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Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and the broader community. Welcome to the September 2022 edition.
We have a lot of updates to share on all fronts of Origin Protocol this month, as well as a few exciting updates to look forward to in the coming weeks.
September was a noteworthy month for Origin’s OUSD and Story products––our Story platform saw several new feature rollouts including analytics and bulk importing of listings. Communities have recognized the benefits of user-centric, native marketplaces with record sales coming from Story’s marketplace. OUSD has transitioned to an on-chain governance model managed by OGV holders. We’ve onboarded several key hires on the engineering and marketing fronts this month. Let's dive in.
Firstly, we’ve added several new hires to the core team, which you can check out toward the bottom of this investor update. Thanks to our healthy treasury, we have the opportunity to recruit top-tier talent to continue building both Story and OUSD. This being said, we’re taking a measured approach to growth with an extremely high bar for talent. Our goal is to double the size of our team in 2022, and we’re well on our way to achieving this.
Origin has made strides on both Story and OUSD this month. We’ve added some heavy-hitting NFT collections to Story, and recently announced our 1st NFT marketplace that bridges physical assets and NFTs in partnership with RoofStock.
RoofStock is a leader in real estate investing technology, and it recently closed its Series E led by Softbank at a $1.94b valuation. Users can now buy and sell physical real estate via our new marketplace at a fraction of the cost of traditional brokerage fees.
The 1st Property Listing on Roofstock onChain
On the OGV side of things, we’ve decentralized our governance via on-chain voting. As of today, there is still 9.3% of the OGV supply not yet claimed from the token airdrop. If left unclaimed, these tokens will be burnt on October 10th, 2022.
As mentioned above, Story has partnered with several well-established NFT collections this month for branded NFT marketplaces. Top launches this month include SupDucks, 0N1 Force, Capsule House, Roo Troop, and Roofstock. Together, these collections boast a Twitter audience of over 200,000 NFT collectors. If you follow us on Twitter, you’ve probably seen some of the collaborative Twitter Spaces we’ve hosted with these collections.
Pudgy Penguin #6873
You may have seen the record-breaking Pudgy Penguins sale for 400 ETH, but did you know the buyer used our official Pudgy Penguins marketplace to facilitate the sale? This comes as no surprise, as our whitelabel marketplaces offer industry-leading analytics dashboards, aggregated listings, and unique data combined from all the leading NFT marketplaces.
We’re also excited to see real estate, traditional finance, and cryptocurrency publications cover the news of Origin Protocol’s partnership with Roofstock onChain. Roofstock onChain innovates on the KYC process with Soulbound tokens while innovating on every step of the traditional brokerage process, appealing to both blockchain enthusiasts and real estate investors alike. To read more about our partnership with Roofstock, check out our blog post.
We realize that for Origin to onboard the next billion users to blockchain, we must expand our audience past crypto-natives and break into industries NFTs and DeFi are directly impacting. Our partnership with Roofstock served as the perfect opportunity to do just that––traditional finance and real estate publications among the likes of Bloomberg, National Mortgage News, and Yahoo Finance covered our Roofstock onChain announcement.
As for new Story features launched this month, we’ve launched new analytics features for NFT collectors. Users can now see top holders of a collection, high conviction holders, notable collectors, and collection distributions directly on Story marketplaces. We’ve also launched a bulk import listings feature, making it seamless for holders to list their NFTs on Story’s marketplaces.
OGN Season 1 staking is coming to an end in less than 40 days! We’re super excited to see such success in our first season. Over 31 million tokens are currently staked, and season 1’s APY is estimated to be 5.2%.
100% of our marketplace fees flow into the OGN rewards pool, so OGN serves as both a governance and value-accrual token for the protocol.
If you haven’t staked your OGN yet to grab your piece of the rewards, don’t worry! There’s one week left to stake before staking is locked for Season 1.
We’re excited to announce that we’re fully decentralizing protocol governance for OGV! Not only does this further align Origin with the ethos of Web3, but it moves control of the protocol and OUSD to OGV holders, particularly those who vote on protocol governance via veOGV.
To further embed OUSD into Ethereum’s ecosystem and attract more TVL to the protocol, we’ve drafted a proposal in response to MakerDAO’s declaration of intent to invest in short-term bonds. While Coinbase, Gemini, and CoinShares submitted responses to this proposal, these solutions don’t align with MakerDAO’s core principle of decentralization. If you hold MKR, please voice your support for Origin’s proposal on the MakerDAO forum for their DAO to use OUSD to generate yield.
Moreover, we’ve published our stablecoin evaluation framework to educate investors on stablecoin risks, highlighting the benefits of fully-collateralized stablecoins in light of the UST death spiral.
A massive OGV token burn is quickly approaching, slated to execute on October 10th, 2022. The token burn is currently projected to reduce the supply of OGV by around 9%, benefitting our community of OGV token holders by increasing the scarcity of Origin Dollar Governance. If you have yet to claim your OGV, make sure to do so before the token burn, as unclaimed tokens from the airdrop will be burnt forever!
This month, we brought on a VP of Marketing to help drive the growth of our OUSD and Story marketplace products. We’ve already seen great headway in regards to internal and external content efforts. In September, Origin Protocol news was featured on top publications, including posts on Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, Inside, and Coinspeaker. While we’ve been mentioned by many other media outlets, these publications alone reach an audience of over 50 million monthly readers!
To onboard more investors to Origin Protocol’s products and tokens, we’ve gained top organic placements in Google’s search engine. This month, we’ve been placed in educational articles on Benzinga, BitCompare, LuckyTrader, and Medium that rank well for high-value keywords around stablecoins and NFT marketplaces.
Notably, we’re currently placed at the top of google for its FAQ snippet for the term “Top Stablecoins,” and are placed in the #1 and #3 articles for the same keyword! As for Origin Story, OGN is listed at the top of google for the search term “Best NFT Cryptocurrencies,” as well as other articles on the first page for similar keywords.
Getting placements in these articles is key for driving growth at Origin, as it's a sustainable way to educate new users on our suite of products, rather than paying for keywords on a monthly basis.
We’re super excited to announce the exceptionally talented individuals we’ve brought on the team in September. In the coming weeks, we’ll publish blog posts on each new team member, so you can get to know who’s helping us take Origin Protocol to the next level. In the meantime, you can check out our new hires below:
And we’re not slowing down! Our goal is to double the size of Origin’s core team this year, while keeping the bar for talent extremely high. We’re on the lookout for highly talented individuals to join our team. Here are some of the open positions we’re seeking to fill in Q4:
Origin Protocol is actively building relationships with the top creators and collections in the NFT space. If you know of someone who may be interested in using our NFT infrastructure for an upcoming mint, marketplace, or other needs, please get them in touch with our team via [email protected].
If you’re attending Devcon this month, we’d love to meet you in person! You can get in contact with our head of strategy for OUSD on telegram @andra_nicolau or reach our director of product on Twitter @micahalcorn to coordinate a time to meet whilst in Colombia.
