There has been some confusion lately about our token release schedule and circulating supply that we’d like to clear up. Specifically, some people have been asking why our circulating supply showed higher on CoinGecko than what was communicated in our Binance report. This discrepancy, unfortunately, led some members of our community to conclude that Origin team members must be selling tokens, increasing sell pressure, and causing a decline in the value of OGN.
First, we’d like to reassure our community that no Origin team members are selling OGN on Binance or any other exchange. There has not been a single token sold by any team member or advisor (including former employees and advisors). 100% of our employees and advisors (both past & present) are currently locked up. We chose to implement this team and advisor lockup to follow best practices from the public equities markets. Just like in an equity IPO, insiders are prohibited from selling. In our case, team members and advisors do not even have access to their vested tokens until 3 months after our Binance listing.
Furthermore, Matt and I, the two co-founders of Origin, have both signed up for brand new 4-year unlock schedules starting from our Binance launch even though we had already vested over 50% of our tokens over the past 2 years. Matt and I will actually be the last people to receive any OGN out of the many stakeholders that have contributed to the creation of the Origin Platform. We believe this is the right way to operate a long-term and mission-focused project. Both Matt and I believe wholeheartedly in our mission and are committed to working on Origin for a very long time.
There were a number of factors that led to our circulating supply showing as higher than it should have on CoinGecko and other websites:
We overfunded the wallets that are used to programmatically distribute tokens to our presale investors. We did this by accident without thinking through the potential consequences to public perception. Since we instructed our investors to give us deposit addresses at Binance if they wanted to trade at the open, this wallet shows hundreds of deposits to Binance. These deposits are all attributable to previous investors, but we understand why people might have questioned what we were doing sending so many tokens to Binance from an Origin owned wallet.
We forgot to tell CoinGecko about a wallet containing OGN allocated for partnerships that should remain untouched for at least 1–2 years. This oversight has since been corrected with CoinGecko.
As required by top exchanges as a best practice to ensure an orderly and liquid market for OGN, we pre-funded our liquidity provider to ensure adequate liquidity. After the initial launch, a large percentage of those tokens were returned to be available for future investor distributions.
To remove any remaining doubts, we have returned all extra tokens to our Foundation Reserves, a multi-sig wallet that owns our ERC-20 contract. This puts our current circulating supply at 2.34%. Note this actually puts us slightly below the 2.38% amount that was modeled out in Origin’s Binance report.
Both CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap now show our correct circulating supply and we expect both sites to show the correct value going forward.
We want to apologize for the confusion we caused. We know our community is counting on us to operate with full transparency, and we’re sorry we gave you any cause to doubt us. Going forward, we will be more careful about making sure our circulating supply matches what we have publicly shared in our Binance report and will communicate any material changes in advance.
On that note, we want to let you know now that we anticipate that our February distributions for Origin Rewards will be slightly higher than predicted and previously communicated in the Binance report. This is due to the overwhelming success of our Holiday Rewards campaign which drove an enormous amount of buzz around our launch. While tens of thousands of people participated in this campaign, the absolute number of tokens as a percentage of our total circulating remains quite small. We also expect this slightly larger distribution (vs. modeled) to be a one-time event associated with our launch.
We’ve heard some criticism from our community for giving away small amounts of OGN to many members of our community. However, creating a widely distributed ownership base is intentional! Don’t forget that the value of OGN is largely derived from the strength of our community. When we founded Origin we promised that we would give our early users a stake in the network. We remain committed to that promise today. We will continue to incentivize as many people as possible to use our platform and share it with their friends. We will also be increasingly careful to ensure no one receives an unfair stake or benefits without contributing meaningful value to the network.
We hope that this post addresses many questions that we have received from the community of late. We look forward to engaging publicly and transparently with our many global supporters. Thank you and look forward to additional updates soon.
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