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by Jun Hasegawa, CEO, and Founder at OmiseGo

To complement the updates provided through OmiseGo social media channels, Jun offers a long overdue follow up to his previous blog post in April 2018. More specifically, he addresses two things:

Exchange acquisitions Developing a digital asset exchange

For the purpose of this post, he speaks on behalf of Omise Holdings, the parent company that manages a number of subsidiaries, two of which are Omise Payment (initially referred to as Omise) and OmiseGO. Jun is responsible for Omise Holdings and therefore is involved in its strategy as well as the strategies of the subsidiaries, so he’d like to attempt to clarify the company structure that was the basis of the Omise/OmiseGO strategy vol. 1 blog post.

Omise Holdings structure. Source: Jun’s blog post.

The acquisition of small to mid-sized exchanges is no longer part of Omise Holdings’ plans and Jun provides information on how OmiseGo arrived at that decision.

Building a digital asset exchange

Following the attempts to acquire small to mid-sized exchanges and after conducting more research on the exchange market, OmiseGo felt the real opportunity was to build a platform that would be better than what was out there. As such, they focused on developing a digital asset exchange. Developing their own platform gives them more flexibility on tech development as opposed to inheriting technology that was built with different premises in mind. This gives Omise Holdings more ownership over the direction of the exchange, and they’re able to incorporate insights from (and provide feedback to) the OmiseGO team to optimize for their unique position and goals.

For these reasons, Omise Holdings launched a new subsidiary called GO.Exchange that would develop a user-facing digital asset exchange. The thinking behind this decision was framed around many factors, but the most publicly communicated point was that this trading platform would add value to the OMG Network ecosystem.

From the Omise Holdings vantage point, it is crucial that they treat each entity as a unique building block. While they aim for synergy between their subsidiaries, there is a time and place for everything. They want to allow each business (Omise Payment, OmiseGO and GO.Exchange) to grow independently, and offer them the freedom to carve out their own unique paths to fulfill their individual mandates.

GO.Exchange

GO.Exchange aims to be a secure, sustainable platform for the exchange of digital assets, striving to support Omise Holdings’ vision and contribute to the future of decentralized finance.

Internal incubation of GO.Exchange solidified during the summer of 2018 with an initial team of five, who commenced research and development of the exchange. As of March 2019, GO.Exchange has expanded to over 20 people. The company continues to grow as they look to recruit top-tier talent to accelerate their mission. If you are interested, view open positions here.

With that, Jun announces that the team is now opening up the waiting list ahead of their soft launch. The purpose of the soft launch is to collect more feedback and observe trends in usage behavior, so that the full launch of GO.Exchange will be as beneficial to its users as possible. If you are interested, sign up to be on the waiting list.

Moving forward

Although GO.Exchange and OmiseGO teams are in communication with one another, the OMG Network is not being built to GO.Exchange’s specifications or vice versa. Both companies are developing different products intended to address different needs, and it’s important for each to retain autonomy in order to optimize for their respective purposes. The first goal for GO.Exchange is to attract volume to their platform, then to integrate emerging technologies when the time is right.

The OmiseGO team is a part of the OMG and Ethereum communities, contributing as builders of the OMG Network. The teams there are heads down working on the OMG Network (DEX + implementation of plasma), eWallet Suite and further defining their products and business.

Now that OmiseGO has released the Ari testnet onto Rinkeby in a closed alpha version — collaborating with their friends at Hoard on the first-ever plasma dApp deployment on a public Ethereum network — they’ll be seeking to incrementally increase engagement with developers, partners and implementers; as well as encouraging and supporting community initiatives to contribute to the OMG vision. Among other things they’ve already contributed to the founding of both the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research and Plasma Group, which was founded to create standards and general tools for plasma development which will benefit the entire ecosystem. The team is also ramping up business development efforts, both to bring volume to the network and to continually improve their strategy based on information and feedback gathered from implementers.

On the Omise Payment front, the company continues to forge ahead with their business targets for 2019 and as always, continues to strive to optimize their services and solutions for their customers. They’re looking forward to exploring the ways that the OMG Network can help us achieve this goal as it matures.

The OmiseGO Developer Program (ODP) is an initiative that is part of the product development process. The objective of the ODP is to systematically and carefully facilitate usage and thorough testing of Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs) and early stage products in order to gain feedback for improvement. The program is aimed towards those who would like to build their own products, such as games, financial service applications, and education platforms on top of the OMG Network. Applicants of the ODP will fall into the developer category and are willing to work with unpolished and early stage codebase.

Early testers and integrators are given early access to the new products OmiseGO rolls out. Those in the program will also have opportunities to interact with each other and with the engineering team.

The ODP is an ongoing program and applications are accepted on a rolling basis. The goal is for ODP participants to participate as Alpha testers for roll-outs before they are released to the public in Beta. What this means is that there is no real definite timeline or start and end dates.

While OmiseGo team has no definite dates set, here’s what they have planned out to beginning of April 2019:

1. Whitelisted access to the Alpha release of the OMG Network with integration guide

2. Access to a JS Starter Kit to start making transactions quickly on browsers

3. Communication channel established with OmiseGO Engineers

4. Early access to a ‘Getting Started Guide’ to the OMG Network

Sign up for the OmiseGO Developer Program.

Technical Update

After a 4 week sprint, the team is now entering their 2 weeks buffer period. They are currently finishing up the last features for the 1.2 release. They’ll then test extensively and work on cleanup/refactoring tasks. They’ve begun work on the blockchain integration but made less progress than they wanted to in this cycle, due to the permissions system being way more complicated than expected. Once this buffer is up, the whole team will be fully focused on Ethereum integration.

Completed

Here are the main items the team has knocked out since the last update:

Improvements:

Permission listing endpoint #857

Remove 5-association limit from MatchParser #858

Allow DB connection pool sharing between repos #853

Gather VM metrics and forward to AppSignal #830

Big update for admin panel data hierarchy and design #818

Hierarchy removal and advanced permission system #730

Add ability to cancel transaction consumptions #829

Add a system to handle consumption intervals to requests #825

Bug Fixes:

Prevent creating new atoms from external sources #820

In review

Improve design for key management section #855

In progress

For v1.2, the team is focusing on:

Client keys without master account #839

Balance-viewing permission #861

Enforce dialyzer #739

Minor bug fixes #804 #811 #814 #831

For v2.0, they’re focusing on:

Persist generated private key in Keychain DB #863

Blockchain wallet schema #806

ERC-20 token import #808

You can also follow the progress on the eWallet Waffle board and in GitHub Milestones page.

- eWallet Suite More Resources:

OmiseGO eWallet GitHub repository

Initial public demonstration of the eWallet

​Waffle board​

​Chat to the eWallet team

Plasma

The past two weeks the team has been helping developers on board to their alpha release network Ari through the Open Developer Program (ODP). Several hundred developers have signed up to get early access to test OmiseGo services. The team has been helping people deposit ETH and tokens, make transactions, and exit back to Ethereum.

During the operation of Ari they encountered a bug with their connectivity to Ethereum. They’ve implemented a work around that allows the services to continue operating normally, and they continue to monitor how this performs. The team is collecting data so they can make informed decisions that contribute towards a good level of service reliability. After developer testing they’ve updated their smart contracts and elixir-omg services to better support in flight exits via emit. This implements more security to better protect OmiseGo users.

- For more on Plasma, see these community-produced resources: