Omise has been around since 2013. This is not a new company, but rather one with history, core investors (20 million in series A and B prior to their latest crowdsale) and a completely serious established operation and team (70+!). They have offices in Thailand, Japan, Indonesia and Singapore. The company provides a payment management system for businesses to accept payments through their mobile application or online store. They work with AliPay as well for example. They have the PCI DSS 3.2 (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) already in place since November last year.
Omise has just recently acquired one of the three largest payment service providers in Thailand, Paysbuy , a licensed by the Bank of Thailand operator of e-money business, and accredited with Trustmark (DBD Verified) by the Ministry of Commerce. This provides a very well established source of active users.
OmiseGO is their blockchain project : "a public Ethereum-based financial technology for use in mainstream digital wallets, that enables real-time, peer-to-peer value exchange and payment services agnostically across jurisdictions and organizational silos, and across both fiat money and decentralized currencies.” . Which to me means that they are taking all that is great in the blockchain technology, and integrating it with their offering, creating a new advanced Omise service.
Other than the lead team working on OmiseGo, the following are all officially advising the project: Vitalik Buterin (ETH lead ) , Dr. Gavin Wood (ETH and Parity lead) , Vlad Zamfir (Casper/ETH lead), Joseph Poon (Lightning Net lead) and Roger Ver of bitcoin.com as well as many others, including a professor of Quantitative Finance. Not aware of any other BC project that has such a list of advisors of this caliber.
Jun Hasegawa, Omise’s CEO, revealed just recently that McDonald’s Thailand (over 240 locations), will be using OmiseGo’s payment channel. A big Press release regarding this news has not been released, and is expected super soon! Also quoting Jun “we're launching OmiseGO to support Omise Payments and all existing stakeholders, including our existing and future merchants, such as McDonald's in other countries in Asia - McDonald's Thailand is just the start. Through OmiseGO, all Omise merchants will be able to seamlessly accept payments in multiple currencies, including ETH or BTC or other cryptos, without needing to know what their client is paying in. And any other payment gateways, including Omise's biggest competitors, as well as global giants like Stripe or Cybersource, will benefit from using OmiseGO/OMG, and are welcome, no partnership or permission needed. The OMG chain will be an entirely public and permissionless network, connected to Ethereum.”
Other than investing in OmiseGo business through their OMG token for all the reasons I detailed here, holders of OMG will also generate an extra income, and quoting Jun : “OMG is a token that secures a public permissionless POS network, whose primary use case is to host a decentralised exchange for digital fiat and crypto alike. It is backed by significant mainstream financial firms in Asia who will use it as the backend for existing digital wallets - think Venmo, Google Wallet, WeChat Pay (examples of digital wallets only) - and for hosting digital fiat tokens for their existing merchant payment network. OMG holders can use OMG to validate the network. If they validate a block correctly, they get paid the tx fees from that block (but if they validate incorrectly, they get punished). Like mining but without the need for hardware.
