VIDEO: From an early employee at YouTube to founding Origin Protocol | Matthew Liu

The cryptocurrency space, the Internet, and the economy at large, have changed immeasurably over the last few years. This week on the Invezz podcast, I was reminded of quite how different both are.

I talked to Matthew Liu, who was one of the first product managers at YouTube, before he went on to co-found the Origin Protocol. We touched on a variety of subjects, but perhaps the most interesting was how he went from an early employee at a small website named YouTube to discovering Bitcoin and grabbing Ethereum as soon as it came online.

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But Origin was a very interesting topic to break down, too. Especially in the current environment, as one of their biggest products is the yield-generating stablecoin OUSD. This is notable because the Federal Reserve has obviously transitioned to a new interest paradigm, where rates in traditional finance are now competing with DeFi.

Matthew chats about how this has affects OUSD and the DeFi landscape at large. Of course, there is also the risk element. I was curious to hear where the yield comes from on the stablecoin, as if there is one thing that the crypto market has taught us this year, it is that it is important to answer that question.

And as for FTX? Matthew had some thoughts there, too. We put our heads together to figure out quite how it went wrong at FTX, and also discussed the mainstream media reaction to the debacle. Needless to say, the former golden boy of crypto did not exactly draw praise from us.

I also asked Matthew whether it was frustrating to be in an industry with its image so tarnished by the recent events. We chatted about the Luna crash earlier in the year, and how Origin managed to largely escape the madness, other than indirect affects felt by everyone in the space.

NFTs are also a big part of the Origin mission. We talked about their work in this area, and what Matthew thinks of the dominance of OpenSea. He had a good analogy about eBay and OpenSea, forecasting a more fragmented NFT landscape which better caters for specialisation, as opposed to the general, one size fits all approach we currently see with OpenSea.

We also discussed Paris Hilton, who has invested in Origin, and intriguing developments around real estate and NFTs, including a partnership with Rooftstock, who I interviewed last month.

We danced around other topics, and all in all it was a fun conversation spanning across Matthew’s years in crypto, his thoughts on DeFi, NFTs, fraud in the space, the current high-rate environment, stablecoins and more.

Continue the conversation on Twitter with @InvezzPortal, @DanniiAshmore and @OriginProtocol. Or visit https://www.originprotocol.com/ for more information. 

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