Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the September 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.
Origin’s primary focus in September has been to launch our new DeFi project, the Origin Dollar (OUSD). Last week, we successfully introduced the world to the first stablecoin that passively and automatically earns yields while it’s still sitting in users’ wallets.
We believe this new Origin product will bring DeFi to the masses while driving increased adoption of our commerce products and benefiting Origin Token (OGN) holders.
We also crossed 100 deployed Dshops in September (with many more in the pipeline) and are excited about our upcoming Q4 product roadmap that will further drive both growth and retention on the platform.
On the token economics front, we executed our first OGN buyback. In the future, we anticipate additional buybacks and other initiatives targeted at reducing our circulating supply.
We built OUSD to both build upon and compete with Tether (USDT), the dominant stablecoin with over $15B in circulation. Like Tether, OUSD is a great medium of exchange. In addition, OUSD earns savings automatically for users directly in their wallets. All they need to do is buy and hold to earn great DeFi yields.
To enable peer-to-peer commerce at scale, we need to create compelling reasons for buyers and sellers to use the Origin Platform over established incumbent products.
We believe one of the best points of attack is creating a superior payment rail. With last week’s launch of OUSD, Dshop merchants will now be able to begin earning interest as soon as they receive buyers’ payments. In contrast to being charged 2.9% in credit card fees, they will earn at competitive DeFi savings rates instead.
Perhaps an even greater opportunity exists in powering peer-to-peer transactions on third-party solutions. In the future, we anticipate integrating OUSD payments into Shopify, WooCommerce, and other platforms, creating new entry points into the Origin ecosystem for many buyers and sellers that currently don’t understand blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies.
OUSD also significantly lowers the hurdles for mainstream crypto users to participate in Decentralized Finance (DeFi). DeFi adoption is accelerating rapidly, with nearly $11B of total value locked (TVL), and will become one of the most disruptive technology categories of our generation.
However, most DeFi products are highly complex to use. Users are required to stake or lock up their tokens to earn, and in many cases there are 3–5 steps required to fully engage with and maximize earnings on individual products.
OUSD is a dead simple decentralized app (DApp) in comparison. No OUSD lock-ups are ever required to automatically earn competitive yields. Again, all you need to do is to buy and hold to participate.
Our work is just beginning with OUSD. In the last week, we’ve already made a number of updates to our smart contracts, including adding the ability to liquidate and reinvest rewards tokens and better support liquidity pools.
Going forward, the team will be focusing on increasing the expected APY of OUSD while minimizing risk and rolling out governance and incentive programs to bootstrap capital deposits and usage.
Existing OGN holders will be able to stake their OGN to participate in governance and earn incentives for driving value to OUSD. Many community members have asked for more details, and we will release specifics in the coming weeks.
This month we also announced our inaugural OGN Buyback campaign. As an active participant supplying liquidity to DeFi platforms like Uniswap, Balancer, Kyber, and other swap exchanges, Origin is able to benefit from trading fees and rewards tokens.
We’ve decided that we will be using all proceeds from these existing and future activities to buy back OGN on the open market. At Origin, we are very committed to building out a strong token ecosystem over the long-term and believe the greatest value creation is ahead of us.
In this first campaign, we purchased 475,102 OGN worth $123,625.38. In the future, we anticipate additional campaigns to signal our commitment to our community.
This month, we were able to keep circulating supply relatively flat when compared to August.
There are currently 129.2M tokens in the circulating supply. This is 33.7M tokens lower than what was expected at this juncture based on our modeled token release schedule, approximately a 20% difference.
Through incentivizing token holders to lock up their tokens, future buybacks, and other planned programs in the future, we believe that our circulating supply will continue to increase at a more gradual trajectory than previously anticipated.
This month we were proud to announce that with your support we were able to raise $17,000 through our Stay at Home Store powered by Dshop. 100% of the proceeds are being donated to CEPI which is working to find a vaccine for COVID-19. Additionally, we donated 50,000 surgical masks to Montefiore Hospital in NYC.
With the Origin ambassador program coming into its second month, we’re grateful to the hard work our Originators have put into numerous campaigns and initiatives. In Korea, we began the month holding a first-of-its-kind Telegram quiz designed to educate community members on Origin. Our Latin American ambassadors ran a crypto treasure hunt that saw hundreds of participants scour our blog and website for clues. The eventual winner completed the hunt in 6 hours and 4 minutes and took home a prize of $80 worth of OGN.
Finally, together with our Turkish ambassadors we’ve also started a brand new Turkish Telegram channel. Turkey is known for being a major crypto hub and we’re excited to reach new fans. If you’re from the region, be sure to stop by and say hello!
As the month came to a close, we were fortunate to have been hosted by LunarCRUSH for a live webinar where we discussed community building at Origin as well as made the first public reveal of OUSD. The full webinar can be found on YouTube. Thank you to Jon Farjo for reaching out and making it happen.
We also want to thank our entire community who got behind OGN in two community votes on Harvest Finance resulting in OGN being added as an asset for yield farming. Not only did we win, but we came in first place by a wide margin both times. We’ll be looking to leverage this enthusiasm further as we look for more opportunities to list OUSD and OGN on DeFi platforms and lists.
Lastly, thank you everyone for supporting Origin’s Educational campaign for the Spanish community. Between July and August, we held 10 webinars where we educated our community on various topics including fundamentals of blockchain technology, use cases of cryptocurrency, DeFi, e-commerce, Fintech and much more. Here is a quick recap prepared by our Spanish Community Manager.
We are overjoyed that Daniel Von Fange joined Origin full-time this month. Daniel (aka DVF) has been one of our earliest open-source contributors. My co-founder Josh initially learned to code and sharpen his entrepreneurial instincts with DVF in high school. We wouldn’t be where we’re at without his past and present contributions.
Currently, DVF is hard at work making OUSD a success with a focus on security and oracles. We can’t wait to see his contributions take our product to new heights.
If you’re interested in working alongside DVF, Yu Pan (Origin’s R&D engineer and one of the original PayPal founders), and other 10x engineers, we’d love to meet you. We’re looking for an experienced senior Solidity engineer to join the team as soon as possible. DeFi experience is a huge plus.
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