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Every month, the Origin team publishes an update to our token holders and the broader community.
We hope you enjoy our March 2023 edition.
Since 2020, Origin’s focus in the DeFi realm has been to offer the best risk-adjusted yield on stablecoins. With the onset of the highest U.S inflation in 40 years, there’s a clear need for people to gain exposure outside the legacy financial system.
OETH is a new, ether-denominated yield product that we’re excited to bring to DeFi markets. 👀 We’re incredibly excited to unveil more details about the upcoming launch in the next few weeks. We’re currently building in public via our Discord, so you can catch the latest alpha there.
More alpha: OGV will be the value-accrual token for Origin Ether.
Now, let’s talk about how Origin Dollar handled the USDC depeg in March.
Origin’s commitment to security is unmatched––it’s why we’re the quickest team in DeFi to respond to bug reports (via Immunifi). It’s also why Origin Dollar was able to achieve its most profitable month in nearly a year. OUSD APYs thrived during the USDC depeg, reaching an average of over 40% APY during the 2nd week of March.
We built Origin Dollar knowing that stablecoins can be volatile. Thanks to the protocol’s robust security, OUSD remains operational even under the most long-tail conditions. Whenever a Chainlink oracle shows a stablecoin’s price below $0.998, Origin Dollar stops accepting the token as collateral.
In terms of redemptions, OUSD protects the vault by sending proportional amounts of USDC, USDT, and DAI to redeemers, preventing the vault to be drained in the event of a depeg. Upon redemption, OUSD charges a .25% fee that is sent to OUSD holders. Pairing this with profits from pricing protections, Origin Dollar holders came out in the green, earning boosted yield directly to their wallets.
The stablecoin volatility in March further proves Origin Dollar’s commitment to security and robust infrastructure in place to protect user funds.
Before diving into the details, let’s take a look at what Origin Protocol accomplished in March. Origin Story and Origin Dollar made waves with new marketplaces launches, higher APYs, new exchange listings, and governance proposals.
Here’s a birds-eye view of what happened at Origin in March 2023:
As Blur and Opensea compete for dominance at the expense of creators, Origin Story has an opportunity to cement itself as the creator-first marketplace platform for decentralized commerce. As such, OGN holders have passed 2 proposals: a proposal to forgo all marketplace transaction fees until June 1, 2023, and a proposal to subsidize OGN staking over the same timeframe.
In tandem with these proposals, Origin Story’s core team now offers free marketplace set up for a limited time. As creators seek to take back control of their web3 businesses, Origin has received dozens of new inbounds from NFT projects looking for a white label marketplace solution. We believe that now is the time to position Origin Story for growth, rather than short-term revenue.
Eventually, Origin Story aims to become permissionless, so every creator can harness the protocol’s toolset for their own NFT ecosystem.
Last week, Origin Story launched Eternals NFT marketplace. The marketplace has just added support for Omni Guards, the brand’s latest mint that launched on 3/31. We’re also gearing up to launch a marketplace with a 90s viral brand entering the GameFi space––stay tuned on April 4th to learn more.
Origin Story aims to create the most seamless experience for NFT transactions so that everyone can participate in the cryptoeconomy. This is why we partnered with Crossmint to offer credit card purchases earlier this year. This month, Origin Story saw many partners add support for this feature, including 0N1 Force, Karafuru, The Doge Pound, Sad Times, and others.
If you follow Origin Story on Twitter, you may have seen us tease Origin’s Royalties Leaderboard. The leaderboard tracks the top payers of royalties for each collection, gamifying the experience to incentivize holders to support creators. Origin’s Royalties Leaderboard will roll out to partner marketplaces soon, and a corresponding incentive program will launch soon after.
Were you holding OUSD the day it earned 198% APY? It happened last month!
Thanks to Origin Dollar’s security measures and collateral allocations, the stablecoin performed considerably well during the USDC depeg. Holders earned boosted rewards from increased trading, protocol fees, and smart rebalancing. Let’s take a look at what Origin Dollar did to preserve its capital and earn a 13.1% trailing APY over the last 30 days.
First, Origin Dollar’s collateral remained secure during the USDC depeg. As previously mentioned, the Origin Dollar protocol temporarily halts minting OUSD with any stablecoin that falls below $0.998. While there was a proposal to swap out of USDC during the depeg, the proposal was vetoed, as it would have realized losses for OUSD holders.
OUSD holders were generously rewarded for holding the stablecoin through the market volatility. During the week of the USDC depeg, OUSD earned more than 40% APY over the trailing 7-days. Almost unbelievably, the peak day for OUSD APYs peaked above 190%. These sharp increases in rewards have boosted Origin Dollar APYs to average 13% in the month of March.
The Origin Dollar team presented at various conferences this month to spread the word about OUSD. Origin’s co-founder Josh Fraser presented on Origin Dollar Governance at ETHDenver. Taking over the DAO stage, Josh spoke on the vote-escrow token model initially pioneered by Curve Finance, and how Origin Dollar improved upon it. Additionally, Origin Dollar’s Head of BD Andra Nicolau presented at IWB2023 earlier this month, and she wrapped up March by taking over the stage at NFT Miami.
The OGV-ETH Curve pool has boosted APYs, increasing liquidity and trading volume for the token.
OGV liquidity providers on Curve saw a huge boost to OGV rewards this month thanks to increased Curve emissions from the Curve Gauge Controller. The OGV-ETH pool on Curve now offers up to 50% APY for liquidity providers, making it one of the most appealing pools currently available. As such, the OGV-ETH Curve pool has grown in TVL, allowing for more liquidity and increased trading through the AMM.
The 80% of OGV that’s staked for OUSD governance also saw increased protocol revenue in March. As a reminder, the OUSD Protocol takes a 10% fee on Origin Dollar yield, which is then used to buy back OGV and distribute yield to veOGV holders. In March alone, protocol revenue for Origin Dollar nearly surpassed $200,000––OUSD’s highest monthly revenue in nearly a year!
We added 2 to our team this month with a new Full-Stack Engineer and Social Media Manager.
We’re excited to add a new full-stack engineer to Origin’s team this month: Scott Mitchell. Scott joins us with a wealth of engineering experience from working at NASA and PayPal, as well as at high-growth technology startups. While only being with Origin for a few weeks, Scott has led our OUSD analytics revamp, improved Origin’s user experience, and has helped to align our codebase with our underlying application infrastructure.
In the same month, Origin welcomed a familiar face to our core team: Maddie Suppa. Maddie has worked with Origin for nearly a year, wearing hats as a copywriter, community manager, and social media lead. We’re thrilled to have Maddie join us on our core team, where she’ll oversee the growth of all three of our Twitter accounts: Origin Protocol, Origin Story, and OUSD. If you’re in our discord or follow us on other social platforms, you’ll surely see Maddie’s work there too!
As always, we’re on the hunt for top talent and passionate builders in web3. Our team hails from diverse backgrounds scaling iconic tech companies, with many of our team members being serial-entrepreneurs themselves. While we’ve recently filled many roles for Origin Dollar and Origin Story, we’re still searching for the right person to take on:
Think you got what it takes? Shoot us a message in our Discord, or apply directly through our job listing.
Origin made tons of announcements in March, so no sweat if you missed anything. The most mysterious of all announcements, however, was OETH. What is OETH? Well, you’ll need to stay tuned to our Twitter. If you’re really curious to learn more, we’re building OETH publicly in our Discord. But enough speculation on the future––here’s some further reading on our past announcements:
Want to get in touch with us to launch your NFT marketplace? Hit us up at [email protected] to get in touch with our team!
