Sharing Economy Startup Origin Raises $28 Million in SAFT Sale

Origin, the startup behind a platform for peer-to-peer services, has raised $28.5 million through a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT) sale.

The funding was revealed in a Form D filing published Tuesday by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Per the document, 190 investors took part in the sale, which occurred between January and April of this year. All were accredited investors, according to the filing, and a spokesperson for the startup confirmed the funding amount when reached.

As CoinDesk reported in December, the startup sold $3 million worth of its tokens to venture fund Pantera Capital. The funding went toward the development of Origin's platform, which its founders described as a system for creating decentralized marketplaces.

A public token sale will occur at some point, co-founder Josh Fraser told CoinDesk. And while Fraser could not confirm a timeline for token distribution, he said "we expect [it] to happen at the same time as the platform launch."

"We already have an early proof of concept on testnet, and are still on track to do our mainnet launch in Q3 of this year. ... Development progress is coming along really well," Fraser said, adding:

"For example, we've built out the first working implementation of the ERC 725 identity standard as proposed by Fabian (same guy who came up with ERC 20). We just released an identity playground and are working on integrating the standard into Origin so identity is fully portable between Origin marketplaces and anyone else who supports this open standard."

The SAFT sale comes amid a busy season for such offerings, as evidenced by the $133 million raised by Basis – announced on Wednesday – from backers like Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures.

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