OmiseGO announced on Tuesday the public Alpha release of the OMG Network, a scaling solution for finance on Ethereum.

The release, named ‘Ari’ — meaning ‘hospitable, gentle, accommodating’ in Thai — was announced in a blog post on Tuesday.

The OMG Network is designed to serve as a scaling solution for Ethereum, and is specifically focused on financial applications and services. The OMG token raised $25 million in its ICO in June 2017, but aside from a number of infamous marketing stunts, development has been mostly quiet until now.

Using the Rinkeby Ethereum Testnet as a base layer, the current Alpha version of the network implements both More Viable Plasma for ETH transfers, and Minimal Viable Plasma for ERC-20 token transfers. These are trustless sidechains that will allow Ethereum to scale beyond its 10-25 transactions-per-second, reducing transaction fees and providing near-instant transaction times.

According to the OmiseGO team, the network has the capability to process over 2700 transactions per second, although that value is simply the highest they’ve tested — implying the network is capable of even greater throughput.

Scaling Ethereum

Plasma, which the OMG Network is primarily developing, is just one scaling solution currently in development for the Ethereum network.

Raiden — Ethereum’s Lightning Network — aims to bring instant and scalable payments to Ethereum and its tokens. Unlike Plasma, however, Raiden is purely oriented towards payments, and does not support smart contracts. The network recently announced the mainnet release of its ‘Red Eyes’ version.

Meanwhile, Ethereum 2.0 — also known as ‘Serenity’ — which seeks to change Ethereum’s consensus algorithm to Proof of Stake, implement sharding, and potentially allow the network to perform thousands of times the number of transactions per second, is rapidly developing on the Ethereum testnet.