Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and the broader community. Welcome to the May 2022 edition. We are eager to hear feedback and suggestions from our community.
In the last several months, the global equity and crypto markets were rocked by significant corrections. BTC hit a low of $25k (down 60+% from all-time highs) before settling back to $31k at the time of this writing. Thankfully, despite the market contraction, Origin remains in a very strong position to build for a highly successful long-term future.
Bear markets bring clarity. Competitors with low conviction leave the playing field. Hiring top talent is easier. Our company is well-capitalized with runway that can last us through a multi-year bear market. Further, we are positioning ourselves to grow and capture market share in our two targeted markets of NFTs and DeFi with Origin Story and Origin Dollar respectively.
Forecasting slightly ahead, we are excited to soon unveil finalized tokenomics and launch plans for OGV, the new governance token for OUSD that will be claimable by existing OGN holders. In addition, we are getting closer to re-launching a new OGN staking model that creates a direct tie-in between Origin Story protocol revenue growth and token performance.
Many new faces have recently joined the team to help move development along and scale up our operations. Please help us welcome Kelly Hwang as our Head of Investments and Treasury, Youngsun Shin as our latest Product Manager for Origin Story, Andra Nicolau as the Head of BD and Strategy for OUSD, Justin Charlton as Head of Finance, and Tom Hirst as our latest world-class engineer.
In this month’s token holder update, we will recap the development of many new initiatives that will soon be available to our community, creators, collectors, and token holders.
Despite the market taking a downturn, we believe we are well positioned to expand the core team. As we now have two growing business units, Origin Story and Origin Dollar (each with their own token), we are increasing our headcount for both engineering and business hires. It’s important to note that we will grow in a controlled and thoughtful way; we will always prioritize hiring a single world-class individual over numerous mediocre players. We pride ourselves on running lean, and we will maintain an extremely high bar while expanding our team. With that context being set, we are actively hiring for several senior leadership positions:
We’ve also expanded our product and engineering openings:
To build out our Business Development and Marketing teams, we will begin the search for specialized team members that can take our community building to the next level:
Check out our full job postings, and come join us or refer your friends!
OUSD continues to be the best risk-adjusted stablecoin strategy on the market today and has demonstrated its ability to maintain stability through highly volatile market conditions. The most recent market downturn was precipitated by the collapse of Terra’s UST stablecoin, which repeatedly lost peg and has now plummeted to less than 3 cents on the dollar.
Unlike UST, which was never backed by any hard assets, OUSD is backed by top USD-backed stablecoins like USDC and USDT as well as the most resilient decentralized stablecoin DAI. As a result, 1 OUSD should always be very close to 1 USD in value. This was proven in this month’s turbulence, as OUSD never deviated from peg by more than a few basis points. Origin’s senior engineer, Daniel Von Fange, wrote a helpful article that further explains why OUSD should never suffer a similar fate as UST and comparable tokens.
We are making rapid progress towards our upcoming launch of OGV. Expect an in-depth launch plan and detailed tokenomics plan to be published and distributed to the community imminently. In addition, the Origin Story team has made significant progress on the new staking program. This upgrade will allow Origin Story platform fees to begin accruing to OGN stakers, whether from primary sales commissions or secondary trading/royalty fees after the staking program’s upcoming re-launch. We are optimistic that this event will provide an exciting way for OGN holders to earn staking rewards immediately after claiming their OGV.
You may have been given a sneak peek at Origin Story’s newest feature set, branded secondary marketplaces. Origin’s VP of Product, Linus Chung, recently gave a walkthrough on our weekly community call to demonstrate how Origin Story will soon empower NFT creators and their communities like never before.
By being able to go directly to a collection’s website to purchase NFTs, collectors will be able to benefit from an added layer of authenticity. This new feature also helps directly support creators by redirecting a portion of the revenue generated on these secondary marketplaces back to the project. We have confirmed our first partners, and we look forward to sharing more details before publicly launching this exciting new product.
OGN’s circulating supply is 493,975,479. The circulating supply number includes the tens of millions of OGN staked in our staking program, reducing the actual float further. There are 31,909,647 OGN currently staked. The majority of these tokens are staked for a year. This is a very strong signal that OGN holders believe in the future of OGN. You can see all of this information on our token dashboard.
Earlier in May, OGN was listed on one of the industry’s most trusted and longest-running crypto exchanges, Kraken. The exchange currently provides over $800,000,000 in total 24-hour daily trading volume and now offers both OGN/USD and OGN/EUR trading pairs to more than 6 million users across 190 countries.
The global Origin community remains strong through the volatile market cycles that came with May. Our presence continues to grow in new regions and platforms. Origin Co-founder Matthew Liu was interviewed by Andrew Chang for Web3 Roundup and shared his thoughts revolving around the current trends of Web3 and NFTs.
Elsewhere, our Latin America Community Manager, Moises Sosa, participated in a fun Metaverse event to kick off Bitcoin Pizza Day and help raise awareness of Origin’s ecosystem. These experiences are a great way to engage with new and existing community members, and we look forward to participating in more of these events in the future.
