What is OmiseGo?
OmiseGo are attempting to bridge the world of fiat currency and cryptocurrency by building a personal and corporate wallet offering that allows users to hold multiple combinations of cryptocurrencies and traditional fiats all in one place. To achieve such an offering, Omisego are also building a decentralized exchange to provide scalable liquidity across assets.
Their aim is to build a wallet that facilitates payment, loyalty and rewards, remittances and cross-wallet transactions. OmiseGO is not owned by a single entity. Instead, it is an open distributed network of validators, which enforce behaviour of all participants. It uses the mechanism of a protocol token to create a proof-of-stake blockchain to enable enforcement of market activity amongst participants. This highly liquid distributed network enforces exchange across as- set classes, from fiat-backed issuers to fully decentralized cryptocurrencies.
Competition Analysis
As mentioned earlier, the OmiseGo offering consists of a Wallet and a Decentralized exchange built into one platform for corporates and individuals alike. The trade and payments industry is enormous and as you can imagine, OmiseGo are not the only crypto project attempting to gain a slice of the payments/exchange pie. Other Decentralized Exchanges include:
1) Bitshares (Bitshare is already growing in popularity)
2) NVO
3) OpenANX
4) AirSwap
5) Waves Platform.
These decentralized exchange platforms using smart-contracts rely upon either doing things directly on-chain (which forces everything on the Ethereum network and does not permit cross-blockchain activity), or they do things off-chain without a single execution engine. ‘The OMG chain is designed to operate trading across chains (e.g. ETH-BTC) without using full-custody issued assets for native cryptocurrencies’ (OMG Whitepaper). Centralized cryptocurrency exchanges such as Poloniex, Bitfinix and Bittrex are also competitors, however, centralized exchanges can be very expensive, regulated and consumers have to rely on the trust of a single party to hold custody of assets. In the payments/e-wallet space, OmiseGo are competing against projects such as Ripple XRP, NEM and Stellar Lumens. These companies are very experienced and have made some serious progress since inception. That being said, networks such as Ripple (XRP) rely upon trusted named validators to reach consensus. Additionally, Ripple’s trading functionality relies upon trading issued assets on its own platform. (Hardly decentralized)
Pros & Cons
This technology is new and not tested as of yet. As with most brilliant concepts raising multiple millions in ICOs, the platform is months away from beta stage and complications will most likely occur. Performance and real-world behavioural implications of the platform are not yet clear. It is not yet clear what long-term value participants of this network will receive, and may be affected by competition in this space. As we have seen, there is a lot of competition in this space and the barriers to entry are low seeing as ICO’s are raising millions of dollars by the day. Execution and successful launch is ultimately the responsibility of the OmiseGO team. Dealing with future complications will test the quality and depth of the OmiseGO team. In my opinion, OmiseGO has a quality team with all the skills needed to take this concept to market!
The list of current exchanges that trade OMG can be found on coinmarketcap.com. I always recommend using Bittrex or Bitfinex.
Wallets –
OmiseGo is built on the ethereum blockchain, and is therefore an ERC20 token. Token holders can store their OMG tokens in the following wallets:
1) MyEtherWallet
2) Ledger Nano S (recommended hardware wallet!)
3) Mist
4) Parity
5) IMToken
6) MetaMask
Conclusion
With the emerging popularity of eWallet platforms, traditional networks are finding it hard to keep up with the pace of development and progression within the industry. This creates a unique opportunity for crypto tokens to interchange across a decentralized network, along with cross compatibility with fiat currencies. Improving the liquidity in decentralizing trading platforms is one way to help encourage mainstream adoption. If OmisGo can enhance the ways in which consumers make monetary transactions using cryptocurrencies, then it's not difficult to imagine a world where OmiseGo is a leading fin-tech company.
In order to build this decentralized interchange network, it requires not only a blockchain well-suited for payments and interchange of issued tokens, but also a decentralized exchange which supports these activities, as well as incentives around creating well-functioning liquidity pools. To this date, OmiseGo has a market cap of 666 million USD, it is ranked number 14 on www.coinmarket.com and is currently trading at 7 USD a token. Tokens were trading at 0.53 cents less than a month ago, representing a WHOPPING 1400% ROI. The skys the limit!