Launch new governance token for OUSD?

Origin has two separate product lines, Origin Dollar and Origin Story, that have both found product-market fit and are doing extraordinarily well. We believe they both deserve to have their own tokens with clear value accrual mechanisms that are clear and easy to articulate. Launching a new governance token for OUSD will maximize both short-term and long-term token holder value for existing OGN holders and new token holders alike.

Our yield-bearing stablecoin, Origin Dollar (OUSD) has grown to hundreds of millions of dollars in circulating supply. OUSD continues to be the best risk-adjusted stablecoin strategy on the market today. OUSD has regularly outperformed other stablecoin strategies, despite being the simplest and most gas-optimized way to get access to competitive DeFi yields. We're also thrilled by the recent increase in institutional interest around OUSD from family offices, corporate treasuries, crypto funds, DAOs, and even other protocols starting to look at holding OUSD on their balance sheets. We expect this trend to continue as we double down on our BD efforts, integrate with more DeFi protocols and centralized exchanges, and restart incentives.

Similarly, our NFT platform has been experiencing incredible growth. Just in the past month, Paris Hilton has promoted Origin on Jimmy Fallon and Nightline and Pablo Picasso's great-grandson teamed up with John Legend to drop their NFTs on the Origin platform. These successes follow multiple record-breaking sales like 3LAU's $11.7M sale, the Inspiration4/SpaceX partnership which sold over 63k NFTs in a single drop, and the Charlie Bit Me NFT that made headlines around the world. Our NFT platform, Origin Story, recently opened up to all creators around the world, and we expect usage to scale exponentially. We are also more excited than ever about our near-term product upgrades that will focus on generating more secondary transaction volumes that can accrue protocol fees to OGN token holders.

With the OGN rewards given out on Curve and Convex, we've seen the power of incentives to drive adoption of Origin Dollar. It has become increasingly clear a native token for OUSD will allow us to offer more generous rewards and increase our growth rate. Ultimately, we want to see the circulating supply of OUSD measured in the billions of dollars.

Despite the tremendous customer traction, global press mentions, and maturation of our products, the price of OGN has struggled since our ATH price in April of last year. Besides the obvious impact of bearish macro trends in the last few months, we also attribute OGN’s lackluster performance to the confusing narrative from having OGN represent two completely separate products that appeal to very different audiences. OGN holders are clamoring for clearer utility, value accrual, and updated tokenomics for both projects. It’s been a struggle to implement proper DeFi token utility while being mindful of OGN's role as the value accrual and utility token for Origin Story. As a result, we have a token that is used for both products but is failing to do a good job at either. In this case, the sum of the parts has been less than the individual parts. It is time to give both protocols the best chance of being top performers in the rest of 2022 and beyond.

We are early in our planning but we are eager for community feedback early in this process. Here’s our current thinking:

1. Assuming community approval, a new ERC20 token, OGV will be launched as the new governance and fee accrual token for OUSD.

2. OGV will be claimable by OGN holders on a 1:1 basis via a Merkle-distributor contract (similar to how Uniswap distributed UNI). If you have 100 OGN, you’ll be able to claim 100 OGV. This includes OGN holders who are currently staking OGN. We will work with centralized exchanges to make sure their OGN holders also receive OGV.

3. Having a native token for OUSD will let us provide rewards directly to current and future OUSD holders and liquidity providers. This will further incentivize protocol growth and adoption.

4. OGV will be the governance token for Origin Dollar via a veOGV mechanism (similar to Curve) that distributes economic and voting power to those most committed to the long-term success of the protocol. veOGV stakers will be able to set protocol fees as a percentage of yield, determine asset allocation, propose new strategies, etc.

While the exact details need to be ironed out, the core team is aligned that this proposed strategy is in the best interests of all OGN holders as we seek to 10x and 100x user growth across both products. With each step forward, we will be conscious to take in community feedback with the goal of maximizing token value.

It should be noted that other projects have successfully gone through similar transitions. We’re watching as Gnosis launches tokens for Cowswap (COW) and Gnosis Safe (SAFE) on top of their original token GNO. We watched the BOBA airdrop to all OMG holders and observed how the combined market cap of both projects is higher today than it was before the airdrop (despite a massive market correction to both tokens). In short, we believe having separate tokens for each product will deliver a better outcome for all current OGN holders, resulting in holders now having two tokens that each have clear narratives, utilities, and value accrual mechanisms, priming them for positive growth.

This is obviously a huge decision and we welcome community input. Please join us in Discord (https://www.originprotocol.com/discord) where we will be discussing this proposal in our #governance channel.