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OmiseGO (OMG) is a money transfer system of Southeast Asian origin. It is based on Ethereum’s technology and seeks to provide a platform for transactions for individuals and institutions without having to resort to central intermediaries.

Besides Jun Hasegawa as the founder of OmiseGO and CEO of Omise, Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum), Gawin Wood (co-founder of Ethereum), Joseph Poon (creator of the Bitcoin Lightning Network) as well as Julian Zawistowski (founder of Golem) are direct founding members or advisory members of OmiseGO. The young startup is therefore supported and further developed by top-class developers from the blockchain sector, which makes the ambitious goals seem quite realistic.

OmiseGO achieved great fame through the ICO (initial coin offering) held in June 2017. In this ICO, 140 million OMG tokens were issued for over 35 million dollars. A short time later, the value per token increased to over 8 dollars – an exponential price jump of over 300%.

Omise – The company behind OmiseGO

A clear unique selling point of OmiseGO is its integration into the “parent company” Omise: an established Southeast Asian company with well over 100 employees and a growing user base in almost every Southeast Asian country. Omise is one of the largest providers of financial services for people without a bank account (around 2 billion people worldwide do not have access to a bank account).

Omise intends to use OmiseGO as a central payment system in the near future, enabling millions of people to make cost-effective and fast transactions with both fiat currencies (Euro, Dollar, etc.) and crypto currencies. This would give people who currently have no access to banking services a much more efficient account than local financial institutions can currently offer. Omise has a dynamic development and numerous partnerships (including McDonalds Thailand, Alipay and Shinhan Card Co., Korea’s largest credit card company). That’s why Forbes magazine awarded Omise the title “Fintech Rockstar”. OmiseGO’s slogan is “unbank the banked”.

How does OmiseGO work?

OmiseGO has two basic functions: the gateway between different blockchains and the wallet with integrated decentralized Exchange (DEX). By combining the two products, OmiseGO provides an efficient, decentralized wallet for different fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies, and other assets in the future. These can then be traded easily, quickly and cost-effectively within the wallet. The OmiseGO Payment Gateway makes it possible to pay anywhere in the world with the currency of your choice, OmiseGO automatically converts to the target currency.

OmiseGO currently works through the Ethereum Blockchain, but in the future OmiseGO will get its own Blockchain (Proof of Stake based). OmiseGO will also be the first project to use Ethereum’s planned “Plasma” infrastructure upgrade. Plasma is an upgrade for Ethereum that will enable significantly more transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. This would allow OmiseGO to cost-effectively process millions of transactions per second in the near future.

OmiseGO also provides many other features. For example, it can be used to query account or custody account balances, and it can also handle transactions between different currency areas.

Goals of OmiseGO

Technically, OmiseGO is an Ethereum fork and implements its functions as Smart Contracts on the Ethereum Blockchain. The own OmiseGO blockchain is currently under development. OmiseGO wants to achieve on the one hand that the approximately two billion people worldwide without access to a bank account get this access and on the other hand that all Fiat currencies, crypto currencies and assets at the same time can be stored compactly in a single wallet and traded cost-effectively. OmiseGO is currently working on a Software Development Kit (SDK) for developers to enable any platform to implement OmiseGO. This could multiply the number of potential users. The SDK is scheduled for release in 2018.

OmiseGO will be one of the first Ethereum-based projects to use Plasma and be able to process millions of transactions per second.

Where can I get OmiseGO?

You can buy OmiseGO on KuCoin and if you like to read our KuCoin Review.

Official links about OmiseGO