While it's impossible to guarantee that OUSD's contracts are 100% safe, every step possible has been taken to mitigate the risk of funds being lost. Every change that is made to OUSD goes through extensive internal and external auditing with OpenZeppelin, one of the most respected security firms in the world, on retainer.

All of OUSD’s smart contract code is open-source and verified on Etherscan with a $250,000 bug bounty offered through Immunifi. Every new yield-earning strategy goes through a rigorous economic review and requires community approval before any funds are deployed.

OUSD and all of its related smart contracts are owned and governed by a decentralized community of token holders. OGN stakers control the future of the protocol through a vote-escrowed token (xOGN), governance module, and timelock. On-chain proposals can be used to modify parameters or upgrade the protocol.

While normal stablecoins lose purchasing power, OUSD grows automatically in your wallet. By holding OUSD, you get access to safe, competitive stablecoin yield without needing to stake or lock up your funds. OUSD can be redeemed at any time by anyone and there are no gatekeepers. The Origin Dollar stablecoin is fully collateralized and can be transferred like any other ERC-20 token.

Minting OUSD is completely free aside from the gas cost necessary for any Ethereum transaction. Depending on the current value of your collateral according to Chainlink’s price oracles, you may receive slightly less than one OUSD for each dollar of collateral deposited.

When OUSD is redeemed or burned on the OUSD dapp, a fee of 0.25% is charged as a security measure to protect the protocol from being used as a free DEX when stablecoin prices fluctuate. However, this fee can usually be avoided by simply selling OUSD on an exchange or AMM.

Selling OUSD instead of redeeming it also enables you to choose which token or currency you end up with. If you redeem OUSD for underlying collateral, you will receive a proportional mix of stablecoins according to the current balances of the Origin vault. There are no fees, other than gas, required to transfer OUSD.

Smart contracts are required to opt-in to receive stablecoin yield from OUSD. AMMs often feature immutable contracts or are unwilling to handle the added complexity of accounting for tokens that have an ever-increasing balance. As a result, these contracts have not opted-in, and the stablecoin interest from their OUSD is added to the OUSD balances in regular user wallets.

OUSD lives on the Ethereum blockchain. It is currently only available on Mainnet but may be expanded to a Layer 2 or additional chains in the future.

There is no need for DeFi staking, locking up stablecoins, or collecting yield as long as you’re holding OUSD. Wallet balances increase automatically at least once per day. If you hold OUSD in a smart contract, such as Safe, you will need to opt-in to receive the yield by making a one-time function call. Check outthe documentation for how to enable stablecoin yield.

Real-time monitoring is in place to alert OUSD’s strategists any time trouble is brewing in the protocols or stablecoins that make up OUSD’s strategies. The strategists are empowered to take swift action and protect the value of OUSD’s holdings by reallocating funds across the whitelisted strategies and the Origin vault.

Additionally, several defensive mechanisms have been built into the protocol to mitigate the risk of malicious actors taking advantage of OUSD in this case. While there is no guarantee that OUSD would maintain its full value in the event of an underlying de-peg, there are measures in place to protect OUSD holders even in a worst-case scenario. Check out the documentation for more details.

All funds are held by decentralized, automated, on-chain contracts rather than company wallets or money managers. Large deposits are automatically routed to default yield-earning strategies and smaller deposits are eventually put to work when anyone calls the public allocate function on the Origin vault contract. On a weekly basis, OGN stakers vote to determine the desired allocation of funds across OUSD’s active strategies to earn yield on stablecoins backing OUSD. The resulting reallocation is executed by members of the Strategist multi-sig, subject to their review and discretion.

OUSD can be purchased from a variety of decentralized and centralized exchanges or minted directly by depositing Dai, USDT, or USDC collateral into the Origin vault. The easiest way to get OUSD on-chain is through the swap dapp, which will automatically select the option that is most economically advantageous at the time.

The beta version of OUSD was first deployed during DeFi Summer on Septemper 18, 2020. The current version of OUSD went live in January of 2021. Since then, OUSD’s supply has scaled up to approximately 300 million and back down to current levels without experiencing any issues.