Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the July 2020 edition. We are eager to hear feedback and suggestions from our community. Please email [email protected] for support requests and [email protected] for general inquiries/comments.
We’re really excited to recap that Origin’s Dshop platform is now open for business. Merchants anywhere in the world can now use our self-serve solution to launch their own decentralized stores. We expect hundreds of merchant partners to use Dshop in the coming months.
In addition, one of our big focuses in July was to bring increased transparency to OGN’s token economics.
We’ve updated the OGN token dashboard with new data. Over 40M OGN has been voluntarily locked up by the team, investors, and others.
The two co-founders have pledged not to sell any tokens for at least the rest of 2020. We have sold 0 OGN to date.
We’ve done our best to minimize circulating supply increases. Current circulating supply is at 81.0M.
We also announced the deepening of our relationship with Coinbase. We’re excited to be listed in Coinbase Custody and look forward to working closely together in the future.
Finally, as DeFi continues to gain momentum, both we and our community have bolstered up OGN’s liquidity on platforms like Uniswap, Kyber, and Balancer. At Origin, we are very optimistic about the future of DeFi. We’re requesting that our token holders participate in this disruptive movement by adding liquidity to our DeFi pools. This is also a great way to earn trading fees.
Dshop is now self-serve
Yesterday we launched the first public version of the Dshop platform. This initiative is the first in a series of launches that we anticipate will increase the number of Dshop instances by several orders of magnitude.
Previously, Dshops were all manually configured and deployed by our engineering team. Each time we signed a new partnership, we had to go through this time-consuming process.
Now, Dshop is taking sign ups from any merchants that want to participate in the decentralized commerce movement. Sign up now to launch your decentralized store in less than a day.
We’ve taken the past few months to collect early feedback from our earliest partners, and are excited to further refine the platform going forward. Our next milestone is to have 100 functional Dshops deployed, followed by 1,000, and 10,000 beyond that.
This month, we decided to sunset the Origin Deals experiment. We were delighted that our early test users were really engaged with the product and also optimistic about the viability of the business as Origin Deals was running at breakeven. However, as we mapped out the future of the product we realized it didn’t fit with our our goal of building a powerful and flexible software platform that enables other developers to build applications. To make Origin Deals successful in the long-run, we’d need to instead focus on operations, fulfillment, and customer service. This isn’t in our team’s DNA, and continuing to push forward in this direction would change the trajectory of the project.
Finally, as we surveyed the blockchain landscape, we’ve realized that there are other higher-impact opportunities that we’re interested in pursuing. We’re reallocating our resources to build a new exciting product that will be announced later this quarter.
The decision to shut down Origin Deals does not impact our core business or change our mission to enable peer-to-peer commerce on the blockchain. As the aggregate amount of OGN locked up in Origin Deals is still quite small (there were only a couple hundred users in the Beta), we do not anticipate any material impact to our circulating supply.
At Origin, we’ve always prided ourselves on operating in a highly public and transparent fashion. We’ve mentioned in the past that we’re actively working on improving our token economics as well.
This month, we will end the month with just over 81M tokens circulating. The originally projected supply was 117M OGN. Current circulating supply is therefore 30.8% lower than initially modeled.
We’re constantly working on ways to incentivize long-term believers and holders of OGN. To lead by example, Josh and I have committed to not selling any OGN until at least 2021. Currently, neither one of us has sold a single token.
Josh details our rationale in this public commitment to our investors and community. We’re not doing this simply to be benevolent. As the two co-founders, we both very much believe that the best is yet to come. We’re well on our way to building a highly impactful technology platform, but we also recognize that the greatest value creation and capture will happen later in Origin’s lifespan.
Following suit, other team members and many of our top investors have also voluntarily locked up OGN for 1-year terms. Cumulatively, there are over 40M tokens locked up today.
We’ve also added updated metrics to the OGN token dashboard. For example, you can now easily see the total number of unique wallets that have used our smart contracts. You’ll also see that we’ve intentionally distributed ownership of our tokens amongst our private sale investors so that no one party has too much control.
We were pleased to announce that OGN is supported in Coinbase Custody. Coinbase Custody is the premier custody solution that global institutions trust. Coinbase has previously posted that OGN is on the list of new assets being considered for listing on Coinbase’s exchange products.
As decentralized liquidity pools and exchanges gain traction, we’ve been eager to increase the number of platforms that support OGN. We’ve also been working hard to make sure the decentralized platforms have adequate liquidity to support users that prefer these non-custodial solutions.
As mentioned above, we’d be very appreciative towards community members that help by adding liquidity to the various DeFi pools. You can do this by going to Uniswap, Kyber, and Balancer. In turn, you’ll get your share of trading fees as more and more traders use these DeFi protocols.
This month, we brought on Amy Hockings as our first full-time customer support hire. Amy had already been working with us as a community manager for almost the entirety of Origin’s existence, and both sides were excited to move forward with a new and expanded role.
In partnership with Solana, Cosmos, and other key blockchain industry leaders, our Community Manager Moises has launched educational-focused virtual seminars for our Spanish-speaking community. We are thrilled for this opportunity to educate users about different use cases of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. This is a significant step towards entering the crypto ecosystem in Latin America and serving regions where our technology can provide improved financial access. For more details, check out this blog post.
To celebrate our token listing on Huobi, we launched our Origin Holder Airdrop campaign earlier this month. The first round ends on July 31st (GMT +8) and the second round starts on August 1st (GMT +8). For each round, 250k OGN will be rewarded to OGN holders to OGN holders based on the amount of OGN they are holding. For more details, visit our website.
Lastly, our first global ambassador program, Origin Genesis is here. We are looking for 10 dedicated Originators who will work closely with our community team and help us spread our mission. Sign up here today!
August will be an eventful month for us. Look forward to several exciting updates in the next few weeks.
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