Origin: Airbnb, Uber, Amazon on the Blockchain

Origin’s whitepa­per is a bleed­ing heart cry for unstop­pable mar­kets. The “Why?” sec­tion that takes up a good quar­ter of the paper even men­tions peo­ple cook­ing Meth in Airbnb homes (yukk), and Airbnb refus­ing their ser­vices to KKK mem­bers (dou­ble yukk). 

A good argu­ment can be made for an unstop­pable glob­al mar­ket­place. With the advent of the www, con­tent and human knowl­edge tran­si­tioned into the dig­i­tal space. Why should­n’t the Blockchain allow us to final­ly tear out the phys­i­cal roots of mon­ey and commerce?

Project Goals and Progress

Ori­gin intends to build a uni­ver­sal, decen­tral­ized pro­to­col for com­merce, based on Ethereum and IPFS. The whitepa­per still most­ly tar­gets the shar­ing econ­o­my, but some of the project’s more recent activ­i­ties go towards con­ven­tion­al trad­ing of goods online, as in: buy­ing cof­fee mugs, head­phones or t‑shirts.

In its cur­rent iter­a­tion, Ori­gin offers a pro­to­col lay­er with mar­ket­place and iden­ti­ty func­tion­al­i­ty, a set of tools to build user-fac­ing mar­ket­places, as well as some user-fac­ing prod­ucts (a mar­ket­place, a Chrome plu­g­in to get dis­counts on Ama­zon, a mobile app).

Future plans include a spe­cif­ic node sys­tem for Ori­gin, and the use of the project’s native token, OGN, as a gov­er­nance token.

Ori­gin is notable for its team with a strong back­ground in the Sil­i­con Val­ley founder scene (YouTube, Pay­pal etc.), for hav­ing a diverse set of VC back­ers, for hav­ing over 160 con­trib­u­tors on their open source repos, for hav­ing actu­al, tan­gi­ble (and good-look­ing) prod­ucts out there. At first sight, there’s a lot to like about this project.

The OGN Token

Ori­gin, and their token, have been around for a while. An ini­tial token sale hap­pened back in Novem­ber 2017, at the price of $0.0685/OGN (3M raised), anoth­er sale in ear­ly 2018 at $0.1200/OGN (28.51M raised), and yet anoth­er sale in mid 2018 ($0.1364/OGN, 6.6M raised). The token issuance sched­ule for OGN isn’t as aggres­sive as for oth­er tokens of this type, full sup­ply will only be reached some­when in 2026. Cur­rent­ly, 6.7% of the tokens are circulating.

OGN can be staked to obtain dis­counts on Ama­zon or on the project’s native “deals” plat­form, and it can be obtained as a reward for com­plet­ing var­i­ous tasks in the Ori­gin app (e.g. invit­ing new mem­bers). Planned use cas­es are: OGN as sales com­mis­sion, as a stake for node oper­a­tors, as a means of pay­ment, and as a gov­er­nance token.

OGN has an excel­lent list­ing sit­u­a­tion and the token’s price isn’t too far removed from its lows in the very short pub­lic trad­ing history.

Scratching the Surface

This all sounds fan­tas­tic, right? Ama­zon, Uber, Airbnb, TaskRab­bit, all rolled into one, and the val­ue of the core pro­to­col accrues in a cryp­to token that any­body can buy and hold. Except, maybe, it sounds a bit too good to be true. What are we missing?

Commerce on the Blockchain

A decen­tral­ized, unstop­pable mar­ket­place is an excel­lent idea. Let me trade what­ev­er I want, with whomev­er I want, and nobody can take out com­mis­sions in-between! Except, that Ama­zon does­n’t just sit out there, fat and ready, grab­bing its com­mis­sions when­ev­er you make a trade. A sig­nif­i­cant part of e‑commerce is logis­tics, ven­dor rela­tions, mar­ket­ing, trust build­ing, legal wran­gling, dis­pute set­tle­ment and much more. 

Could such an orga­ni­za­tion run on top of a decen­tral­ized infra­struc­ture? Of course! And it cer­tain­ly will, one day. But the hard thing isn’t build­ing the back-end infra­struc­ture, it’s build­ing the whole set of activ­i­ties a big e‑commerce orga­ni­za­tion needs, and Ori­gin does­n’t solve that at the moment. Origin’s “deals” plat­form is “cur­rent­ly avail­able to US-based cus­tomers only” and “prod­ucts ship direct­ly from Ama­zon”. Some irony in there. I took Ama­zon as an exam­ple, but the same line of think­ing applies to oth­er mar­ket­place ver­ti­cals that Ori­gin aims for, like Uber, Airbnb or TaskRab­bit. Not to men­tion that some of these projects cur­rent­ly lose mas­sive amounts of money. 

Will Ori­gin solve the puz­zle of tru­ly dig­i­tiz­ing e‑commerce and the shar­ing econ­o­my? It def­i­nite­ly could, but the adop­tion curve for a change like this will span decades, not years, and until then, the pro­to­col will just be hand­ing out tokens for new sub­scribers, hoard user data, burn mon­ey on dis­counts (they deny that), and maybe lock up tokens again to make them seem useful.

There are already plat­forms where you can trade what­ev­er you want, with whomev­er you want. Some of my read­ers might know them, and the kind of prod­ucts that are being trad­ed on there. What would hap­pen if a thriv­ing, high­ly usable couch shar­ing mar­ket­place for the extreme right would be built on top of Ori­gin (to take the above, hilar­i­ous exam­ple from the whitepaper)? 

Rewards Tokens

The token-val­ue link between the Ori­gin pro­to­col and the OGN token isn’t as com­pelling as it seems, at least not right now. Why would there be a need for an addi­tion­al token if I want to trade what­ev­er I want with whomev­er I want? Sure, token util­i­ty can be shoe­horned into such a project, but past expe­ri­ence tells us that once a project rec­og­nizes that its token adds fric­tion, the token will mer­ci­less­ly be shoved into the back­ground. Until there are tru­ly com­pelling rea­sons for the token to exist, OGN will remain a rewards token, hand­ed out as an incen­tive to join the net­work, and hope­ful­ly locked up again instead of imme­di­ate­ly dumped on the open market.

Conclusion

A com­pelling bet at first sight, Ori­gin did­n’t look as good any more once we scratched the sur­face a lit­tle. As true blockchain enthu­si­asts, we dream of an unstop­pable mar­ket­place where we can trade what­ev­er we want, with whomev­er we want, and we wish that this project will build just that. 

Beyond those dreams, adding OGN to a port­fo­lio is an extreme­ly bull­ish bet on cryp­to (based on the “future Amazon/Uber/Airbnb” nar­ra­tive, or on TA), and we are not in such a mar­ket phase yet. For the moment, OGN will not find its way into the Moun­tains and Val­leys strat­e­gy.

Sources

• https://www.originprotocol.com/
• https://research.binance.com/projects/origin
• A big thank you to Cryp­toMae­stro for shar­ing his thoughts on this project with me

Cov­er image by cloud.shepherd. Mon­u­ment Val­ley, Utah, USA.