Origin Protocol Review

General Information

Sharing economy is emerging multi-billion industry, monopolized by giant tech company each in its niche - Uber for car sharing, Airbnb for accommodation, Fiverr for freelancing, and many others. These companies are earning enormous commissions for matching counterparties on their platforms. For instance, Airbnb charges in average 20% commission collected from both sides (final commission depends on operating region). 

Blockchain created an opportunity to make lives of centralized marketplaces much more difficult. This technology allows creating the decentralized peer to peer marketplaces, where counterparties conclude transactions directly between each other without a third party, eliminating commissions and regulation. If properly organized, such decentralized marketplaces can truly change the way small businesses work today.

Origin Protocol is US-based startup which aims to build infrastructure for such future marketplaces. They are creating fast, secure network blended with InterPlanetary File Storing systems, thus eliminating the need for centralized marketplaces. In our option, this project is very interesting and potentially can create next big thing. Although at the current stage of blockchain development we doubt that decentralized marketplaces will be compatible with already existing big players (since they will face huge difficulties with customer support and service at early stages), we still believe that peer to peer marketplaces would lead the future. And that future can’t be created without proper infrastructure. So let’s take a closer look at Origin Protocol! 

ICO details

Origin team hasn’t published any details on token sale or token metrics yet. The roadmap, published on the website of the projects says community sale is planned for March 2018 and token distribution for Q3 2018. March is already here but not further details on ICO have been revealed. 

Origin has raised 3 million USD funding from blockchain specialized venture fund Pantera Capital on closed presale, and since that haven’t made any official announcements. We are watching updates on token sale closely and will let you know as soon as some clear statements are made. 

Team

Origin’s team is based San Francisco, California. Two co-founders are pretty impressive: Mathew Liu has graduated from Stanford, later was YouTube early employee and later worked for few successful startups acquired by Wallmart and Yahoo. Josh Fraser was CEO of Torbit, the startup that provided tools for website performance measurement and optimization (also acquired by Wallmart). The rest of the team consists of skilled engineers and business development specialists.

Roadmap

Origin has launched alpha testnet based on Ethereum blockchain in December 2017. The launch of third-party DAPPs is planned for Q3 2018 together with token distribution. At the current stage, Origin develops it’s opened-sourced software and actively concludes partnerships with other blockchain startups.

Hype rate

Origin has more than 20k followers on Telegram, 4.7k on Twitter and 4.3k on Facebook. These numbers are not bad, but also not very high compared to other hyped crypto projects. Same goes for website traffic - 205k unique visitors since it was launched. Although the project is not extremely high, we expect the hype to grow once token sale details are officially published.

Comparison with existing projects

Origin is infrastructure project with no real competitors at this time. However, some DAPPs built on its protocol have already conducted successfully ICOs followed by exchange listings. Bee token (a decentralized competitor for Airbnb) currently trading at 1.3x ICO price (in ETH equivalent), CanYa at 0.72x. These projects were launched on exchanges during altcoin dump cycle, so the results aren’t too impressive. However, for the time being, infrastructure projects on blockchain are always performing better than consumer-orientated DAPPs, so we expect Origin to score higher numbers once it hits exchanges. 

Conclusion

Origin Protocol is another potentially interesting ICO. The project solves real issue and targets trillion dollar market. Although decentralized marketplaces have to prove they are compatible with their existing peers, infrastructure platform for such developing such marketplaces would definitely bring some interest from investors. All this together with a solid team and existing prototype makes us bullish on this project. Stay tuned.