Most yield products require claiming, compounding or wrapping. Origin's rebasing tokens simply increase your balance as yield accrues, with no action required and no separate reward token to manage.
How the yield is generated
OUSD allocates across lending markets and stablecoin strategies; OETH across liquid staking and ETH yield strategies. Allocations are published and updated, so a depositor can see which protocols their capital is exposed to. Fees run roughly 10–20% of yield generated.
The 2020 exploit
A flash-loan attack manipulated a price used by OUSD's strategy, extracting around $7m. Origin published a full post-mortem, pursued recovery, and committed to compensating affected users, which it completed over the following period. Protocols that repay after an exploit are the exception rather than the rule, and it is the main reason the protocol retained any users at all.
The rebasing trade-off
A balance that changes automatically causes friction in DeFi protocols that assume static balances, and in some tax jurisdictions the accounting is more complex than for a value-accruing token. Wrapped non-rebasing versions exist for integration purposes.
Who should use it
Users who want passive stablecoin or ETH yield with no maintenance, at moderate size, and who have read where the strategies allocate. The 2020 incident is old but it is the relevant data point about how this team responds under pressure — favourably, as it turned out.