Origin Dollar (OUSD) (launched 2020) is a cryptocurrency token built on the Ethereum Blockchain. It is the first stablecoin of its kind that earns a yield while stored in the wallet. It was created by the team at blockchain-powered commerce platform, Origin Protocol (cryptocurrency) (OGN)^[1].

Company

Origin Dollar was developed by a startup headquartered in San Francisco known as Origin Protocol, Inc. The company was founded in 2017 and it currently has 11-50 employees and has head office at San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US. It raised a total of $38.1M USD in funding over 7 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Aug 31, 2018 from a seed round. Their investor list includes Chain Capital, Kamal Ravikant , Foundation Capital , KBW Ventures , Alexis Ohanian, Gil Penchina , Cypher Capital , Curtis Lee , DHVC , Curtis Lee and Kenetic and many others^[2].

Overview

Origin Dollar is a stablecoin created on the Ethereum blockchain. It is pegged to 1:1 to USD indirectly. It is backed by 1:1 by other stablecoins like USDT, USDC and Dai . As a result, 1 OUSD always remains close to 1 USD in value. It is one of the first stablecoin that earns interest while standstill in the cryptocurrency wallet. Its design is superior to existing stablecoins like Tether (USDT and USD Coin because OUSD captures competitive yields while being passively held in wallets^[3].

Features

OUSD has many advantages over not only fiat money, but also over popular USD pegged stablescoins like Tether (USDT and USD Coin, Pax. Some of the features of OUSD are.

Speed

Fiat money takes hours (sometimes days) to reach people or institutions. As Origin Dollar is based on blockchain it enables stability and desirability of the USD and has the speed of cryptocurrency transactions.

Programmable

As it is OUSD is created on blockchain, it is programmable money. It can be integrated into applications and businesses. The developers can create accounts to store money with simple code. It can be used for lending, borrowing, faster and payments, payroll, global crowdfunding, transparent and stable donations and charity etc.

Transparency

As OUSD is an open source project based on blockchain, anyone can trace transactions using block explorers as compared to Fiat money transfer.

Elastic Supply

OUSD is a stablecoin and works differently than other cryptocurrencies. Instead of the price increasing as the value of the assets under management increase, its value remains constant at approximately $1 USD. Its supply is elastic and this approach is inspired by the Ampleforth . The stable value ($1USD) is achieved algorithmically by smart contracts. The smart contracts constantly adjust the monetary supply and automatically updates the balance in every token holder’s wallet to reflect the yield that has been earned by the protocol^[4].

Despite being inspired by Ampleforth's rebase mechanism, OUSD has some differences.

• OUSD is 100% backed by other stablecoins and will not have the same challenge maintaining the peg to the dollar. Given the ease of minting and redeeming OUSD, users can count on arbitrageurs to ensure the peg is maintained.
• OUSD rebasing should only increase supply since the amount of OUSD minted is tied to the realized gains earned by the underlying strategies. The principal of user is protected as long as nothing goes wrong with the underlying lending/AMM and stablecoin protocols on which OUSD rely on. Any decrease in user balance would be an indication of trouble in the system.
• Unlike Ampleforth, which rebases once a day, the monetary supply of OUSD is constantly being updated in real-time as yield is generated.

Yield Generation

The OUSD smart contract pools capital from all stablecoin depositors, then routes that capital to a diversified set of yield-earning strategies. Earnings are automatically converted to OUSD and deposited to the owner wallet. The new lending and automated market maker pools have raised total value locked (TVL) in DeFi, but it has also made it increasingly challenging for yield farmers to manually allocate capital in efficient and optimal ways. Projects like yEarn have shown that smart contracts can automate the re-balancing of funds across various strategies to optimally earn lending interest, market making fees, and rewards tokens. The first version of OUSD employs a simple compound strategy, but new strategies will be deployed every month that maximize returns while minimizing risk and dependencies. Currently supported platforms are Compound, Aave, Curve and soon yEarn, Balancer and Uniswap will also be supported^[5].

Tokenomics

Origin Dollar is an ERC20 Token created by deploying smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain  It currently has circulating supply of 543,523 OUSD. It registered all time high of $1.04 USD on Oct 10, 2020 and all time low of $0.950539 USD on Oct 11, 2020. It is available to trade on Uniswap cryptocurrency exchange. Users can save it in any Ethereum and ERC20 supported wallets including MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet etc^[6].