The OmiseGO (OMG) platform has been developed by Omise Ltd., a venture capital funded payments technology firm based in Thailand. The company also has offices in Japan, Singapore, and Indonesia as it’s reportedly planning to expand its operations further into the Asia-Pacific region.

In this introductory article, we go over the basic concepts and motivation behind the development of OmiseGo’s OMG network.

As described on its official website, the OmiseGo platform aims to “enable financial inclusion and interoperability through the public, decentralized OMG network.” While other cryptocurrencies such as XRP and Stellar’s XLM have been created to expedite cross-border transactions and provide financial services to the unbanked, the OMG platform may also be developing an effective payments ecosystem which may prove to be a better alternative to larger crypto networks in some cases.

Updated SDK For Developers

According to OmiseGo’s developers, the OMG network is “a scaling solution for finance” which is based on the Ethereum blockchain. OMG’s main design goal is to “enable transparent, peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions in real-time” through a “self-sovereign”, borderless financial services network. In addition to digital assets, the OMG platform will allow users to trade fiat currencies and develop decentralized applications (dApps).

In order to build and deploy dApps, there’s a customized and open-source software development toolkit (SDK) that OMG developers can use. OmiseGo’s SDK makes it easier to “enable wallet-to-wallet transactions of crypto and fiat currencies, loyalty points, [and] game credits.” The OMG network also provides a robust digital asset gateway that allows users to “access, manage, and transact” with cryptocurrencies that are held “securely on chain.”

Providing A Clearinghouse & Decentralized Multi-Asset Exchange

What really sets OmiseGo apart from other crypto-related platforms is that its developers are working on creating a clearinghouse. This multi-asset payments settlement solution will facilitate “secure and rapid transaction clearing” by issuing Ethereum-based smart contracts and “protocol consensus.” As explained on OmiseGo’s website, OMG network users will also have access to a decentralized exchange (DEX) that will provide scalable and secure proof-of-stake (PoS)-based “multi-asset and cross-chain interoperability.”

The main benefits of using the OMG network include security, accessibility, and scalability. “Bonding to the Ethereum blockchain” in the manner that the OMG network does (on its testnet) helps to “create secure token custody, decentralized exchange of all Ethereum assets, and ultra-secure transaction validation”, the OmiseGo website notes. Meanwhile, OMG’s developers aim to achieve a high level of scalability for the network by using the Plasma architecture.

Scaling To “Millions, And Potentially Billions” Of Transactions Per Second

Theoretically, the Plasma architecture “allows for unlimited scalability” as it can potentially process “millions, and [maybe even] billions of transactions per second.” Although there are several other cryptocurrency networks that have made similar claims, including EOS and Tron (TRX), the OmiseGo platform is backed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who is one of OMG network’s main technical advisors.

In a highly anticipated update released on December 20th, 2018, the OmiseGo team announced that Plasma researchers had met “over the weekend of December 7-9.” At the meetup, the main topic of discussion was the ongoing development of “Plasma Prime”, which aims to address the double spending problem. More broadly, the Plasma project is a collaborative scalability solution for Ethereum which was first proposed by Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon, the author of the OMG whitepaper and prominent Lightning Network (LN) researcher.

Notably, the OmiseGo project is being developed by many of the same software architects who are focused on the ongoing developments and updates for Ethereum, the world’s largest and most established dApp and smart contract creation platform.