BW.com weekly AMA with Anna from Origin Protocol: We have a world class team and we share a different vision for the future of the sharing economy

The AMA (Ask Me Anything) held every Friday by the BW.com official telegram(following as BW) invited Anna Wang from Origin Protocol this week. In over 90 minutes, Anna answered all the questions which raised in the eight BW communities of different languages in terms of the recent progress of their project. She also shared her opinion on the direction of the development for Origin Protocol in the future and the goal this world-class team has focus on all the time.

Section 1: Introduction

Allen: As usual, could you tell us briefly your previous experience in the blockchain industry and how’s your current work now? thanks.

Anna (The following is abbreviated as A): Sure Allen; As mentioned earlier, I’m the regional manager for Greater China at Origin Protocol, I’m working on expanding Origin’s business footprint and growing our community in China and in parts of Asia, Over the past month or two we have been doing events in multiple cities in China as well as growing our team in Shanghai, so it’s been really fun. I’ve been at Origin for a year now, and I believe in our vision more strongly than ever. I got into blockchain through origin, actually why did I join Origin? People often ask me that, and I think one thing that is crucial to the concept of the sharing economy is trust, and it makes sense that it is sometimes also referred to as the trust economy, and I think in recent times we are seeing a lot of this trust disappear.
Origin has a different vision for the future of the sharing economy, one in which users aren’t taken advantage of and their privacy isn’t compromised, anyone, anywhere in the world can confidently participate
It’s not going to be an easy task at all, but I’m excited to wake up everyday and work towards this with the team (:

Section 2: Questions from BW 8 global Communities

Question 1 @a458895542 from BW Turkish community:
We have known that Origin Protocol is a project launched for a while, any big progress or updates recently that you could share with us? what are the special and unique characteristics of ORIGIN that make it different from the others, that make investors and users decide to invest into it? What is the foundation of ideas in building this project?
(Menşe Protokolünün bir süredir başlatılan bir proje olduğunu, son zamanlarda bizimle paylaşabileceğiniz büyük ilerlemeler veya güncellemeler olduğunu biliyoruz. ORIGIN’in onu diğerlerinden farklı kılan, yatırımcıların ve kullanıcıların buna yatırım yapmaya karar vermelerini sağlayan özel ve benzersiz özellikleri nelerdir? Bu projenin oluşturulmasında fikirlerin temeli nedir?)

A: That’s a great question to kick things off with.
For some of the big updates, in April this year we launched Origin Rewards, which allows all of our users to become token holders alongside our team and investors, and in July, we launched a significant upgrade to our mobile apps and our web DApp.
You can check them out at:
www.originprotocol.com/mobile (available for both iOS and Android)
www.shoporigin.com (on the web)
For the second part of the question, in terms of why Origin is different and what made investors and users decide to invest into it, I think it’s really the team.
We have a world class team made up of successful serial entrepreneus and people who built and scaled some of the most iconic companies in the world.
For example we have one of the co-founders of PayPal, Yu Pan, on our team, as well as multiple early employees at companies like YouTube and Google.
We also put a lot of emphasis on building a valuable product that people will actually use, and we are constantly building and iterating, and we still have a lot of work to do but I’m happy to say that the product is getting better with each new update (:
For the last part of the question, about the “foundation of ideas in building this project”
Origin exists because every single person on our team wants to build something truly disruptive and very very valuable to the world. Even though the technology is still in the early stages, we believe that blockchain will forever transform the way that humans interact on the Internet.
It made sense to us that blockchain and crypto-economic incentives should be used to disrupt traditional two-sided marketplaces. Today, hundreds of intermediaries sit in between billions of users (collectively), facilitating transactions across many different verticals that are actually supposed to be p2p (peer to peer)
They extract large transaction fees and routinely become monopolies that slowly kill innovation, Using blockchain, we believe Origin can enable truly peer-to-peer commerce on the Internet, allowing us to both create and capture a ton of value with our network

Question2 @JohnMathews from BW English community:
How is the trust built on market place? Let’s say I pay to buy something and that something doesn’t get delivered? Will you act as Escrow until the product is delivered? Then it won’t be peer to peer.

A: This will be a more straightforward answer than the previous. Basically, the funds are escrowed in a smart contract, and they will only be released once the buyer finalises the transaction on the platform, Currently, we allow for arbitration in our Marketplace smart contract, in case disputes happen between the buyer and seller, On our Origin DApp, Origin currently serves as the arbitrator in the rare case that a dispute happens. However the smart contract allows for any third-party to be an arbitrator as well

Question3 @mohan_ram from BW Indian community:
Once $OGN is generated will the marketplace have an option to deal with OGN? If yes, what are the benefits over other payment modes.
(एक बार $ OGN उत्पन्न हो जाने के बाद बाज़ार के पास OGN से निपटने का एक विकल्प होगा? यदि हाँ, तो अन्य भुगतान मोड पर क्या लाभ हैं।)

A: Yes both parties, For the 3rd question, We are planning for OGN (Origin token) to be one of the accepted currencies, One of the major benefits would be that users can earn OGN on Origin and then immediately spend it on Origin as well, instead of having to acquire ETH or DAI first, which are the the two payment methods we currently support, We will also continue to explore new token use cases as we go along too.
Now is probably also a good time to remind you to join Origin Rewards and get free OGN, if you haven’t already signed up . Here is the link : https://www.originprotocol.com/en/ogn-token

Question4 @MrSnippe from BW African community:
How many active users are registered on your marketplace and what is the total number of Ads posted at marketplace?

We launched our mainnet beta towards the end of last year, and some interesting numbers to share would be that since then we have driven several thousand buy and sell transactions on the network, we’ve had tens of thousands of users use our mobile apps (available on both iOS and Android) and also our web DApp. We are also seeing early success with our newly launched Origin Rewards incentive program, with a lot of users participating in each month’s campaign to get OGN (:

Question5 @hemadi21 from BW Indonesian community:
What is the biggest challenge that the origin protocol has passed and how to overcome it?
(apa tantangan terbesar yang telah dilewati oleh origin protocol dan bagaimana cara mengatasinya)

A: Hmmm, so, user adoption is probably the biggest challenge; I wouldn’t say that we have already successfully overcame this, but we are getting a little closer each day, We believe the key to unlocking this is to make our product easier and easier to use (not just easy to use but also good to look at 😁) . Origin development is progressing quite fast. On the product side, we spent 1 year building out our beta and getting to Mainnet.
We’ve built several upgrades in just the past few months. Our development cycles with each major new release are growing shorter, and the product is getting much better each time. Again, we know there is still a LOT of work to do, but we are improving very quickly, In the past few months, we made many user experience improvements to make our flagship app easier to use, For example, we re-designed the Marketplace app from a mobile-first perspective (after we discovered that a lot of our traffic was coming from mobile users), and we also launched new features to Origin Rewards, our program that incentivizes users with OGN to use and share our app. Most recently we also launched Meta Transactions (subsidising gas fees for our users) so that Origin users don’t have to pay for ETH gas to create their profiles or listings. This greatly reduces friction when onboarding new users. In the next few quarters we plan to continue to improve the experience of our flagship app. More importantly, we want to enable our partners to be successful with their own apps. In the next few months, we will unlock our token and also announce new token use cases to grow the network 😌

Question6 @Xxracer from BW Spanish community:
what is the plan having in mind the current bearish market behavior ,in order to protect the contribution done by investors? Will there be any changes done to roadmap, to accomodate the recent changes of the crypto paradigm, or will the company follow what was stated initially on Whitepaper?
(¿Cuál es el plan teniendo en cuenta el comportamiento bajista actual del mercado, para proteger la contribución de los inversores? ¿Se realizarán cambios en la hoja de ruta, para adaptarse a los cambios recientes del paradigma criptográfico, o la empresa seguirá lo que se indicó inicialmente en el Whitepaper?)

A: The current market conditions have indeed been a topic of concern and discussion lately, so this is a good question too. Firstly, we actually very recently shared our updated roadmap and the latest version of our whitepaper. You can find them on our newly redesigned website, It’s got a sleek new look and a ton of new content on there, so don’t forget to check it out!, Perhaps @AllenQue can help to share the link in a bit (:, We believe the best way to build value is to actually build something people will use, which is why we are constantly building and iterating our product., So regardless of market conditions, we will always be keeping our heads down working hard and building a good product.
But in addition to that, there are also new token models and new marketplace features that we are working on right now. We will share more updates with the community as we make progress.
We have very recently shared our updated roadmap and the latest version of our whitepaper. You can find them on our newly rdesigned website at https://www.originprotocol.com/.

Question7 @Ekonsward from BW Russian community:
How long do you think the development of your project will take to be used all over the world, is it difficult to make such an adaptation ?
(Как вы думаете, сколько времени займёт развитие вашего проекта для того, чтобы его использовали во всем мире, сложно ли произвести такую адаптацию?)

A: Yes it’s difficult 😂
But on a serious note, I think it is always challenging for any project to achieve global adoption, but we are tackling the challenges one by one and constantly making our product better and easier to use.
I think this question overlaps with the previous one about the greatest challenge that we face at Origin. User adoption is difficult but we will get there by slowly abstracting away all the complexities of the blockchain. In time, our users shouldn’t even know that they are using an app on the blockchain, and they shouldn’t need to even know what crypto or blockchain are.
Once OGN is unlocked, we also plan to be more aggressive with our incentive systems, and we expect this to play a huge role in further driving usage. We expect a significantly increased user base within a year.

Question8 @rreyey from BW Japanese Community:
Why is the Orgin app like a market that sells everything from homes to equipment?
(なぜOrginアプリは、家庭、機器などのすべてを販売する市場のようなものですか？)

A: What we have done is, we have built a generic marketplace platform at the infrastructure layer that can support multiple use cases (simple e-commerce like selling clothing, toys etc, to sharing economy uses like home-sharing)
And our marketplace smart contract can also handle many different types of transactions
We expect our current developer partners (and new ones!) to continue to build out more new use cases in many more verticals over time, and we expect to see many more Origin-powered apps in 2020.
Our Origin Marketplace app actually aggregates all of the listings created across all origin-powered marketplaces, which is why you see all kinds of goods and services on there

Question 9 @ yum2177 the sharging economy is getting colder now, the business mode is yet to be prove, how would you make sure that decentralized mode will work?yum2177

A: There is definitely more negative sentiment around the sharing economy nowadays, especially with the poor performance of Uber’s IPO and also the recent high profile discussion of wework’s IPO, One thing I have to say is that the sharing economy is actually continuing to scale rapidly despite its recent bad publicity
To reference some numbers from the market I take care of, over 600 million people participates in the sharing economy in China yearly, and globally, gross bookings are expected to cross $335B by 2025 (these are conservative estimates)
The world is becoming more peer-to-peer, with individual suppliers driving more and more commercial activity, Blockchain technology is in its early stages, but it’s already transcending borders and is growing in many countries across the world, and it is perfectly designed for the peer-to-peer world and the sharing economy use case.
Both the sharing economy and blockchain industries face their own challenges, but there’s no denying that the overall markets are both poised to grow at accelerating paces in the years to come. We strongly believe that we can ride the momentum in the global sharing economy and gradually steal more and more market share from traditional sharing economy players by embracing blockchain technology.

Question 10 : Any partnership with Indonesian project in the next future?@annawangsj

A： Thanks for this question @Hemadi21 !
Right now we don’t have any concrete partnership plans with an Indonesian project, but we would absolutely love to and it is something we will be working towards over the next few quarters.

Thanks for watching this AMA. If you are interested in Origin Protocol, please visit their
official website: https://www.originprotocol.com/en
official Twitter: https://twitter.com/originprotocol
official telegram: https://t.me/originprotocol

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