Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and the broader community. Welcome to the June 2022 edition. We are eager to hear feedback and suggestions from our community.
June was a significant month for Origin as we announced multiple product updates and made progress on our highly anticipated Origin Dollar Governance (OGV) launch. Our goal is to have straightforward narratives and clear token utility for both OGN and OGV by the middle of next month to build off of the traction we are experiencing with Origin Story and Origin Dollar respectively. As we enter the month of July, look forward to the upcoming launch OGV and decentralized governance features and a revamped OGN staking program.
OGV will launch on July 12 00:00 UTC.
Very importantly, Origin continues to thrive and remain in a strong personnel and cash position as we build through the bear market and look toward delivering long-term token holder value.
Earlier this month, we revealed Collections, an innovative branded secondary marketplace solution by Origin Story. We were also thrilled to announce that our first partnership for this new feature was with Pudgy Penguins, an inspiring collection of 8,888 NFTs. Now creators like the team behind Pudgy Penguins can utilize the branded marketplaces to organize their multiple NFT collections into one easy-to-use place while creating an additional revenue stream to fund their project’s development and growth.
We’re very excited about the early market feedback we are getting from Collections. Expect more branded marketplaces to launch in the very near future.
In addition, we launched a partnership with Rift Finance, which will help bring deeper liquidity to OGN markets. Rift has incentivized liquidity provisioning in new and exciting ways, allowing profit-motivated liquidity providers and liquidity-motivated DAOs to work collaboratively. Utilizing our three new Rift vaults, we can offer liquidity providers amplified returns combined with protection from impermanent loss.
Our most important launch of the year is fast-approaching. We are less than two weeks away from the launch of OGV. Security has always been a top priority as we prepare to distribute and launch OUSD’s new governance token. At the end of this month, Origin Dollar’s new governance mechanisms via smart contract were thoroughly audited by the team at Open Zeppelin. The minor issues that they discovered have been addressed and resolved by our engineering team. This audit is an essential step in ensuring and maintaining the safety of our users’ funds as we prepare for OGV to be implemented into the Origin ecosystem.
Additionally, we have recently announced an ambitious plan to grow OUSD through a liquidity mining campaign leading up to the OGV airdrop. In addition to OGN holders being eligible to claim OGV on a 1:1 basis, we’re allocating 50 million OGV tokens, or approximately 5% of the initial supply, for everyone who supplies liquidity to the Curve OUSD MetaPool during the 5–6 week period beginning on June 1, 2022 and ending on the upcoming snapshot.
As we draw closer to the distribution phase of the OGV launch, we have published a list of participating exchanges that will support the airdrop for their customers who hold OGN. We will continue to update our Twitter for the most current information as additional exchanges come onboard.
OGN’s circulating supply is 501,312,825. The circulating supply number includes the tens of millions of OGN staked in our staking program, reducing the actual float further. There are 31,909,647 OGN currently staked. The majority of these tokens are staked for a year. This is a very strong signal that OGN holders believe in the future of OGN. You can see all of this information on our token dashboard.
Several Origin team members descended upon New York this month for NFT.NYC. This was our second year attending the conference and following in traditional we hosted an event to celebrate Origin Story and the creators and collections who we have been fortunate enough to collaborate with.
Additionally, Origin’s Chase Colman took the opportunity to organize a Women in Web3 panel while in New York. It’s always great to connect in person with our partners and community members, and even better when we can treat you to a good time. Thank you to everyone who came out to make our events a success.
Origin Co-Founder Josh Fraser was interviewed by Coindesk to share his insight on potential vulnerabilities and safety precautions within Discord that he had discovered and that every web3 project needs to remain aware of.
Elsewhere, Origin’s VP of Product, Linus Chung made an appearance on the WLD show to draw from his experience and share knowledge about topics ranging from growth at Coinbase to the future of NFT infrastructure.
We also saw one of our phenomenal Community Managers, Moises Sosa, conduct an AMA with the MEXC Spanish Community to discuss the details of the upcoming launch of OGV. From the other side of the world, Slavik Lashkul, Origin’s outstanding Russian Community Manager, met with GagarinCrypto to raise awareness about Origin and its mission to bring DeFi and NFTs to the masses.
Origin continues to look for new talent to onboard and help accelerate development as we build for the future. We are seeking to prioritize quality and hire individuals whose experience and expertise align with our innovative strategy and mission.
With those expectations set, we are currently hiring for several senior leadership positions:
We’ve also expanded our product and engineering openings:
To build out our Business Development and Marketing teams, we are searching for specialized team members that will play a significant role in taking our community building to the next level:
Learn more about Origin:
Since OUSD was launched during the Summer of 2020, it has proven to be one of the best-performing, most trusted ways to earn yield from DeFi. By combining the concepts of a yield-bearing vault with a rebasing stablecoin, OUSD brings simplicity, gas savings, and convenience to farmers who would otherwise be forced to navigate a web of complex staking transactions and actively manage their portfolios. Today, we’re introducing wrapped OUSD (wOUSD): a second flavor that will further improve the composability of OUSD and expand its addressable market.
OUSD is unlike any other stablecoin. It is pegged to the dollar, not by decree or algorithmic hand-waving, but by over-collateralization with the top three most proven stablecoins (DAI, USC, USDT). But what makes it special beyond its strength and stability is that it grows every day. By deploying the underlying collateral to battle-tested DeFi strategies, the protocol earns yield and distributes it in the form of additional units of OUSD. Users simply hold the stablecoin in a regular Ethereum wallet and their balances will go “up only”, all of the time.
Wrapped OUSD (wOUSD) provides the same compounding yield with the same level of trust and stability. Only, it abstracts away the rebasing nature of OUSD. Instead of the balance increasing every day, the price increases every day. This is because wOUSD can be unwrapped at any time in exchange for an ever-increasing balance of OUSD. So as yield is generated by the protocol and distributed continuously to OUSD holders, the price of wOUSD reflects this earnings growth that will be realized when it is unwrapped.
The entire DeFi ecosystem is built upon the premise of composability. This “money Lego” characteristic is unique to our open financial system and it’s a catalyst for rapid growth and innovation. However, the rebasing nature of OUSD presents an extra layer of complexity for anyone wishing to integrate the token into their projects. Even though OUSD conforms to the ERC-20 token standard, it behaves differently as a yield-bearing token and developers may need to account for this when building their applications. Many of the most established exchanges and decentralized protocols still lack support for rebasing tokens. This all presents an obstacle for OUSD to become a core DeFi building block and a ubiquitous payment method across the industry.
With the introduction of wOUSD, anyone can leverage the yield-bearing aspects of OUSD without needing to build a custom interface to account for constantly increasing token balances. wOUSD is one of the first implementations of EIP-4626, which is an extension on ERC-20 that provides basic functionality for depositing and withdrawing tokens and reading balances on a tokenized vault. In addition to following this new standard, wOUSD has also been independently audited by Solidified and it’s ready for production use.
Individual token holders and institutions may also find it preferable to hold wOUSD compared to OUSD. In some jurisdictions, the tax treatment of wOUSD price appreciation may be different from the token accumulation that occurs daily with OUSD. In other cases, there may be unique constraints that cause users to have a greater appetite for the wrapped version.
Getting wOUSD is simple. You start by holding OUSD and then wrapping it by submitting two Ethereum transactions. We look forward to wOUSD being available for purchase directly on exchanges and automated market makers soon, but you’re early. 😉 If you don’t already have OUSD, you can buy it from Gate.io, KuCoin, Curve, Uniswap, or get it directly from the OUSD DApp.
Once you have OUSD in your wallet, visit ousd.com/wrap and follow these steps:
As time passes, the virtual price of wOUSD will increase. When you’re ready to unwrap your OUSD, there will be more of it than there was when you initially wrapped it. There’s no minimum term or lock-up period. You can return to the same form and submit a single transaction (in the opposite direction) to unwrap your OUSD.
As OUSD continues to evolve as an upgrade over ordinary stablecoins, security and stability will always remain the top priority. The Origin core team is committed to growing OUSD during every market cycle with a vision to create the superior payment method for Web3. This involves maintaining the trust of our users with each additional feature and wOUSD is no exception. After extensive testing and an external audit, we’re excited to see how wOUSD is used in the wild. If you’re a developer looking to integrate OUSD into your application or a humble farmer seeking the best risk-adjusted yields, we would love to hear from you.
Learn more about Origin:
Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and the broader community. Welcome to the May 2022 edition. We are eager to hear feedback and suggestions from our community.
In the last several months, the global equity and crypto markets were rocked by significant corrections. BTC hit a low of $25k (down 60+% from all-time highs) before settling back to $31k at the time of this writing. Thankfully, despite the market contraction, Origin remains in a very strong position to build for a highly successful long-term future.
Bear markets bring clarity. Competitors with low conviction leave the playing field. Hiring top talent is easier. Our company is well-capitalized with runway that can last us through a multi-year bear market. Further, we are positioning ourselves to grow and capture market share in our two targeted markets of NFTs and DeFi with Origin Story and Origin Dollar respectively.
Forecasting slightly ahead, we are excited to soon unveil finalized tokenomics and launch plans for OGV, the new governance token for OUSD that will be claimable by existing OGN holders. In addition, we are getting closer to re-launching a new OGN staking model that creates a direct tie-in between Origin Story protocol revenue growth and token performance.
Many new faces have recently joined the team to help move development along and scale up our operations. Please help us welcome Kelly Hwang as our Head of Investments and Treasury, Youngsun Shin as our latest Product Manager for Origin Story, Andra Nicolau as the Head of BD and Strategy for OUSD, Justin Charlton as Head of Finance, and Tom Hirst as our latest world-class engineer.
In this month’s token holder update, we will recap the development of many new initiatives that will soon be available to our community, creators, collectors, and token holders.
Despite the market taking a downturn, we believe we are well positioned to expand the core team. As we now have two growing business units, Origin Story and Origin Dollar (each with their own token), we are increasing our headcount for both engineering and business hires. It’s important to note that we will grow in a controlled and thoughtful way; we will always prioritize hiring a single world-class individual over numerous mediocre players. We pride ourselves on running lean, and we will maintain an extremely high bar while expanding our team. With that context being set, we are actively hiring for several senior leadership positions:
We’ve also expanded our product and engineering openings:
To build out our Business Development and Marketing teams, we will begin the search for specialized team members that can take our community building to the next level:
Check out our full job postings, and come join us or refer your friends!
OUSD continues to be the best risk-adjusted stablecoin strategy on the market today and has demonstrated its ability to maintain stability through highly volatile market conditions. The most recent market downturn was precipitated by the collapse of Terra’s UST stablecoin, which repeatedly lost peg and has now plummeted to less than 3 cents on the dollar.
Unlike UST, which was never backed by any hard assets, OUSD is backed by top USD-backed stablecoins like USDC and USDT as well as the most resilient decentralized stablecoin DAI. As a result, 1 OUSD should always be very close to 1 USD in value. This was proven in this month’s turbulence, as OUSD never deviated from peg by more than a few basis points. Origin’s senior engineer, Daniel Von Fange, wrote a helpful article that further explains why OUSD should never suffer a similar fate as UST and comparable tokens.
We are making rapid progress towards our upcoming launch of OGV. Expect an in-depth launch plan and detailed tokenomics plan to be published and distributed to the community imminently. In addition, the Origin Story team has made significant progress on the new staking program. This upgrade will allow Origin Story platform fees to begin accruing to OGN stakers, whether from primary sales commissions or secondary trading/royalty fees after the staking program’s upcoming re-launch. We are optimistic that this event will provide an exciting way for OGN holders to earn staking rewards immediately after claiming their OGV.
You may have been given a sneak peek at Origin Story’s newest feature set, branded secondary marketplaces. Origin’s VP of Product, Linus Chung, recently gave a walkthrough on our weekly community call to demonstrate how Origin Story will soon empower NFT creators and their communities like never before.
By being able to go directly to a collection’s website to purchase NFTs, collectors will be able to benefit from an added layer of authenticity. This new feature also helps directly support creators by redirecting a portion of the revenue generated on these secondary marketplaces back to the project. We have confirmed our first partners, and we look forward to sharing more details before publicly launching this exciting new product.
OGN’s circulating supply is 493,975,479. The circulating supply number includes the tens of millions of OGN staked in our staking program, reducing the actual float further. There are 31,909,647 OGN currently staked. The majority of these tokens are staked for a year. This is a very strong signal that OGN holders believe in the future of OGN. You can see all of this information on our token dashboard.
Earlier in May, OGN was listed on one of the industry’s most trusted and longest-running crypto exchanges, Kraken. The exchange currently provides over $800,000,000 in total 24-hour daily trading volume and now offers both OGN/USD and OGN/EUR trading pairs to more than 6 million users across 190 countries.
The global Origin community remains strong through the volatile market cycles that came with May. Our presence continues to grow in new regions and platforms. Origin Co-founder Matthew Liu was interviewed by Andrew Chang for Web3 Roundup and shared his thoughts revolving around the current trends of Web3 and NFTs.
Elsewhere, our Latin America Community Manager, Moises Sosa, participated in a fun Metaverse event to kick off Bitcoin Pizza Day and help raise awareness of Origin’s ecosystem. These experiences are a great way to engage with new and existing community members, and we look forward to participating in more of these events in the future.
Please give a warm Origin welcome to Kelly Hwang, my lifelong friend of 20+ years and seasoned crypto and traditional finance investor. Kelly recently joined Origin as Head of Investments and Treasury. His primary objective is to grow the Origin Foundation’s balance sheet, so that we will have many years of operating capital to scale Origin Story, Origin Dollar, and any other future Origin business units. As our treasury grows, we will have the ability to hire more aggressively, acquire new users and partners through marketing, and other initiatives that drive value to OGN and our upcoming new token, OGV. In addition, under Kelly’s leadership, Origin will be selectively investing in new startups that share our web3 ethos and/or have strategic synergies with our protocols and community.
After just a couple weeks on the job, Kelly has already implemented new treasury strategies at Origin. In turbulent market times, it’s essential that protocols de-risk their exposure to violent downside price action. To that end, Kelly is managing our portfolio exposure between fiat (USD), stablecoins, and large-cap cryptocurrencies. He has begun writing and buying options at different strike prices and tenors to manage our risk while earning yield. He will also be implementing delta-neutral high-yield strategies to grow the treasury while minimizing market risk.
Kelly has been a member of the crypto community since the beginning, having read the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2011 and gradually increasing his exposure over time. In the last market cycle, beyond being one of the first checks into Origin, he was quick to invest in Filecoin and Tezos. Today, he is a very active participant in DeFi protocols such as Compound, Curve, Convex, Abracadabra Money; his staking/yield farming experience spans across multiple chains including Ethereum, Avalanche, Solana, Fantom, and Layer 2s (e.g. Arbitrum). Beyond DeFi, Kelly is also an NFT degen. He is an early holder of Azuki, CloneX, MAYC, and many other collections.
I first met Kelly the summer after we both enrolled at Stanford University. In the next four years, we developed a strong friendship across mutual interests of investing, understanding the macro markets, and entrepreneurship. After college, Kelly honed his investment expertise in several industries. First, he was an investment banker at Jefferies covering technology companies. At Upfront Ventures, he helped lead multiple investments, including several deals at the forefront of the creator economy. Between his venture and angel deals, Kelly has invested in over 100 companies and seen hundreds more. Later, Kelly scratched his entrepreneurial itch by co-founding, scaling, and successfully selling his own consumer e-commerce company.
I’m extremely excited to be partnering with Kelly to raise the Origin Foundation’s capital reserves, so that we can most effectively deploy our resources to the benefits of our token holders and broader community.
Learn more about Origin
Origin Dollar is 100% collateralized by USDT, USDC, and DAI.
UST and Terra (LUNA) crashed this past week triggering a cascade of liquidations and fear throughout crypto markets. People have asked if Origin Dollar (OUSD) could crash in a similar way, and the answer is a resounding no.
There was never any collateral backing UST. Minting new UST requires LUNA to be purchased and burned, which reduces the supply of LUNA and drives its price upwards. To redeem UST, LUNA is created and sold. This reduces the price of LUNA, which also means that the next redeem of UST will have to create even more LUNA per UST, which will further accelerate the price downwards. The mint/redeem mechanism that drives prices up when things are good for UST also rapidly drives the price to near zero when there is a potential reduction in future UST supply.
In contrast, OUSD is designed to be fully backed, all the time. To mint OUSD, you must put in an equivalent dollar value of stablecoins (USDC, USDT, or DAI), and then these stablecoins stay in OUSD until it is redeemed. OUSD is backed by these stablecoins, and this remains true even during a supply reduction.
UST’s “APY” was creating more UST out of the air. Just a number going up. And each dollar of this created money increased the likelihood of a death spiral.
OUSD’s yield is earned by providing liquidity to AAVE, Compound, and Curve. These earnings, which result from interest, trading fees, and farming reward tokens, are then distributed to all OUSD holders as a balance increase every day. OUSD remains backed 100% at all times.
In short, UST required everyone to believe that the total supply of UST would continue to go up or the entire system would death spiral.
OUSD requires no belief in OUSD. Anyone can redeem OUSD at any time for funds that are already there. Those who held OUSD through last week have not suffered any losses, and have, in fact, gained a high double-digit APY from the market volatility.
As a team, we are building for the long term — for up markets and for down markets. OUSD is designed with the same goal in mind.
Learn more about Origin:
Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and the broader community. Welcome to the April 2022 edition. We are eager to hear feedback and suggestions from our community.
April was full of exciting developments at Origin. From new faces joining the team to adding more utility for our token offerings, Origin continues to be at the forefront of DeFi and NFTs. This month, much of the focus was centered around our commitment to create a more concise narrative for token holders, where a new governance proposal was passed to bring more value to the current Origin Token (OGN) staking participants.
Implementing this decision will further incentivize OGN stakers by upgrading the current staking rewards to now include the distribution of the revenue generated from our NFT platform, Origin Story. This exciting development further ties both our DeFi and NFT products together to increase the value that the Origin ecosystem provides to our most dedicated stakeholders.
Origin Story continues to be the platform of choice for creators who offer sales in both open-edition and auction formats as well as for launching PFP generative-style collections. In April, we launched the second of these PFP collections, Praise Pals, on Story. This new vertical demonstrates a more comprehensive set of utilities that creators have expressed immense interest in.
Although Story is better known as the record-breaking NFT platform for celebrities and musicians, we have recently begun to open the platform up to a broader audience. We recently announced our entry into GameFi with a play-to-earn (P2E) NFT game called Blades of Valor. This is another exciting initiative as beginning to incorporate GameFi NFTs onto the platform will open the door to expanding the accessibility of different types of NFT-based utilities available on Origin Story.
The first round of the Blades of Valor mint on our platform will allow you to acquire these interactive NFTs that serve as your character inside an immersive arena fighting experience. Make sure that you have the best chance of acquiring your BoV NFT by joining the Discord.
Origin Dollar (OUSD) continued to gain wider usage among exchanges and was listed this month on the popular exchange Gate.io. Origin Token also received a new listing on the widely used South Korean exchange, Bithumb. Bithumb now offers its users both OGN/KRW and OGN/BTC trading pairs. Our vision for OUSD is a ubiquitous stablecoin that will be accepted everywhere as a payment alternative with more benefits than one’s native currency. These two exchange listings mark an essential step toward the vision of making both OUSD and OGN more accessible to everyone.
OGN’s circulating supply is 483,774,386. The circulating supply number includes the tens of millions of OGN staked in our staking program, reducing the actual float further. There are 35,722,012OGN currently staked. The majority of these tokens are staked for a year. This is a very strong signal that OGN holders believe in the future of OGN. You can see all of this information on our token dashboard.
Origin’s community continues to grow as the project’s scope expands, and with each new vertical that we take on, we begin to welcome new groups of users to our community. Blades of Valor has attracted many GameFi enthusiasts to participate as new members of the Origin community. Whether this is your first time hearing about the project or you have been with us for quite some time, we are thrilled to have you on board.
Origin’s Co-Founders have been busy going out into the community to spread the word about the benefits of our platform. Josh Fraser and Evgeny Gokhberg from Re7Capital sat down to discuss the current state of stablecoin farming in 2022 and why firms like Re7Capital are choosing to hold OUSD as one of their primary earning strategies.
Matthew Liu also visited with Mike Townsend on the Around The Coin podcast to break down the progression of the Origin ecosystem and our vision of bringing DeFi and NFTs to the masses.
We also want to take a moment to acknowledge a new chapter for Origin as our Head of Community, Max Unger, will be leaving the project as a core-team member. Max has been working with Origin for the past two years and has contributed immensely to the project’s growth, awareness within the broader industry, and helped solidify and promote the community’s cultural values. Max has made a positive impact during his time with Origin, and although he will be stepping down from his position, he will remain an active investor and friend to the community. We are grateful to Max for his years of service to our team, investors, and the community at large and wish him the best in where life leads him next.
I am, however, excited to announce that I will be taking over the role of Head of Community. Max and I have worked closely together on community and marketing initiatives for the duration of his time with the company and I am eager to return to my roots as a community builder during this important time of growth at Origin.
We are hiring a Finance & Operations Manager, Business Development Representatives, an NFT Analyst, multiple Full-stack Engineers, a Senior Growth / Marketing Engineer, and multiple Senior Solidity Engineers. Check out our job postings, and come join us or refer your friends!
Learn more about Origin:
We’re adding a world-class product, business strategy, and global operations leader to the Origin executive team. The entire team is ecstatic that Linus Chung (Twitter, LinkedIn) is going to take on the reins as VP of Product. Linus’s primary mandate is to scale Origin Story to be the NFT platform of choice for creators worldwide and to ensure OGN delivers enhanced utility and tokenomics to holders.
Linus’s first initiative is launching our new OGN staking program, recently approved in our decentralized governance vote, that will accrue Story platform fees directly to OGN stakers. Linus will lead the expansion of Story’s platform to branded creator marketplaces, secondary trading, and other exciting new product features. Beyond building a world-class team of product managers, designers, and engineers, he will also work closely with me to build a business development organization that can build long-lasting partnerships with leading brands, gaming/metaverse companies, native NFT artists, and celebrities/influencers alike.
Linus is a product visionary and leader with an exemplary track record of scaling products and businesses. He’s taken initially modest user bases and revenues and scaled them 2–10x in multiple instances, and has built products used and loved by millions worldwide. He’s helped multiple organizations scale from early stages through successful IPOs (Coinbase, Pinterest) and also built an international joint venture (LinkedIn China) from the ground up.
Most recently, Linus was an executive at Coinbase, serving as Director of Product. While at Coinbase, he held many product leadership positions, including Head of Risk, Head of Growth, and Director of Product for payments. As Head of Growth, Linus led Coinbase’s global customer growth, growth marketing, and international expansion. Under his leadership, Coinbase expanded to 100+ countries, and its customer base grew from 25M to 50M+ in two short years. He also managed the teams that built and scaled some of Coinbase’s fastest-growing products, including Coinbase Earn, Coinbase Card, Coinbase Pay, crypto payroll, gifting, peer-to-peer payments, and international transfers.
Prior to Coinbase, Linus also served in senior product roles at iconic companies Pinterest and Tesla. At Pinterest, Linus led a cross-functional team of 40+ people that doubled active users to over 200M.
Beyond product, Linus also has extensive experience in business development, corporate development, and global operations. He was a founding member of LinkedIn China, where he led the establishment of the joint venture and served as head of both sales and corporate development. He was essential in bringing a major US Internet company to the Chinese market, one of the most complex markets for foreign technology companies to enter and operate.
Perhaps even more important than his decorated experience is Linus’s deep passion for Web3 and NFTs. Linus was an early investor in Origin, participating in our fundraise as an angel investor in 2018. Over the last year, he’s become extremely passionate about NFTs as a transformative medium. His favorite in his collection: Bored Ape #1418,
Linus has deep empathy for both NFT collectors and creators alike, having experienced ups and downs being a crypto degen. He understands tokenomics, Web3 user experiences, and the power of incentives to grow user bases and protocol revenue.
I’m especially looking forward to this new working relationship and partnership with Linus because we’ve known each other for 20 years and have always been looking for the right opportunity to build together. Linus and I first met as Stanford students. Throughout the years we’ve been close friends, housemates, confidantes, and co-investors, but this is the first time that we will be able to work together on a daily basis. I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Linus to the Origin family with the full confidence that he will 10x our business like he has so many others in the past.
Linus and I as young Apes
If you want to work with 10x product, design, engineering, and BD talent, please apply for our open roles and send us a message on our Discord or Twitter.
Learn more about Origin
I’m thrilled to announce that Chris Jacobs has joined the Origin engineering team. Chris brings a wealth of experience in front-end engineering.
Chris was referred to us by Ed Spencer and we were expecting a high-caliber engineer. We were not disappointed! As part of the interview process, Chris worked on a project to add support for 3D models (GLB and glTF files) to the NFTs that the Story platform can mint. We were impressed with Chris’ speed of execution, and his high-quality code that was well commented on and thoroughly unit tested. He clearly met our high hiring bar.
Some of Chris’ favorite technologies to work with are React, and Node.js — which we both use extensively both in the codebase of OUSD (our DeFi product) and Story (our NFT platform). He is also a strong advocate for TypeScript to increase long-term maintainability, velocity, and overall quality when working on a complex application. Not surprisingly, soon after he joined our team Chris took the initiative to start experimenting with how we could gradually transition some of our codebase from JS to TypeScript.
Example of a 3D model being uploaded to story.xyz
Chris grew up in a small town in Connecticut. Fascinated with computers at a young age. He would play on his father’s commodore 64, old business computers, and mac classic prior to having his own PC. He first got interested in coding by modding his favorite video games like Total Annihilation and Quake II.
After studying computer science Chris later moved to Silicon Valley and started a position as an application developer for OCZ Storage Solutions (later acquired by Toshiba) where he worked with technologies such as .NET, SQL, JavaScript, Java, and later Node.js, Python, and single-page web applications. At Toshiba, he managed a team of 5 to create the manufacturing test workflow for enterprise-grade SSDs which were manufactured in Taiwan. After Toshiba, he moved to Storcentric as a UI Architect where he fell in love with TypeScript while building NAS and DAS management tooling. He later moved to Palo Alto Networks as a Principal Engineer working with React and TypeScript to create interactive applications for security researchers and PANW customers.
Chris and his family hiking by the coast
Outside of work, Chris enjoys learning about history and how the events of the past have shaped the world into what it is today. He loves going for hikes, visiting the coast, and exploring life with his wife and 3 children. He also codes for fun during his spare time where he creates simple games, interactive simulations, and experiments with neural networks. Check out his particle simulator (and the code here). He has been a PC gamer since his youth and he still enjoys playing video games as an adult. His current games of choice are League of Legends: Wild Rift, Hearts of Iron IV, and MechWarrior Online.
Please join me in welcoming Chris to the Origin engineering team!
Learn more about Origin:
Origin’s NFT Launchpad is entering a new chapter and is opening up to creators around the world as Origin Story (story.xyz). We envision our platform being the place where brands and artists will tell their most authentic stories via the exciting new medium of NFTs.
Since our $11.7M record-setting NFT launch with acclaimed musician and producer 3LAU, we’ve been inundated by thousands of requests from creators across dozens of verticals that want to launch their NFT sales on Origin. In the last few months, we’ve selectively worked with top NFT artists like Trevor Jones, Alotta Money, Ali Sabet, and Don Diablo as well as mainstream icons like Paris Hilton, George Lopez, and Jake Paul. Origin’s NFT platform powered the most successful viral video NFT auction to date with Charlie Bit My Finger and shattered the numbers for the most successful whiskey cask sale at $2.3M, over four times higher than the previous record.
While we have been able to work with many household names and set numerous records, we’ve never wanted to be a in position to decide whether creators are able to run NFT sales or not. Origin doesn’t want to be the gatekeeper that determines whether an up-and-coming NFT artist or aspiring musician can use NFT technology to engage with their fans. Rather, we want to bring NFTs to the mainstream, tackling opportunities like powering the metaverse, disrupting high-end luxury industries, and enabling NFT gaming marketplaces.
To accrue value towards OGN in a massive way, we will exponentially increase the number of NFT sales that happen on the platform. We will also be revealing new OGN utility on the platform.
Today, we are one step closer to democratizing NFT creation and sales with the launch of Origin Story. Starting today, artists, musicians, influencers, athletes, filmmakers, and even casual hobbyists can sign up and join our waiting list. We’ll begin onboarding dozens of new creators each week with the goal of completely opening the platform to the public by the end of the year. These creators will be using the same battle-tested technology and product offering that has generated tens of millions of sales for the aforementioned celebrities as well as brands like Rolling Stone, West Coast Customs, and Inspiration4/SpaceX.
It’s time to scale and let creators sell NFTs on their own terms.
Origin Story offers creators many differentiated features and a streamlined, easy user experience that enables both new and experienced creators to successfully sell NFTs to their audiences.
Creators are able to create their very own NFT storefronts with Origin Story. This enables creators to tell their stories and engage with their audiences in the most direct and genuine ways possible. From a platform perspective, Origin is able to host many simultaneous NFT sales concurrently rather than being limited to the number of sales that can fit in tightly-controlled drop calendars. Over time, we anticipate powering hundreds or even thousands of NFT sales on a daily basis.
We have always been inspired by the Shopify and Squarespace models that give sellers the ability to sell on their own storefronts. These services give sellers fine-tuned control, customization abilities, and powerful third-party apps. Sellers can sell on their own terms. In the same way, we believe NFT artists shouldn’t be constrained to existing gated platforms that act as gatekeepers. NFT creation and selling should be democratized and open to all.
Our creator onboarding starts with launching a custom storefront. The design can be tailored to reflect the creator’s own unique style.
It’s time to shake things up in the world of NFTs. While many competing platforms charge 15% or more to host primary sales, we empower creators to own a stake in the entire Origin platform by selling on Story with our free option.
Instead of taking a 15% commission that we pocket, creators can opt for a 15% OGN fee refund instead. Anytime an NFT purchase occurs, 15% of the sale proceeds are automatically swapped for OGN (bought on the open market) and locked for six months. After the end of the lock-up period, creators are able to freely withdraw.
We believe that the creators using Origin Story should have vested interests in the platform. This gives them incentives to refer additional creators to Origin, give valuable feedback so that we can improve the product, and evangelize Origin to their existing audiences. We can’t think of a better way to mobilize thousands of influencers, artists, musicians, athletes, and other public figures to spread the Origin gospel than to ensure that they have stakes in the network.
We anticipate that millions of OGN will be removed from circulation as Origin Story scales to thousands of creators running successful sales on our platform. This innovative pricing model will reduce our circulating supply in a similar manner as our current staking offering. However, rather than offering additional OGN incentives that would increase circulating supply, we’re offering waived fees instead.
For creators who don’t want to opt into the OGN option, we will charge a competitive and creator-friendly commission of 7.5% that is half the prevailing market rate on other drop sites. In this situation, the creator will keep 92.5% of sales proceeds (less minting and credit card processing costs), while the remainder is earned by the platform. Over the next couple of months, we will aggressively evaluate and determine the best way to accrue value to OGN holders with this platform revenue. Possibilities include directly distributing dividends to OGN stakers and running frequent and automated OGN buybacks. As we fine-tune our value accrual model, we will be bringing these options to OGN holders for a governance vote.
Time and time again, we’ve heard that secondary royalties are of primary importance to many creators. On Origin Story, creators will get their very own marketplaces that are hosted on their custom storefronts. This enables NFT sellers that are more sensitive to their brand images to control their secondary experiences.
At the same time, we believe in open protocols and standards. NFTs can and should be sold on secondary marketplaces like OpenSea. To support royalties across platforms, NFT contracts deployed by creators through Origin Story include contract metadata that passes royalty information to OpenSea and, in the future, other marketplaces. This ensures that creators are paid for secondary royalties across the NFT ecosystem.
At launch, secondary royalties will be set at 10%, with 7.5% going to the creator and 2.5% going to Origin. Over time, we expect to allow creators to calibrate their desired royalty percentage. Revenues generated will eventually accrue to OGN holders in one of the aforementioned models.
We believe creator provenance is extremely important. Collectors need to be able to confirm that the NFTs they purchase are in fact minted from smart contracts that creators have deployed.
With today’s upgrade to the platform, each creator will deploy their smart contracts themselves when they are ready to sell, ensuring that provenance is always preserved.
To reduce friction for creators that are getting started with the platform, we won’t require creators to pre-mint NFTs that have not yet been purchased. Rather, NFTs are minted as they are sold in a just-in-time fashion. We intentionally made this design decision so that creators don’t have to deal with the inventory risk of paying for the minting costs of NFTs that may or may not sell.
At launch, creators will be able to sell NFTs in three of the most popular formats:
1 of 1 auctions have become the standard for scarce pieces of art. Auctions can start and end according to the auction duration that is set by the creator. Auctions automatically extend when bids are placed in the final 5 minutes to give everyone a fair opportunity to place a winning bid.
Limited editions are fixed in quantity. They can be sold as evergreen sales or as timed sales. In evergreen sales, NFTs are listed in perpetuity until they sell out. This format is particularly useful for up and coming creators that are just starting to grow their collector bases. In contrast, timed sales have a beginning and closing time.
Open editions have fixed beginning and closing times like auctions. These are designed to be flash sales, usually of fairly short duration. The exact edition count will match the number of purchases that happen in the time window. These sales enable creators to aggregate demand in short time windows. Open editions are ideal for selling lower-priced NFTs that can later serve as access tokens to other sales, content, and other gated features.
Over time, we expect to introduce a multitude of new innovative sales mechanics that creators can employ, including more exotic auction formats.
Origin Story currently supports sales denominated in ETH and USD with the intention of supporting other currencies in the near future. Creators can price their NFTs in either currency and also choose their supported payment methods. For USD-denominated sales, the platform enables creators to accept credit card payments provided that they pass approvals by our payment processing partner, Stripe.
Ethereum is the gold standard in NFTs, so it is very important that the platform caters to established, web3-enabled NFT purchasers. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we chose to prioritize credit card payments to allow creators to reach their mainstream fans. As the NFT market matures, we have a strong thesis that established personalities like athletes, musicians, actors, politicians, and businesses will bring in mainstream users, many of whom are new to crypto. We hope that Origin Story will be the marketplace to power many users’ first interactions with NFTs and the broader crypto ecosystem.
This is just the beginning of an exciting next chapter for Origin Story as the upgrade to our original NFT Launchpad. We will be focusing on several core themes as we continue to refine and scale the product and our customer base.
First, we will be keenly focused on driving value to OGN as we launch many more sales which will either generate protocol revenue or incentivize OGN lock-ups. We will also be adding new OGN use cases. For example, as we roll out new premium features, some or all of them will require creators to stake or use OGN as the native currency. In addition, we are very motivated to continue simplifying user experiences for both sellers and buyers, allowing us to target more and more mainstream users, while also allowing for more customization, flexibility, and novel experiences for creators. We expect NFTs to act as access tokens that can unlock experiences for collectors such as private communities (e.g. Discord and Telegram), premium content, or entry into future sales/raffles. Expect to see us roll out more themes, sales mechanics, and payment methods. In addition, we will be developing features to target the Metaverse, gaming, and generative art categories over time. We also expect that NFT growth will be multi-chain, and hope to support numerous layer one and layer two chains over time. Once we have reached sufficient scale, we anticipate building a user-friendly aggregator marketplace for secondary sales and pursuing developer APIs that empower developers and top-tier brands to create truly custom experiences. Platform fees generated by these new feature sets will all accrue value to OGN holders.
We built the original NFT Launchpad to enable top creators to launch their NFT drops. However, we’ve realized that building an enduring, ever-evolving platform that isn’t just focused on individual NFT drops that start and end is much more impactful. Instead, we believe our platform and NFT technology as a whole enables creators to tell their stories in a much more powerful, direct-to-fan way. These stories are what will drive the new web3 creator economy forward.
Similarly, we don’t see basic NFT sales as the only and last piece of what we want to do at Origin. We plan to continuously iterate and upgrade our products so that NFTs have far-reaching and diverse utility. NFTs will power the Metaverse revolution that we are just beginning to see. We also expect NFTs as access and social tokens to become huge categories. We see the potential of NFT ticketing and Play-to-Earn gaming in revolutionizing multi-billion dollar industries. We believe NFTs will be an integral part of tracking ownership and provenance of high-end physical goods (e.g. tomorrow’s StockX) and creating new ways for creators and super fans to interact (e.g. tomorrow’s Patreon).
NFTs are a fundamental building block to web3 just like HTML and basic webpages were just the first building blocks in web1 and web2. From HTML as a basic building block of the early Internet, we saw entire new categories of markets emerge, like blogging, e-commerce, social networking, and more. The story of what we are building at Origin and what we hope to achieve, whether that’s disrupting massive existing industries or creating brand new markets that were never before possible, is also in the beginning chapters.
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