What is Origin Protocol?

Origin Protocol aims to enable blockchain-powered commerce. The Origin Platform allows buyers and sellers to connect and transact on the blockchain. The project's goals are to reduce/remove unnecessary transaction fees charged by intermediaries, promote open and censorship-resistance commerce, and give early ecosystem participants stakes in the commerce network as it grows over time.

Products

Origin's main product offering is the Origin Platform that powers many different applications in the ecosystem. The project released the first version of the Platform to the Ethereum Mainnet in October of 2018 and has since upgraded its features several times since then. In addition to supporting third-parties, Origin has released several first-party applications on top of the Platform, including the Dshop e-commerce store creator (www.originprotocol.com/dshop), the Origin Marketplace DApp (www.shoporigin.com), and Origin Deals (www.origindeals.com).

Traction

Origin currently powers over a dozen partner e-commerce and marketplace applications on its Platform.

Underlying Technology

The Origin Platform consists of a series of smart contracts at the protocol layer, intermediary APIs that allow for in-house and third-party app creation, and the application/UX layer that end users interface with to buy/sell on the network. The components of the Platform are designed to be modular, and Origin strongly encourages other developers, e-commerce merchants, and marketplace operators to create their own applications for various business use cases. Origin is built on Ethereum and IPFS, and Origin Tokens (OGC) are ERC-20 tokens.

Team and Investors

Origin's founding team and early engineers include one of the original co-founders of PayPal, YouTube's first employee, and engineering managers from Dropbox and Google. The two co-founders, Matthew Liu and Josh Fraser have successfully built and sold previous companies together in the past.

Origin's lead investor is Pantera Capital. They are also backed by Foundation Capital, Blockchain.com Ventures, Hashed, PreAngel Fund, BlockTower Capital, FBG, Sora Ventures, and other venture/crypto funds as well as angel investors Steve Chen (co-founder of YouTube), Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit), Garry Tan (former Ycombinator partner), Gil Penchina, and Steve Jang (founding advisor and angel investor in Uber).