Welcome to the monthly Origin Token (OGN) holder monthly update. For the past two years, our team has been communicating with our pre-sale token purchasers through confidential monthly investor updates. Now that OGN is freely tradable and widely held by thousands of holders, we are making our monthly updates public to the entire community.
Our overall format is to provide a high-level summary (aka TLDR) followed by deep dives into various topics like product, token economics, and community.
We are eager to hear from our community. Please email [email protected] for support requests, and [email protected] for general inquiries/comments.
The start of the new year has been a particularly eventful month for our team and our community.
Most notably, we became Binance’s first token listing of 2020. This was also the first direct listing of Origin Tokens (OGN) on any exchange.
Coinciding with the enthusiasm for the launch, we reached new highs of 150k MAUs (monthly active users) and 50k DAUs (daily active users) on www.shoporigin.com during launch week.
Our community size also swelled to over 300k members. Our Telegram, Blockfolio Signal, and Twitter have grown to approximately 60k members each.
On the product and technology side, we continued to push forward on our Origin Rewards product.
Again, as a result of OGN’s initial launch, we saw a record number of Rewards monthly participants (50k+).
We expect these numbers to taper off now that our initial listing is over. We are also re-calibrating OGN rewards to ensure that we maintain healthy activity with Origin Rewards while managing our circulating supply carefully to prevent excess tokens from being distributed in the program.
We’ve also removed many fraudulent users from the program, including users that attempted to sign up for Origin Rewards multiple times in an attempt to claim extra OGN.
We believe that the strong interest we’ve seen for Origin Rewards supports our thesis that having a freely tradable token greatly improves the crypto-economic incentives needed to further expand the Origin network.
In the middle of the month, we launched OGN as a payment token on our flagship marketplace app. This will be the first of many applications that support OGN as a medium of exchange between buyers and sellers.
We also made good progress on our decentralized e-commerce store creator this month. Currently, the Origin merchandise store is the first application built on this product, and our next release will enable the creation of many more e-commerce store applications on the Origin Platform.
This has been a strong month for our engineering team, but we did face a few lowlights with our launch, experiencing technical load that brought down our marketplace app on several occasions. Users in China and other international countries also complained that our apps were not always accessible even when they were using VPNs. We’ve been working to stabilize our IPFS instances and deploy bug fixes.
Currently, there are approximately 23.4M OGN tokens circulating which is slightly lower than our 23.8M projected number in the Binance research report on Origin. We recently put out a blog post clarifying some of the confusion around OGN’s circulating supply, which was not properly tracked in the past on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko (both are now up to date).
We want to reiterate that no team members or advisors (both past and present) have sold any tokens to date. The first team unlock will happen in April of 2020. Both Josh and myself, the two co-founders, will not have any tokens unlocked until June of 2020.
As a reminder, you can view an interactive version of our token release schedule on the report from Binance Research.
Our community has doubled in size since the beginning of this month, with strong growth in the strategic regions of China, Korea, and Southeast Asia.
While we were somewhat slower to act than we should have been to the massive swell in our community, we soon course-corrected and have increased our staffing and created several new region and topic-specific Telegram channels to better communicate with valuable members of our community. These official new channels include:
Our community team has also been evangelizing Origin far and wide. Most recently, Anna presented alongside the Binance team in Bali to an overwhelmingly supportive crowd of over 100 people.
Josh and I were also honored to share some of our latest updates on TV with HKB News. This segment was broadcast on Korean television on January 16th. You can also watch the interview online.
We’ve also conducted numerous AMAs in China, Korea, Indonesia and Vietnam, with several being conducted in local languages. These include:
Through the holidays and into mid-January, we ran the Origin 2020 Kickoff social media contest. We rewarded over 100 members of our community with USDT prizes for their creative images, videos, and memes about Origin.
1st Prize Winner: @arayawisnathika (Twitter)
As part of our ongoing testimonial series, Evan Tana, founding general partner at 122 West Ventures made this great video talking about why he invested in Origin as he explained the important role of crypto-economic incentives in bootstrapping the network.
Finally, we wanted to give a special community shoutout to one member of our community that hunted us on Product Hunt and got us listed on BetaList, Mahesh Shrestha.
As always, we are forever grateful for the support that our token holders and broader community have given us.
Look forward to more exciting updates next month.
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