Founded in 2013, OmiseGO is a Thailand-based open payment platform and decentralized exchange issued on Ethereum. Its primary objective is to provide better financial services for both people who use traditional banking services and those in developing countries and jurisdictions that lack traditional banking infrastructure (especially in Southeast Asia). Its associated token (OMG) has achieved a market capitalization of $1,571,159,374 (ranking 5th among all tokens and 19th among all crypto-assets).

The Unbanked: A Serious Problem

Billions of individuals around the globe lack access to traditional banking. In Southeast Asia that number amounts approximately to 483M (73% of its population). While bank accounts are few within many population groups, many people own smartphones. Pete Humiston wrote in tech publication Hackernoon that mobile payment services in those locales are sometimes not quite straightforward:

“...mobile users can load money onto an eWallet for spending. The downfall to this is that in order for users to spend with their eWallet, a merchant must support said wallet. Not ideal for consumers or businesses.

It is incredibly cumbersome to transact across different payment service providers, for example sending money from WeChat to Alipay. There exists a long-tail of entities wishing to provide eWallet services, which requires greater coordination among multilateral participants. Allowing users to exchange value across networks would yield greater network usability, a win-win for all.”

Bridging the Gap

Think of OmiseGo as a universal remittance bridge to interconnect fragmented payment processors, legacy rails, and decentralized blockchains.

This means helping the “unbanked” get banking services through an open-wallet infrastructure and enabling interchangeability between the many legacy rails (ACH, VISA, Paypal) and decentralized blockchains.

OmiseGo is powered by the Plasma architecture, an Ethereum Layer 2 scalability solution which is quite promising in terms of scalability and speed.

Buying OMG Tokens?

OmiseGO does not have OMG tokens for sale, however there are several online trading exchange platforms listing OMG against fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies.

I’m definitely keeping an eye on OMG since it serves a noble purpose and has shown considerable growth in recent times despite some notable fluctuations.

The information provided in this article does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, trading advice or any other sort of advice.