Every month, the Origin team publishes an update to our token holders and the broader community. We hope you enjoy our January 2023 edition.
January featured major updates to Origin Story, DAO adoption for OUSD, and experimental new products stemming from our inaugural innovation week.
From Polygon support on Story marketplaces to new partnerships for OUSD, we’ve hit the ground running in 2023. Story’s broad feature expansion this month is in preparation for the new marketplace partners joining us in Q1, but you’ll need to stay tuned for February’s token holder update for the scoop on that.
To expand our toolset for Story and OUSD, Origin kicked off the new year with innovation week: a 5-day hackathon where our team built over a dozen new prototypes. We’ve publicly launched our NFT Compare tool, one of the many products born out of innovation week. Excitingly, we’ve garnered partner interest from FairTix, another innovation week product that allows for fair distributions of tickets via community auctions and lotteries. Aside from data analytics and ticketing, we’re excited for our new prototypes pertaining to NFT wash trading, no-loss stablecoin lotteries, and an NFT buy button for external sites.
As for all that happened this month, here’s a short list of January 2023’s highlights. We’ll dive deeper into these developments in each respective section.
In January:
Here’s the scoop on our January 2023 highlights.
Origin Story 💜 Polygon
As we prepare to onboard more strategic marketplace partners to Origin Story, we’ve improved the platform’s feature set to support new use cases for NFTs across various industries. In order to accrue the most value to OGN holders, we believe casting a wide net––far beyond profile picture collections––lays the groundwork for capturing new market share. Excitingly, we’re seeing real estate platforms, entertainment companies, and fashion brands enter web3 at breakneck speeds.
We’ve built Story with an emphasis on inclusivity and frictionless transactions––it’s clear to us that leveraging Ethereum scaling technologies is necessary to reach our goal of onboarding the next 100 million users to crypto. This month, we’ve added support for Polygon on Story marketplaces, allowing existing and future partners to add their Polygon NFT collections to Origin Story. As many of our existing partners already use Polygon for secondary collections, adding this support will create a more holistic experience on our white label marketplaces.
Polygon supports Reddit, Meta, Disney, Stripe, and many other industry behemoths in their web3 endeavors. We expect more brands to launch their web3 strategy on Polygon, which is why we’ve added the network on Story marketplaces. As non-fungible tokens enter the mainstream, more networks will be necessary to support broad use cases––and we’re prepared to support them.
In order to provide unique utility for NFT collectors directly from Origin Story, we’ve added token-gated access across our partner marketplaces. We first tested this feature with Roofstock onChain, adding functionality for KYC through soulbound token-gated access. After this successful launch, it became clear our partners can benefit from integrating their holder-only benefits within our white label marketplaces.
We were Swift to make a ticketing platform, dove deeper into NFT analytics, and made purchasing NFTs even easier.
Since day one, our branded marketplaces have served users with advanced analytics, aggregating data across all major NFT platforms. Alongside data aggregation, Story supports community analytics, showing the largest and most influential holders of each collection. We’re excited to announce our latest tool: NFT Compare. NFT Compare lets collectors view side-by-side data to compare collection volumes, prices, and sales. Uniquely, NFT Compare allows users to easily view holder overlap between collections, allowing investors to make more informed decisions on NFT purchases.
Origin creates the infrastructure necessary for collectors, real-estate investors, music fans, and beyond to venture into web3. We continually look for new ways to solve pain points for our diverse partners and their communities. By broadening our NFT toolset, our partners are enabled to find ways to utilize tokenization in never-before-seen ways.
Our NFT Compare tool was one of the many products developed during innovation week. During the span of just 5 days, our team created an NFT ticketing platform, a wash trading identifier, and several other prototypes in the realm of NFTs and DeFi.
Our NFT ticketing platform FairTix has already received interest from creators, and we’re scheduling demos for prospective partners to showcase the prototype’s unique offering. FairTix allows artists and creators to host community auctions and lotteries, improving the way tickets are sold and eliminating bots from scalping tickets from loyal fans.
Inline with our analytics platform, Rinse was developed during innovation week to paint a clear picture of legitimate NFT trading. Rinse identifies wash traded NFTs, allowing prospective buyers to view which NFTs, collections, and wallets engage in wash trading.
Lastly, our NFT buy button offers our partners a way to highlight NFTs listed for sale and grants users the ability to acquire NFTs directly from partner websites. Partner collections with NFT galleries can integrate the buy button within them, adding listing data and purchase capabilities without needing to visit an NFT marketplace.
Get your popcorn out. OUSD can now be leveraged up to 10x via Archimedes Finance.
Leveraging the largest DeFi apps, self-custody, and instant liquidity, Origin Dollar is the glaringly clear solution for DAO treasury management. This month, PopcornDAO passed PIP-14 to add over $2 million of OUSD to its treasury. Holding OUSD allows Popcorn to earn passive yield through Aave, Compound, Curve, Convex, and Morpho without giving up custody of its assets.
While our long-term goal remains to create a ubiquitous yield-bearing stablecoin for retail and institutional users, Origin’s focus on DAO integrations has aided in growing Origin Dollar’s TVL at a time when new retail interest in digital assets remains low.
We also saw increased institutional support for OUSD this month. Both Qredo and Fireblocks will now support Origin Dollar and its yield-generating functions. Fireblocks is the leading provider for institutional digital asset custody, securing the transfer of over $3 trillion of digital assets. Similarly, Qredo is a decentralized custody solution that provides instant cross-chain settlement for traders and money managers.
Also this month, Origin submitted an Aave Ethereum V3 proposal to add support for Origin Dollar on Aave’s latest Ethereum mainnet iteration. Aave V3 support will open up new liquidity for OUSD holders and give investors the opportunity to lend and borrow OUSD through Aave V3.
We firmly believe that DeFi and NFTs reach their greatest potential when used as money legos. This month, Origin Dollar solidified its partnership with Archimedes Finance. OUSD holders will be able to access up to 10x leverage through Archimedes, allowing them to boost their Origin Dollar yield. Due to the ability to customize leverage on Archimedes, all positions are represented as NFTs. Users can redeem the NFTs for their underlying collateral or trade these NFTs on secondary marketplaces.
Origin Dollar is the first stablecoin to launch with Archimedes. As such, we expect leverage-seeking users to join the OUSD ecosystem. This bodes well for OGV, as the protocol will capture new revenue streams through the Origin Dollar yield accrued on Archimedes Finance. This is the first instance of a leveraged yield-bearing stablecoin, allowing for greater capital efficiency and impressive yield generation. Due to Origin Dollar’s stable price, the risk of liquidation is much lower than traditional leverage on digital assets.
Our Origin Dollar Governance (OGV) dashboard also got an overhaul this month. Users can now view OGV analytics on ousd.com. The new OGV dashboard highlights OGV price action, staking APYs (currently over 54%), market capitalization, and supply metrics. In line with our commitment to transparency, users can also see OGV allocations on our analytics dashboard.
In December, OGV governance passed a new strategy to onboard the LUSD Convex Strategy to Origin Dollar. The strategy has run smoothly since launch, generating compelling yield in tandem with our other liquidity provision and lending strategies. Congruent with our values of transparency and security, we’ve published an in-depth risk assessment on the LUSD Convex strategy.
OGN Season 2 staking will be locked soon. OGV staking now yields 54.33% variable APY.
As a refresher, all platform revenue from Origin Story is sent to the OGN staking pool and is distributed proportionally to those who stake OGN. While there is still over a month left for Season 2, staking will be locked on February 6th. Staked OGN will continue to accrue rewards until March 8th, when rewards become claimable in the form of ether and OGN. OGN Season 3 staking will commence directly after Season 2 ends––be sure to stake your tokens at the beginning of Season 3 to accrue the maximum rewards for the season.
With over 10% of OGN staked in Season 2, circulating supply is significantly reduced. Moreover, OGN emissions are running behind schedule, meaning the token is less inflationary than what was initially modeled. We do not anticipate any near-term catalysts to impact our token emissions, so we expect to continue pacing behind schedule in this regard.
Inline with the market resurgence this month, OGN has appreciated 42% month-to-date. While token appreciation is good for everyone, we remain focused on expanding Origin’s fundamental value through new marketplace partnerships and strategic value accrual functions for OGN. Aside from profile picture collections, our current partnership focus includes titans in the real estate, fashion, and entertainment industries.
The recent market resurgence comes at a time when the FED is signaling tapering rate hikes, and investors are reacting by becoming more risk-on. This has a compound effect for Origin Dollar and Origin Dollar Governance (OGV). DeFi yields are expected to increase in a risk-on environment. OUSD would then earn higher DeFi yields while OGV holders earn more protocol revenue.
Origin Dollar Governance (OGV) is the value accrual and governance token for OUSD. Over 78% of OGV is currently staked, and those who stake are earning 54.3% APY on their tokens. Origin Dollar takes 10% of the yield earned through its collateral and distributes this to OGV stakers––and Origin Dollar recently surpassed $4M in protocol revenue!
We had a lot to shout about in January, and some of it may have gotten lost on your Twitter feed. To stay up to date with everything Origin Protocol, be sure to turn our Tweet notifications on, and check out our blogs on Story.xyz/blog and ousd.com/blog. We regularly post long-form content on OUSD integrations, DAO proposals, and new features for Origin Story. Here are some of our favorite posts you may have missed:
Want to get in touch with us to launch your NFT marketplace? Looking to demo a product we made during innovation week? Hit us up at [email protected] to get in touch with our team!
