Omise Go is a new product created by a fintech company based in Thailand called Omise, they recently raised $25 million via their ICO to create the Omise Go token ( OMG ). Omise provides Stripe-like functionality for receiving payments, essentially they want to make Omise Go the Stripe of Asia.

Omise Go is built on the Ethereum network and aims to be a decentralized payment platform for retailers with the aim of disrupting more traditional payment processors.

OmiseGO is the answer to a fundamental coordination problem among payment processors, gateways and financial institutions.

The idea behind Omise Go is to allow the user to share funds without needing a bank account and without incurring fees or cross-border processing costs. Omise aims to signup retail partners to accept the payments and also build a platform which other payment providers can use as well.

This is a very promising product for a number of reasons, take a look below where we delve into Omise Go.

Who is Behind it?

Omise Go stands out because it is being developed by a well established company, Omise was Founded in 2013 and is a venture-backed payments company operating in Thailand, Japan, Singapore, and Indonesia. It is being advised by non other than creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon who is a highly-regarded computer scientist co-wrote the “Lightning Network” white paper and also the white paper for Omise Go itself.

Why Could this be Big?

The payment processing industry is huge, with payment processors moving over $3.6 trillion per year. They typically take a percentage of each transaction which adds up to large amounts of money. The largest processors are companies like VISA, Mastercard, Alipay and Wechat who each process billions each day. The problem with current payment companies is they operate in a closed system and can’t “talk” to each other. For example, if a user has a PayPal account, he can’t send money to a user with an AliPay account – Omise Go is hoping to change this and create a platform based on the blockchain which will allow different processors built on the system to communicate.

Because Omise Go is a platform, similar to Ethereum which will allow other projects to be built on top of it, I think this has the potential to be very profitable for any investors who get in at this very early stage of it’s development.

Millions of mainstream users in the largest growing economies in the world will be enabled to make the transition from using fiat money to using decentralized currencies such as ETH, BTC, and others.

Another reason I see success for this, is the fact that there are currently 50,000 southeast Asian merchants who already use the Omise payment system. This is an audience already built-in which Omise Go can take advantage of immediately. In Asia alone, 420 million people are unbanked and that figure rises to 2 billion world-wide, an audience perfect for taking advantage of the Omise Go system.

ICO Details

The Omise Go ICO ran for one day on June 27th, 2017 and offered tokens capped at $25million at a rate of 1,000 OMG:1 ETH. It receieved it’s target funding in that period and subsequently the OMG token has gone on to be added to exchanges such as Bittrex where it now trades at just over $7 after reaching a high of $9. ( As of 22nd August 2017 ).

Proof of Stake & Air Drop

The OMG system is designed to run on a permissionless proof-of-stake (PoS) network which means the token holders will be able to stake their holdings to secure the network and receive OMG in return. Omise recently announced that they will be doing an “Air Drop” of OMG tokens to all Ethereum holders with a balance of 0.1 eth or more in a private wallet.

5% has already been set aside from the total issuance, ready to be distributed by an automatic airdrop. That is, sometime quite soon, every address on the Ethereum blockchain that held a balance over a minimum threshold of 0.1 ETH at a recent past block height will receive a share of this 5% that is proportionate to their share of ETH.

They are doing this to help make the network stronger by making it possible for hundreds of thousands of Eth holders to become PoS validators.

Conclusion

This looks like a very good project to get behind, with a large and important team behind it and real-world use potential combined with the fact that Omise already has a large system of merchants to tap into I can see the price increasing rapidly over the next year.

Another attractive feature is the Proof of Stake system which will reward token holders for putting their tokens up to secure the network, you could increase your holdings exponentially. Even though the price has risen rapidly since the ICO, I feel there is still time to purchase the tokens with the possibility of seeing 10x returns.