Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the April 2020 edition. We are eager to hear feedback and suggestions from our community.
April was a very strong kickoff for Origin’s Q2 2020. The team has been firing on all cylinders and has accomplished a lot in a short amount of time:
We introduced two products that increase the utility of Origin Tokens (OGN). First, we added Origin Commissions to Dshop, our decentralized e-commerce platform. More recently, we released Origin Deals in Beta, enabling users to lock up OGN to access massive discounts on Amazon.com.
Together with our new partner Brave, we released the Brave merchandise store. Brave is the first marquee partner using the Dshop platform.
OGN was listed on two additional top-tier exchanges, Upbit (Korea’s top exchange) and Bittrex Global.
To combat COVID-19, we scrambled to procure masks for members of our US community. In less than 3 weeks, we’ve distributed thousands of masks to individuals, including many frontline healthcare workers. We are donating 100% of the proceeds to CEPI to help find a vaccine.
Finally, we wanted to point out that OGN’s token release schedule has been modified downwards, with 8.83M fewer tokens circulating in April than projected (33.52M actual vs. 42.35M projected).
In the next quarter, we anticipate that OGN will have significantly lower circulating supply than the modeled numbers in our original token release schedule. You can read this post for full details.
In the Binance research report published in January, we modeled out 42.35M and 84.55M OGN in circulation for April and May respectively. April will close with 33.52M tokens in circulation, a 21% reduction compared to the modeled amount. May’s differential will be even larger, with an estimated decrease of 25M tokens (30% reduction) compared to the modeled amount.
The decrease in actual circulating supply can be attributed to several reasons:
First, the majority of team and advisor tokens that have been unlocked have not entered circulating supply. An even larger share of tokens are not yet vested as our team members are all on 4-year vesting schedules. Our team is committed to growing the Origin network over the long-term.
Hundreds of our investors have similarly signaled their belief in our project over the long-term by electing to lock up their tokens for a year. We’ve locked up an additional 12.21M tokens in this way.
We’ve chosen to hold back the entirety of our Foundation Reserves that unlocked in April, accounting for a further reduction in 4.71M tokens.
Finally, we’ve changed the Origin Rewards program to more selectively reward ecosystem participants that are adding large amounts of value to the platform. This means an ongoing reduction in OGN that is distributed through this program.
Product launches
At the end of last year, we introduced Origin Commissions as a new way for sellers to incentivize application developers to promote their listings in exchange for OGN. These “affiliates” would earn OGN commissions whenever they referred new buyers to sellers in their applications. In truth, this program never really took off because the barrier to entry was too high.
This month, we’ve upgraded Origin Commissions to work with our Dshop platform. Now sellers can offer OGN commissions easily on their decentralized storefronts. Affiliates can sign up in a self-serve way and promote merchant listings easily across social media, blogs, and publisher sites. This greatly increases the accessibility of Origin Commissions. Now bloggers, influencers, and fans will be able to participate in the program and earn OGN without needing to know how to code.
You can become an Origin affiliate by referring buyers to our StayAtHome shop that is selling KN-95 and surgical masks. We’ve sold thousands of masks already and encourage our community members sign up and earn OGN by spreading the word and helping people get the masks that they need.
Two weeks ago, we introduced a new Origin experiment, Origin Deals, that utilizes OGN in a novel way. Users are able to lock up small amounts of OGN for 120 days in exchange for unlocking significant discounts on Amazon products (up to 20%). As we iterate and improve on our Beta, it’s our goal to further decrease the circulating supply of OGN with Origin Deals.
With the accompanying browser extension (Chrome, Firefox, Brave) you can see how much you can save on millions of products on Amazon by using Origin Deals.
Both of these product launches are focused on creating additional utility for OGN while better servicing important participants in our ecosystem (sellers and promoters with Origin Commissions and buyers with Origin Deals).
We are thrilled that Brave signed on to be our first marquee partner for Dshop. Users can now purchase official Brave products via a privacy-focused, decentralized application (DApp) hosted on IPFS.
Brave is one of the premier companies in the cryptocurrency industry. Over 13M people use the Brave desktop and mobile browsers every month. In addition, the Brave team created the Basic Attention Token (BAT) and have built a large and thriving community. We look forward to future collaborations with the Brave team as we deepen our partnership over time. We are also eager to unveil new Origin partners in the rest of Q2. If you’re interested in setting up your own decentralized store, please reach out.
Last week, OGN was listed on Upbit, a tier-1 exchange. This further strengthens our foothold in the important market of South Korea where we are also listed on Coinone and GOPAX and are partnered with the iconic global technology company, Samsung.
Similarly, Bittrex Global opened up BTC and ETH trading pairs for OGN on their new global platform. As one of the early mainstays of the cryptocurrency trading market, Bittrex is an exchange we are excited to be working with.
As we continue to tackle new geographic markets, we expect OGN to be listed on multiple additional exchanges.
