Origin Protocol Adds Support For First Stablecoin, Maker’s DAI

SAN FRANCISCO, April 9, 2019: Today, San Francisco-based Origin Protocol (“Origin”), a blockchain platform for building decentralized marketplaces on Ethereum, announced support for its first stablecoin: MakerDAO’s DAI.

Origin Protocol intends to support many ERC20 tokens over time, but users have been asking to be able to use a stablecoin since the platform’s smart contracts went live on the Ethereum mainnet in October of last year.

DAI is a popular ERC20 token that is price-pegged at $1 USD. Since launching in late 2007, DAI has kept a remarkably steady peg with the dollar, despite significant fluctuations in the price of ETH. Today, there are thousands of daily active users of DAI that use it for many purposes, such as buying/selling, storing value, and trading.

“To date, all payments on Origin have been in ETH and the price volatility has been especially challenging for categories like home-sharing which often have a long period of time between booking and fulfillment,” said Origin co-founder Josh Fraser. “In addition,” he continued, “Origin now denominates prices in fiat currencies so buyers and sellers can more easily reason about the price of the goods or services they are purchasing. Sellers can choose whether they want to accept ETH, DAI or both.”

The MakerDAO team behind DAI, also based in San Francisco, has built one of the few stablecoins that are seeing traction outside of exchanges and inside decentralized applications, which was a key reason Origin Protocol decided to work with them to bring price stability to Origin-powered marketplaces.
About Origin Protocol: Origin Protocol is building a blockchain platform that allows developers and businesses to build decentralized marketplaces. Origin Protocol enables true peer-to-peer commerce between buyers and sellers of goods and services to transact on the distributed, open web. By doing this, Origin Protocol hopes to lower transaction fees, distribute value more fairly throughout the network, promote free commerce where it is banned or over-regulated, and serve the billions of unbanked. Origin Protocol is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain and Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and raised $38M from top VCs like Pantera Capital and Foundation Capital as well as angel investors like Alexis Ohanian (founder of Reddit), Garry Tan (former partner of YCombinator), and Steve Jang (founding advisor at Uber).