Dear Reader,
Today we will explore the OmiseGO cryptocurrency and look at nine reasons why it is a top 20 cryptocurrency. OmiseGO (OMG) is a subsidiary blockchain of the Omise payment gateway service which is popular in South East Asia. Naturally, the OMG network focuses on financial transactions as its parent company has experience beyond cryptocurrency technology. The Ninelives series has covered most of the top 20 coins (links below) and will continue to look into lesser-known yet still promising blockchains. Many early adaptors of blockchain technology think that only a few blockchains are necessary or relevant, but the goal of this series is to establish that there are many other projects which will intend to solve a problem using distributed ledger technology. So without further delay, let's jump into the #Ninelives of OmiseGO.
UnBanking the banked: OmiseGO's motto and primary use case, it plans on creating mobile financial infrastructure so everyone can perform banking operations without a bank. Most people don't qualify for loans, cannot afford banking fees or don't even have access to a bank, OMG plans on changing this. Our current financial systems reward the wealthy while penalizing the poor, OMG intends to create a decentralized banking system were having an account at a financial institution is not necessary to function in our modern society. You will be able to use the OMG network to transact directly with individuals or companies of your choice; you can store your wealth virtually, not at some bank but in your own secure wallet. To sum it up, OMG aims to remove the need for people to use a centralized banking system.
Omise: Omise is a Fintech company operating in Thailand, they are the parent company of OmiseGO. Omise has been operating since 2013 and focuses on online payment solutions, with numerous partnerships including Alipay and MacDonald's. Omise launched OmiseGO in 2017 bringing their expertise in digital payment systems to the blockchain. No one owns the OMG network as it is decentralized and open-sourced.
Plasma Architecture: OMG is a child chain of Ethereum, it's a blockchain within a blockchain. One of the major issues with Ethereum is scalability, the network can only handle so many transactions and calculations. OMG intends to do all of the transactions and calculations on its own blockchain and use the Ethereum (root) blockchain just for validation. The root blockchain will only be heavily utilized in the event of a dispute. Plasma allows those who trust Ethereum to trust the child blockchains. Since OMG is the first blockchain projects to use plasma, it has the advantage of being able to consult with the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin and the co-author of Plasma, Joseph Poon. You can find the Plasma whitepaper here https://plasma.io/
White-label Wallet Software Development Kit (SDK): The SDK feature of OMG intends to standardize and simplify the creation of digital wallets. Let's face it, using a Bitcoin or Ethereum wallet isn't simple and programming a digital wallet is even more difficult. OMG's wallet SDK allows a company without technical expertise to make a unique and branded wallet in a matter of minutes, they can choose which currencies to store and transact with, create reward tokens, etc. They have already launched the beta version and are steadily improving it, you can follow this progress on their GitHub https://github.com/omisego/ Using the wallet won't cost anything and you would not even know it's powered by OMG.
Decentralized Exchange (DEX): No bank account or exchange is required with OmiseGO, you will be able to directly interact with another entity without requiring a third-party intermediary. Person A sends money to Person B, there is no person C. This improves trust, lowers costs and makes the system more secure as there are fewer fail points. OMG's Decentralized Exchange is in still under development. DEXs will drastically alter the financial industry in the coming decades fulfilling OMG's key promise to disrupt banks.
Currency Agnostic: OMG doesn't care or discriminate against whichever currencies you are exchanging. Fees often vary according to what you are transacting in and where you are transacting it; with OMG, foreign exchange rates and different asset classes will not matter. Since there are no intermediaries or third parties, costs are significantly cheaper. Whether you are converting ETH to BTC or USD to XRP, it doesn't matter, using OMG's technology will incur the lowest transaction costs possible. This is a key feature of DEXs.
Proof of Stake (POS): OmiseGO uses Proof of Stake to validate transactions and reach the distributed consense, there are no miners like in bitcoin so it is a much less expensive system to operate. Instead of investing in expensive equipment and wasting electricity to solve transactions like a bitcoin mining operation, POS just looks at how much of the cryptocurrency you are holding and rewards you based on that. Minimums or maximums required to operate a node or acquire stakes have yet to be announced, they will be associated with the transaction costs and will be as low as possible. OMG has announced that operating a node to validate transactions won't be any more expensive than running a decent home computer and that holding OMG will produce a high enough return to make it an attractive investment.
Vitalik Buterin: Since OMG is closely associated and helps solve problems with Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin is an advisor. OMG is more than just another decentralized application built on the Ethereum Blockchain so key developers of Ethereum are very interested in OmiseGO. There is no better endorsement for a blockchain project than Vitalk, asides from perhaps the legendary Santoshi who created bitcoin.
Partnerships: Since OmiseGo is a child of Omise, many partners of Omise are interested in OMG. OMG makes it extremely simple for smaller companies to operate loyalty programs and create accounts with their client's so naturally there are many interested parties. They have partnered with many large companies including Thai Airways, MacDonald's Thailand, Insurance companies, Telecommunications companies, a large cement company, and even a Korean Bank. Since OMG's products are all but free to use, they don't really need partners, they just need adoption and they are already well known in South East Asia.
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Thank you for taking the time to read about OmiseGo, I am definitely more interested in following the project after researching it and writing this post. For further reading here is a link to their website https://omisego.network/ OMG seems more similar to Stellar (XLM) than any other cryptocurrency. It will be interesting to watch if transactional cryptocurrencies you need to purchase such as Ripple, Litecoin or Bitcoin can compete with not-for-profit coins which aid transactions such as OMG. Keep in mind, no one has to buy OMG, it is simply just used to facilitate the transfer of assets from one individual to another. I would love to hear your opinion on this below, also any comment, question or corrections are greatly appreciated.
In no way is this meant to be financial advice, it is intended for informational purposes only. I do not recommend purchasing, using, selling or holding OmiseGO, OMG or any cryptocurrency. I am not affiliated with Omise or the OmiseGO Network in any way and only have never directly invested in OMG. Please do your own research when making investment decisions. Cryptocurrencies are highly speculative and you can lose your entire investment.
Previous Topics in the Ninelives Series
| ICOs | IOTA | Bitcoin | TRON | Binanace |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ethereum | Stellar Lumens | Ripple | NEM | Vechain |
| Monero | Litecoin | Dash | Cardano | BAT |
| EOS | NEO | Ontology |
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