In these extraordinary times, we extend our best wishes to all the members of the global community. COVID-19 (aka the coronavirus) has disrupted the daily lives of billions of people and currently endangers millions of the most vulnerable members of society, including the elderly, those that have existing health issues, and the impoverished in the third-world. We stand together with the rest of humanity. Together, we will beat this pandemic.

Every month, the Origin team publishes a monthly update to our token holders and broader community. Welcome to the March 2020 edition. We are eager to hear feedback and suggestions from our community. Please email support@originprotocol.com for support requests and info@originprotocol.com for general inquiries/comments.

Summary

Like other teams around the world, the sudden and aggressive arrival of COVID-19 has required our team to adjust to the “new normal” and take decisive actions to ensure the safety of our team members and the continued growth of our business. See below for more details.

Here’s a quick summary of what happened in March:

We’ve been heads down working on several new products that are built on top of the Origin Platform. While we are not quite ready to unveil our new creations to the world yet, we encourage you to install the Origin browser extension (Chrome / Firefox / Brave). We’ll be releasing one of the Beta products we are most excited about via the browser extension in the near future.

We also formed new partnerships and increased the number of ways that users could trade Origin Tokens (OGN) by listing on Crypto.com, Kyber, and Tokocrypto.

Coronavirus updates

Due to the onslaught of COVID-19, all Origin team members are currently working from home (and have been for the last several weeks). Thankfully, because we’ve always had a distributed team, we were ready to embrace this change and are just as productive today as we were before the virus took the world by storm.

Further, we want to assure all our token holders and our community that we remain very well-capitalized. We’ve run as a lean startup from day one and have been disciplined about how we deploy capital across hiring, marketing, and community building. While many startups now face uncertain financial futures, we have multiple years of runway and our financial position remains strong.

Our team is also evaluating several ways to take a more active stance to help those in need.

Product/technology

In the past month, we’ve made several updates to Dshop, our decentralized e-commerce platform that allows merchants to create a full-featured store that is hosted on IPFS and the Ethereum blockchain.

We’re happy to report that we are now better-equipped to launch more e-commerce stores on behalf of partners. If you are interested in running a store on Dshop, please get in touch with our business development team (info@originprotocol.com).

As mentioned above, we’re rapidly prototyping several new products on the Origin Platform. We’re planning to release early previews of these products from within the Origin browser extension. If you’re excited about seeing what’s next, download the extension on Chrome, Firefox, or Brave to be amongst the first to get invited to our newest releases.

New exchange listings

We partnered with Crypto.com, and OGN is now available in the Crypto.com app. We’ve long been fans of Crypto.com as their mobile app and MCO Visa card make cryptocurrencies more accessible to mainstream users. The 1M+ users of the Crypto.com app can purchase cryptocurrencies with multiple fiat currencies (USD, GBP, EUR, SGD). This makes it much easier for more everyday users to buy and sell OGN.

Use OGN with the Crypto.com MCO Visa card. Apply for your card today.

We also listed OGN on Kyber Network, the leading decentralized exchange protocol. Our community members can now convert OGN to and from 70 different ERC-20 tokens and ETH.

Finally, OGN was also listed on Tokocrypto, one of the only regulated and government-approved Indonesian exchanges. While many outside of Indonesia may not have used Tokocrypto previously, we wanted to open up a dedicated market for our fast-growing Indonesian community that is approximately 4,000 members strong.

Hiring

Please join us in welcoming Max Unger, our new Head of Community! Max has been a longtime cryptocurrency investor and operator that has built communities for EdenChain and OKEx. He has also worked with the likes of RedNova, the marketing and incubation entity for Du Capital, to build communities for their portfolio projects. We first got introduced to Max in early 2018 when he invested in Origin as part of our Strategic Round. As we’ve gotten to know Max over the past two years, we became convinced that we wanted his expertise on our team, particularly around building thriving, engaged communities in the cryptocurrency space.

Max with Dan Tapscott, founder of the Blockchain Research Institute and acclaimed author

Community

Thank you everyone for participating in our recent February Origin Rewards campaign. We announced the winners earlier this month where we gave away 15,000 OGN to our community.

We also had an overwhelming response to our March Origin Rewards campaign. Our community is our greatest asset, and we could not be more thankful for your continuous support. Please continue to download and experiment with our Origin browser extension as your feedback will be invaluable to us. Stay tuned for new opportunities to earn OGN in next month’s campaign.

Online Events

Despite the global pandemic slowing down our ability to engage with our community members in person, we’re still committed to evangelizing the Origin Platform and OGN around the world.

In China, we’ve kickstarted weekly online meetups with top projects that are also still active:

On March 19th, we partnered with IPFS.Fund to discuss decentralized storage use cases and adoption. We invited Zhou Huan, founder of IPFS.Fund to speak at the event.

A week later, we collaborated with Algorand, Conflux, and Taraxa to discuss the current macro environment and its impact on cryptocurrencies.

As more people are staying indoors, we’ll be looking at new ways to engage and grow our community through virtual events and our existing online channels.

Token economics

Circulating supply did not increase this month and remained at 28M OGN (Coinmarketcap). Moving forward, we are working on new initiatives to lock up OGN and be more frugal in our OGN distributions. For example, we’ve purposefully scaled back OGN rewarded in Origin Rewards the past several months in an attempt to maintain a lower-than-expected circulating supply vs. our modeled token release schedule from the Binance research report on Origin.

Miscellaneous

Prior to the global pandemic, all of our core team members gathered together for our quarterly strategic planning offsite. It was a great opportunity for us to celebrate the milestones we’ve achieved to date in 2020, and more importantly, plan the future direction of Origin. As a distributed team, we always appreciate the time we get to spend together in person. We spent four days co-working, brainstorming, and finalizing key product and business initiatives that will drive the direction of our company in the upcoming quarters.

With the continuous support we’ve been fortunate to receive from our global community, we are truly excited about what we will accomplish in the future. Thank you, everyone, for supporting our vision and allowing us to be where we are today. During this extremely difficult time with COVID-19, we extend our best wishes to everyone in our global community. Let’s stay strong and healthy.

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