Launch App
As one of the longest-standing projects on Ethereum, Origin’s mission is to bring non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized finance (DeFi) to the masses. By innovating consistently across these verticals with a user-first approach, Origin is simplifying the Web3 user experience, while also amplifying its utility by staying true to the core tenets of crypto.
Origin was founded in 2017 by seasoned entrepreneurs Joshua Fraser and Matthew Liu, who envisioned a platform for frictionless, decentralized commerce powered by Ethereum.
As a result of this unerring conviction, Origin raised $38m in funding to bootstrap growth.
The protocol has boasted a wealth of support since launching its native token, OGN, in January 2020. Initial sales rounds saw significant contributions from crypto-focused firms including Pantera Capital and Blockchain.com, as well as tech heavyweights such as YouTube founder Steve Chen and Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian.
Four years later, Origin’s commitment to building infrastructure for decentralized commerce remains as unshakeable as ever. Recognizing that fresh entrants would seek out crypto for utility that centralized outfits cannot offer, Origin’s vision for seamless peer-to-peer marketplaces has honed in on the burgeoning sectors of DeFi and NFTs.
By focusing on NFTs and DeFi, Origin has developed products at the bleeding edge of innovation in these sectors. Origin’s NFT arm, Story, has partnered with leading NFT collections to build bespoke white label marketplaces, while the launch of Origin Dollar (OUSD) and Origin Dollar Governance (OGV) has pioneered novel mechanics in the realm of DeFi.
Origin Story serves as Origin’s NFT arm, aiming to further innovation at the bleeding edge of NFT utility through groundbreaking products that tokenize real world assets, digital goods, and services. Story’s white label marketplaces are built to cultivate robust, inclusive platforms for the communities they serve, which include a number of premier pfp (profile picture) NFT collections.
However, Story’s vision is by no means constrained to facilitating the exchange of digital art. The launch of the first marketplace for tokenized property exchange, built for real estate heavyweight Roofstock, evidences the vast, untapped utility that Origin is committed to unlocking. The marketplace’s first successful sale saw the seller incur a total of 3% in fees – well below industry norms – with both parties enjoying the benefits of rapid finality offered by the technology.
NFTs are in their earliest innings. In the next 5 years, Origin imagines many industries being completely disrupted by NFTs. NFTs are a new primitive that allows for true digital ownership, scarcity, and provenance. Just like basic HTML websites later gave rise to multi-billion dollar industries like e-commerce, blogging, online media, and social networking, NFTs will disrupt the way that billions of users will interact with Web3. This technology will disrupt gaming, real-world asset tokenization (e.g. real estate, luxury goods, commodities), the creator economy, and ticketing.
Origin recognizes that vertical-specific use cases and bespoke feature sets require marketplaces and engagement features that monolithic centralized operators like OpenSea will be unable to provide.
The non-fungible token boom has given rise to a crowded market of generic marketplaces and third party tools for analytics and rarity. However, the space remains fraught with malicious actors while the overall user experience remains rudimentary – leaving users more susceptible to fraudulent activity. Data suggests that over $100m in NFTs has been stolen over the course of 2022 alone.
Recognizing the need to create safe, user-first platforms for NFT exchange, Origin Story partners with leading NFT collections to create a safe platform for buying and selling NFTs. Story creates bespoke white label NFT marketplaces for individual collections, integrated directly into projects’ native sites.
Story offers an all-in-one solution to the choice overload faced by market participants at present. By aggregating listings from major generic marketplaces, collectors are able to gain an overview of all legitimate listings, thus eliminating the risk of purchasing items from counterfeit collections that have flooded generic marketplaces.
While an array of third party rarity ranking tools are now available to NFT enthusiasts, Story integrates official rarity rankings devised by the projects themselves, taking into account each community’s unique tastes and prized attributes.
Further, Story’s white label marketplaces also include a comprehensive analytics dashboard comprising key holder insights to inform traders’ decisions.
Origin’s native token OGN now has fresh utility as the staking token for Origin Story. Holders who stake their OGN on Story are rewarded in ETH and OGN accrued from 100% of fees across Story’s white label marketplaces.
Tokenomics:
OGN staking is delineated across seasons, with each season running for 120 days.
Just over 507 million OGN are currently in circulation, with over 39 million OGN staked during Season 2.
The season-based model has been implemented in order to incentivize users to stake OGN early on, and for the entire duration of a season, to benefit from maximal rewards.
Launched in September 2020, OUSD offers groundbreaking innovation in DeFi. Fully collateralized by reserves of the space’s leading stablecoins – USDT, USDC, and DAI – the novel, yield-generating stablecoin allows users to accrue yield directly in their wallets, without the need for staking or lockups. OUSD’s architecture ensures that yields will consistently outperform those found on the underlying protocols used, namely Compound, Aave, Convex, and Curve.
With record-high inflation and multiple CeFi failures (e.g. FTX, Celsius, BlockFi), the timing is perfect for a truly decentralized, high-yield product that is transparent, battle-tested, and risk-averse.
OUSD has been developed with a consistent emphasis on protocol security. The protocol’s smart contracts have been comprehensively audited by leading security firms including OpenZeppelin, Certora, Trail of Bits, and Solidified, with internal audits being regularly conducted. Beyond these robust measures, OUSD’s open-source codebase can be monitored by skilled community members to rapidly identify any potential threats.
Origin’s commitment to disruptive innovation is evidenced by OUSD – the first stablecoin that generates yield passively and eliminates the complexities of staking and protocol management. This represents a crucial leap towards broadening the DeFi sector’s overall accessibility and driving financial access to the masses.
OUSD’s underlying reserves are allocated to the space’s most robust yield-generating protocols:
OUSD boasts a unique elastic supply that expands as more OUSD is minted and yield is accrued from strategy allocations.
Recognizing the need for independent governance for Origin’s NFT and DeFi products, Origin Dollar Governance (OGV) has been developed as the governance token for the OUSD ecosystem in order to promote decentralization and empower the community to drive key protocol decisions.
Users may stake OGV with a lockup period of anywhere from 1 month to 4 years. In return for staking to the protocol, holders are issued non-transferable vote-escrowed OGV (veOGV), which offers economic and voting power. veOGV issuance is determined by the amount of OGV staked and the duration for which it has been staked, thus rewarding those with a long-term commitment to the protocol’s success.
Strategy allocations for OUSD’s reserves are determined on a weekly basis via a governance vote.
OGV was launched in the form of an airdrop to OGN holders on 12 July, 2022, with a claim period of 90 days. All unclaimed OGV – 9.33% of supply – was burned following the closure of this window on 10 October, 2022.
Over 72% of all OGV is currently staked, with Origin and its founders locking up the majority of their holdings for the maximum 4 year staking period. Stakers currently earn a 71.01% variable APY. The token’s high staking rate evidences the community’s conviction in its long term growth, while the consequent reduction in liquid supply serves to boost OGV’s performance.
At present, OGV’s circulating supply amounts to 859,782,377 OGV.
Crypto is now at an inflection point for mass adoption, with millions of new entrants being observed over recent years, and millions more eager to benefit from the potential applications of decentralized value exchange and accrual.
Origin’s renewed vision underpins a commitment to onboarding the next wave of adopters, equipping users with all the tools they need to scale the realms of NFTs and DeFi with a radically simplified, user-first approach.
Origin’s products serve to bridge the gulf between Web3’s utility and Web2’s ease of use, with beautiful, seamless, groundbreaking technology that encourages disrupters across the globe to participate in a future of decentralized peer-to-peer exchange.
The power of blockchain technology has been evidenced by its exponential growth over the last decade. Origin aims to bring this infrastructure to the masses, while also disrupting the legacy mechanics of vast untapped industries to drive fair and innovative value creation.
