Introducing Origin Story, the NFT Platform for All Creators

Origin’s NFT Launchpad is entering a new chapter and is opening up to creators around the world as Origin Story (story.xyz). We envision our platform being the place where brands and artists will tell their most authentic stories via the exciting new medium of NFTs.

Since our $11.7M record-setting NFT launch with acclaimed musician and producer 3LAU, we’ve been inundated by thousands of requests from creators across dozens of verticals that want to launch their NFT sales on Origin. In the last few months, we’ve selectively worked with top NFT artists like Trevor Jones, Alotta Money, Ali Sabet, and Don Diablo as well as mainstream icons like Paris Hilton, George Lopez, and Jake Paul. Origin’s NFT platform powered the most successful viral video NFT auction to date with Charlie Bit My Finger and shattered the numbers for the most successful whiskey cask sale at $2.3M, over four times higher than the previous record.

Scaling the platform

While we have been able to work with many household names and set numerous records, we’ve never wanted to be a in position to decide whether creators are able to run NFT sales or not. Origin doesn’t want to be the gatekeeper that determines whether an up-and-coming NFT artist or aspiring musician can use NFT technology to engage with their fans. Rather, we want to bring NFTs to the mainstream, tackling opportunities like powering the metaverse, disrupting high-end luxury industries, and enabling NFT gaming marketplaces. To accrue value towards OGN in a massive way, we will exponentially increase the number of NFT sales that happen on the platform. We will also be revealing new OGN utility on the platform.

Today, we are one step closer to democratizing NFT creation and sales with the launch of Origin Story. Starting today, artists, musicians, influencers, athletes, filmmakers, and even casual hobbyists can sign up and join our waiting list. We’ll begin onboarding dozens of new creators each week with the goal of completely opening the platform to the public by the end of the year. These creators will be using the same battle-tested technology and product offering that has generated tens of millions of sales for the aforementioned celebrities as well as brands like Rolling Stone, West Coast Customs, and Inspiration4/SpaceX.

It’s time to scale and let creators sell NFTs on their own terms.

Key product features

Origin Story offers creators many differentiated features and a streamlined, easy user experience that enables both new and experienced creators to successfully sell NFTs to their audiences.

Sell off-platform, on your own terms

Creators are able to create their very own NFT storefronts with Origin Story. This enables creators to tell their stories and engage with their audiences in the most direct and genuine ways possible. From a platform perspective, Origin is able to host many simultaneous NFT sales concurrently rather than being limited to the number of sales that can fit in tightly-controlled drop calendars. Over time, we anticipate powering hundreds or even thousands of NFT sales on a daily basis.

We have always been inspired by the Shopify and Squarespace models that give sellers the ability to sell on their own storefronts. These services give sellers fine-tuned control, customization abilities, and powerful third-party apps. Sellers can sell on their own terms. In the same way, we believe NFT artists shouldn’t be constrained to existing gated platforms that act as gatekeepers. NFT creation and selling should be democratized and open to all.

Our creator onboarding starts with launching a custom storefront. The design can be tailored to reflect the creator’s own unique style.

OGN stakeholders sell for free

It’s time to shake things up in the world of NFTs. While many competing platforms charge 15% or more to host primary sales, we empower creators to own a stake in the entire Origin platform by selling on Story with our free option.

Instead of taking a 15% commission that we pocket, creators can opt for a 15% OGN fee refund instead. Anytime an NFT purchase occurs, 15% of the sale proceeds are automatically swapped for OGN (bought on the open market) and locked for six months. After the end of the lock-up period, creators are able to freely withdraw. We believe that the creators using Origin Story should have vested interests in the platform. This gives them incentives to refer additional creators to Origin, give valuable feedback so that we can improve the product, and evangelize Origin to their existing audiences. We can’t think of a better way to mobilize thousands of influencers, artists, musicians, athletes, and other public figures to spread the Origin gospel than to ensure that they have stakes in the network.

We anticipate that millions of OGN will be removed from circulation as Origin Story scales to thousands of creators running successful sales on our platform. This innovative pricing model will reduce our circulating supply in a similar manner as our current staking offering. However, rather than offering additional OGN incentives that would increase circulating supply, we’re offering waived fees instead.

For creators who don’t want to opt into the OGN option, we will charge a competitive and creator-friendly commission of 7.5% that is half the prevailing market rate on other drop sites. In this situation, the creator will keep 92.5% of sales proceeds (less minting and credit card processing costs), while the remainder is earned by the platform. Over the next couple of months, we will aggressively evaluate and determine the best way to accrue value to OGN holders with this platform revenue. Possibilities include directly distributing dividends to OGN stakers and running frequent and automated OGN buybacks. As we fine-tune our value accrual model, we will be bringing these options to OGN holders for a governance vote.

Secondary sales and royalties

Time and time again, we’ve heard that secondary royalties are of primary importance to many creators. On Origin Story, creators will get their very own marketplaces that are hosted on their custom storefronts. This enables NFT sellers that are more sensitive to their brand images to control their secondary experiences.

At the same time, we believe in open protocols and standards. NFTs can and should be sold on secondary marketplaces like OpenSea. To support royalties across platforms, NFT contracts deployed by creators through Origin Story include contract metadata that passes royalty information to OpenSea and, in the future, other marketplaces. This ensures that creators are paid for secondary royalties across the NFT ecosystem.

At launch, secondary royalties will be set at 10%, with 7.5% going to the creator and 2.5% going to Origin. Over time, we expect to allow creators to calibrate their desired royalty percentage. Revenues generated will eventually accrue to OGN holders in one of the aforementioned models.

Creator provenance and just-in-time minting

We believe creator provenance is extremely important. Collectors need to be able to confirm that the NFTs they purchase are in fact minted from smart contracts that creators have deployed.

With today’s upgrade to the platform, each creator will deploy their smart contracts themselves when they are ready to sell, ensuring that provenance is always preserved.

To reduce friction for creators that are getting started with the platform, we won’t require creators to pre-mint NFTs that have not yet been purchased. Rather, NFTs are minted as they are sold in a just-in-time fashion. We intentionally made this design decision so that creators don’t have to deal with the inventory risk of paying for the minting costs of NFTs that may or may not sell.

Flexible sale formats

At launch, creators will be able to sell NFTs in three of the most popular formats:

• 1 of 1 auctions
• Limited editions
• Open editions

1 of 1 auctions have become the standard for scarce pieces of art. Auctions can start and end according to the auction duration that is set by the creator. Auctions automatically extend when bids are placed in the final 5 minutes to give everyone a fair opportunity to place a winning bid.

Limited editions are fixed in quantity. They can be sold as evergreen sales or as timed sales. In evergreen sales, NFTs are listed in perpetuity until they sell out. This format is particularly useful for up and coming creators that are just starting to grow their collector bases. In contrast, timed sales have a beginning and closing time.

Open editions have fixed beginning and closing times like auctions. These are designed to be flash sales, usually of fairly short duration. The exact edition count will match the number of purchases that happen in the time window. These sales enable creators to aggregate demand in short time windows. Open editions are ideal for selling lower-priced NFTs that can later serve as access tokens to other sales, content, and other gated features.

Over time, we expect to introduce a multitude of new innovative sales mechanics that creators can employ, including more exotic auction formats.

Multiple currency support

Origin Story currently supports sales denominated in ETH and USD with the intention of supporting other currencies in the near future. Creators can price their NFTs in either currency and also choose their supported payment methods. For USD-denominated sales, the platform enables creators to accept credit card payments provided that they pass approvals by our payment processing partner, Stripe.

Ethereum is the gold standard in NFTs, so it is very important that the platform caters to established, web3-enabled NFT purchasers. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we chose to prioritize credit card payments to allow creators to reach their mainstream fans. As the NFT market matures, we have a strong thesis that established personalities like athletes, musicians, actors, politicians, and businesses will bring in mainstream users, many of whom are new to crypto. We hope that Origin Story will be the marketplace to power many users’ first interactions with NFTs and the broader crypto ecosystem.

What’s next

This is just the beginning of an exciting next chapter for Origin Story as the upgrade to our original NFT Launchpad. We will be focusing on several core themes as we continue to refine and scale the product and our customer base.

First, we will be keenly focused on driving value to OGN as we launch many more sales which will either generate protocol revenue or incentivize OGN lock-ups. We will also be adding new OGN use cases. For example, as we roll out new premium features, some or all of them will require creators to stake or use OGN as the native currency. In addition, we are very motivated to continue simplifying user experiences for both sellers and buyers, allowing us to target more and more mainstream users, while also allowing for more customization, flexibility, and novel experiences for creators. We expect NFTs to act as access tokens that can unlock experiences for collectors such as private communities (e.g. Discord and Telegram), premium content, or entry into future sales/raffles. Expect to see us roll out more themes, sales mechanics, and payment methods. In addition, we will be developing features to target the Metaverse, gaming, and generative art categories over time. We also expect that NFT growth will be multi-chain, and hope to support numerous layer one and layer two chains over time. Once we have reached sufficient scale, we anticipate building a user-friendly aggregator marketplace for secondary sales and pursuing developer APIs that empower developers and top-tier brands to create truly custom experiences. Platform fees generated by these new feature sets will all accrue value to OGN holders.

Why Story

We built the original NFT Launchpad to enable top creators to launch their NFT drops. However, we’ve realized that building an enduring, ever-evolving platform that isn’t just focused on individual NFT drops that start and end is much more impactful. Instead, we believe our platform and NFT technology as a whole enables creators to tell their stories in a much more powerful, direct-to-fan way. These stories are what will drive the new web3 creator economy forward.

Similarly, we don’t see basic NFT sales as the only and last piece of what we want to do at Origin. We plan to continuously iterate and upgrade our products so that NFTs have far-reaching and diverse utility. NFTs will power the Metaverse revolution that we are just beginning to see. We also expect NFTs as access and social tokens to become huge categories. We see the potential of NFT ticketing and Play-to-Earn gaming in revolutionizing multi-billion dollar industries. We believe NFTs will be an integral part of tracking ownership and provenance of high-end physical goods (e.g. tomorrow’s StockX) and creating new ways for creators and super fans to interact (e.g. tomorrow’s Patreon). NFTs are a fundamental building block to web3 just like HTML and basic webpages were just the first building blocks in web1 and web2. From HTML as a basic building block of the early Internet, we saw entire new categories of markets emerge, like blogging, e-commerce, social networking, and more. The story of what we are building at Origin and what we hope to achieve, whether that’s disrupting massive existing industries or creating brand new markets that were never before possible, is also in the beginning chapters.

Learn more about Origin:

• Get started with Origin Story: story.xyz
• Buy Origin Tokens (OGN): Coinbase, Binance, Huobi, Upbit
• Track OGN token metrics: originprotocol.com/dashboard
• Participate in governance: vote.originprotocol.com
• Join our team: angel.co/originprotocol/jobs