yet here we are at year’s end. Just 6 months ago Origin Story launched its white label NFT marketplace product, and we’ve partnered with behemoth brands in web2 and web3 alike.
Here are some Origin Story highlights from 2022, brought to you by the Origin Protocol team!
Linus Chung, VP of Story’s Product, answered with OGN staking & shouted out a successful mint:
“The launch of OGN staking and the success of OGN Season 1 stood out as an Origin Story highlight this year. The feature allows token holders to earn marketplace revenue via staking, adding powerful new utility for token holders. OGN Season 1 stakers earned 5.6% APY, proving a viable model for staking revenues without ridiculous token issuance. In 2023, we’re looking forward to locking up more OGN as we increase APYs from here on out.”
He continued, “A personal highlight from Origin Story was the Lucky Ducky generative collection that sold out in minutes. It was incredibly exciting to watch happen. The mint once again affirmed Story’s ability to mint generative NFTs at scale.”
Amit Patel, Head of BD for Story, answered with Origin’s partnership with Roofstock:
“I only recently joined Origin after leading multiple billion dollar business units at Lyft, but I’ve enjoyed working with our partners at RoofStock. Seeing the Story team join forces with Roofstock, Teller, Wyre, and Polygon to finance and sell NFT real estate completely on-chain was an incredible experience. As a real estate investment company valued at nearly $2 billion, Roofstock is an ideal partnership to really make waves in the crosshairs of NFTs and real estate.”
Eric Charles, BD & Account Manager, answered with our white label marketplace launch:
“Watching our white label marketplaces grow into one of Origin’s largest products was a true highlight of 2022. Starting with Pudgy Penguins in June, we began to partner with leading NFT collections to create custom, white label marketplaces. There were a few days in the year that really stood out at Origin: the record 400 ETH Pudgy Penguins sale routed through Origin Story; conducting the first full on-chain NFT home sale with Roofstock; and the day we launched Paris Hilton’s NFTs, to name a few.”
This year, self-custody reigned supreme amongst the numerous CeFi collapses. As these centralized exchanges and yield products imploded, Origin Dollar launched the biggest product updates in its history.
Here are some Origin Dollar highlights from 2022, brought to you by the Origin Protocol team:
Franck Chastagnol, VP of Engineering, answered with the OGV token launch:
“Launching Origin Dollar Governance this year was certainly a highlight for the team. The token launch sets the groundwork for a more decentralized and robust protocol and has allowed us to begin decentralized governance for Origin Dollar. Value accrual for DeFi tokens has been a hot topic this year––products are being utilized but few actually have revenue that flows back into the hands of token holders. Launching OGV lets us directly incentivize OGV holders through OUSD revenues.”
Daniel Von Fange, Senior Engineer for OUSD, answered with some important tech-y stuff:
“There were some big updates under the hood this year that many users may have not even realized, yet it makes Origin Dollar significantly more robust, autonomous, and convenient for holders. One that stood out was the incentivized harvesting mechanic. This allows users to harvest token rewards directly from the OUSD protocol, allowing a more gas efficient, autonomous system. Incentivized harvesting is 100% distributed, as there is no longer a single authority that must fund token reward harvesting.”
Micah Alcorn, Director of Product, answered with OUSD V2 strategies:
“OUSD V2 strategies rolled out this year which had a huge impact on Origin Dollar yields. The new stablecoin strategies on Morpho, Convex, and Curve have allowed OUSD to compete with Treasury bonds which, in the current climate, sit at 4.5%. Over the last 365-days, Origin Dollar’s trailing APY was 5.5%.”
Origin’s team has grown to be 31-people strong, and we’ve continued to recruit top talent from web2 giants and web3 innovators alike. 2022 was the first year Origin has had a formal marketing team, led by our VP of Marketing Jan Sammut who joined us in September of this year. These efforts have laid groundwork to attract newcomers to Origin’s DeFi and NFT products as retail interest progresses.
Moreover, we made key hires this year to lead both our Story and Origin Dollar Business Development teams. Amit Patel recently joined us after over a decade at Lyft where he founded Lyft Business, Lyft’s billion-dollar in revenue B2B service. Since joining, he’s garnered relationships with leading web2 brands across the real estate, fashion, fast food, and ticketing industries. Andra Nicolau joined us earlier this year after raising nearly $300M for 1inch in the year prior. Andra has been crucial for amassing partnerships with institutions, DAOs, and treasury managers for Origin Dollar.
From our engineers to our BD team, we’re proud to have such incredible talent at Origin Protocol. If you think you’d be a good fit for our team… we’re hiring!
