OMG Network (OMG)

OMG Network

Total supply	140,245,398 OMG

Basics

• Rebranded from OmiseGo (1-6-2020).
• Founded in 2013, Omise is a venture-backed payments company operating in Thailand, Japan, Singapore, and Indonesia.
• Mainnet release: 1-6-2020, first value in its contracts is recorded on 17-3-2022 though.
• Based in: Bangkok. Got acquired by a Hong Kong venture firm (12-2020).
• It's a trustless, centralized transaction processing service with decentralized security. 
• “The OmiseGO Blockchain comprises a decentralized exchange, liquidity provider mechanism, clearinghouse messaging network, and asset-backed blockchain gateway. It is a scalable and totally public (permissionless) blockchain whose Proof-of-Stake consensus is bonded by the activities of the chain itself. The network is designed as a highly performant system leveraging interlinked blockchain construction: while clearing and settlement occurs over the OmiseGO blockchain, the costs of protecting transaction value is externalized to other chains in ways that directly promote the value of those chains.“
• “OmiseGO is the answer to a fundamental coordination problem amongst payment processors, gateways and financial institutions. By enabling decentralized exchange on a public blockchain at high volume and low cost, OmiseGO provides a next-generation value transfer service operating across currencies and asset types. Through the OmiseGO network connected to the Ethereum mainnet, anyone will be able to conduct financial transactions such as payments, remittances, payroll deposit, B2B commerce, supply-chain finance, loyalty programs, asset management and trading, and other on-demand services, in a completely decentralized and inexpensive way. Further, 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. The OmiseGO network is intrinsically agnostic between fiat and decentralized money: as far as adoption and usage go, the system is constructed so that the best currencies will win.”

History

• A full background story interview can be read here (11-7-2020).
• "It is part of the parent company Omise which is payment gateway provider aiming at the South East Asian market. If you know anything about payment systems in China you will have heard of WeChat pay and AliPay. The premise is that everyone has access to a smart phone and allowing you to pay everything from bills to street vendors with a swipe of your phone is not only convenient but has become the predominant form of payment in China. Omise aims at establishing this same system in South East Asia and OmiseGo is its attempt to incorporate cryptocurrencies into this system. The positioning is unique for a couple of reasons. Firstly it allows people access to secure funds without the need for a bank account. In South East Asia only 27% of the region’s 600 million inhabitants have a bank account. Secondly it is working towards facilitating payment in FIAT as well as cryptos and making the whole process easy to understand and set up which is crucial for vendor and customer adoption."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found here. Max payout is $25,000 (29-6-2020).
• From L2beat (31-10-2022):

"Funds can be stolen if

1. there are fraudulent exits which nobody reported. Fraud proofs assume that every exit is checked by at least one honest and able party (CRITICAL),
2. users are unable to withdraw in a mass exit event,
3. the source code of unverified contracts contains malicious code (CRITICAL).

Funds can be lost if

1. the external data becomes unavailable (CRITICAL).

Users can be censored if

1. the operator refuses to include their transactions. They can still exit the system.

MEV can be extracted if

1. the operator exploits their centralized position and frontruns user transactions."

• Blockchain Security DB (29-6-2020) shows 3audits. The latest was in 1-2020.

Governance

Admin Keys

• From L2beat (31-10-2022):

"The system has a centralized operator. The operator is the only entity that can propose blocks. A live and trustworthy operator is vital to the health of the system. Independent exit allows the users to escape censorship by withdrawing their funds. The system allows users to withdraw their funds by submitting a transaction directly to the contract on-chain. In case the operator is malicious all users need to exit within a predetermined time frame. Users that do not manage to do this will lose their funds."

Token

Utility

• From Messari (3-6-2020):

"The protocol's token, OMG, is the primary method by which users can pay for transaction fees and interact with the network."

Stablecoin

• Has integrated Tether (21-8-2020), which sparked a pump for OMG.

Tech

• Whitepaper can be found here (17-6-2017).
• Code can be viewed here (3-6-202).
• Built on: OmiseGo is a DApp built on the Ethereum blockchain.
• Programming language used:

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS):
• Latency:

Other Details

• Integrated Tether

How it works

• From L2beat (31-10-2022):

"Using the OMG Network, individuals and businesses can transact on a financial infrastructure that is claimed to be several times faster, 1/3rd the cost, and as secure as the Ethereum Network — while retaining full autonomy over their funds and keys. The Network scales by centralizing transaction processing and remains safe by decentralizing security.

The internal system state is not subject to any checks. Only exits from the system can be challenged. This places a much higher burden on potential validators, as they have to monitor all user activity and not only the single state. The transaction data is stored on a plasma chain and is not recorded on the Ethereum main chain."

• The OMG Network uses the More Viable Plasma (MoreVP) specification “MoreVP trustlessly scales Ether and ERC20 transactions by grouping them together and sending them through a set of Ethereum smart contracts. These grouped transactions are then verified and validated by a decentralized network of watchers. Processing batched transactions enables a high throughput of thousands of tps and results in 1/3rd the transaction cost for the end-user — all with Ethereum-level security."

• From Formal Verification (21-8-2020):

"OMG Network operates semi-centralised with a single operator creating blocks in the Plasma blockchain. The network is made more ‘decentralised’ by allowing watchers (OMG stakers) to oversee this process, receiving a portion of the transaction fees paid on the network (eventually set dynamically at 1/3 of ETH gas fees). Therefore, OMG’s value can be modelled as the NPV of future profits to watchers.

We’re still very early - right now staking isn’t yet live but if a significant portion of Tether’s transactional activity is moved to OMG’s layer we should expect proportional value flows to the token-owning supply side participants - the OMG stakers."

• From Formal Verification (5-6-2020):

OMG’s More Viable Plasma ultimately relies on fraud proofs. These form of proofs are provided as evidence that a state transition is incorrect, in other words, it is optimistically assumed that every state change is correct until proven otherwise (in contrast to validity proofs that present evidence that state transitions are correct".

• From Messari (3-6-2020):

"OMG Network is a Layer-2 scaling protocol for Ethereum that aims to achieve higher transaction throughput at lower costs while leveraging the security guarantees of Ethereum. OMG Network is predicated on the creation of a child chain that batches transactions before committing them to Ethereum. The child chain relies on the root chain as the trust and arbitration layer. With this type of relationship, if something goes wrong with the child chain, users’ funds should remain safe."

Upgrades

Rolled out (1-6-2020) a Layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum called Plasma that reduces costs by 66% and increases the processing capacity of the network.

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].
• Future releases include (1-6-2020) faster exits, scalable exits, and OMG staking.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Many high profile advisors including Ethereum founder Vitalik, Lightning network co-author Joseph Poon and the founder of Golem, Julian Zawistowski.
• In talks with the Thai Government.
• Professional presentation and organisation\
• From Formal Verification (5-6-2020):

"One of the advantages of this approach is the lower requirement of computational resources and provides higher scalability." 

Cons

• Has a centralized operator.
• The marketing has been very slick and as a consequence there has been a lot of hype. Most likely overvalued (Could be said about most cryptocurrencies to be fair)
• From Formal Verification (5-6-2020):

"The drawback here is ensuring high consistent liveness of the parties claiming fraud. Moreover, as Plasma operators are able to be corrupted at any given point, exiting Plasma chains cannot be instantaneous (means exit games are required bringing further complexity). A problem might therefore arise for end users but in the coming months we will able to ascertain how attractive OMG is for Tether users and as a scaling solution generally."

Competition

Stellar, Waves and OmiseGo compared (23-10-2017)

• “Stellar, Waves, and OmiseGo all aim to serve very similar use cases. All three platforms have native support for a decentralized exchange. All three platforms support multiple assets. Although Waves is not currently focused on micropayments, remittances, and mobile payments, Stellar and OmiseGo are both gunning for these three use cases.
• It seems that Stellar comes out just slightly ahead of Waves as a multi-asset trading platform. Although Stellar is losing in terms of ICOs, Stellar has many more anchors than Waves has gateways. Most of Stellar’s anchors are operated by external companies that include large financial institutions. Waves, on the other hand, currently operates all of its gateways. Stellar is also currently much faster than Waves. Stellar supports a theoretical of maximum of 1000 transactions/second whereas Waves only supports 1.7 transactions/second. This will change as the WavesNG protocol comes online, but that’s not for another few months and even then, Waves’s maximum transaction throughput is still shy of Stellar’s 1000 transactions/second.

• Stellar will give OmiseGo a run for its money. Almost everything that OmiseGo aims to do, Stellar is planning to do or is already doing it. Not to mention Stellar already has a robust, secure, and fast blockchain already running in the wild whereas OmiseGo is still a farcry away from even launching a public testnet. At this point we have no idea what the OmiseGo blockchain will even look like. Having a functioning public blockchain also gives Stellar a headstart in business integrations. As mentioned above, a multitude of payment companies, especially in Asia and Africa, have integrated with Stellar and are already sending payments through the platform. We also can’t forget the massive IBM and banking integration that was recently announced.“

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• From EthHub #143 (7-12-2020):

"Has been acquired by Genesis Block Ventures (GBV). GBV is a subsidiary of Genesis Block, a Hong Kong-based crypto over-the-counter (OTC) trading firm. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed."

• From their website (3-6-2020)

"We are a medium-sized enterprise, with over 50 employees located around the world. OMG Network offices are located in Thailand, Singapore, Japan, and Poland."

• OMG Network is a subsidiary of SYNQA. 
• Hasegawa, Jun; CEO & Founder (not anymore, 1-6-2020)
• Vansa Chatkavanij, OMG Network CEO (1-6-2020)
• Harinsut, Donnie; COO, co-founder
• Kasima Tharnpipitchai, OMG Network CTO (1-6-2020)
• Poon, Joseph; advisor and principal Author
• Wood, Gavin; advisor
• Buterin, Vitalik; advisor
• Kwon, Jae; advisor
• Zamfir, Vlad; advisor
• Zawistowski, Julian; advisor
• Aya Miyaguchi; advisor
• Ver, Roger; advisor
• Eva Beylin, previously worked with them

Funding

• Contributing funding to the Ethereum foundation's DEVGRANTS initiative in 2015, as well as funding the development of Raiden.
• Investors are: SBI Investement, SMBC, Ascend Capital, SMDV, Golden Gate Ventures, Last Ventures, 500Startups.
• Does funding (1-2020) and was one of the earliest believers in Plasma Group

Partners 

• OMG and Cosmos have decided to start spooning.
• Also collaborated with Hydrachain, Golem, Tendermint, and Cosmos.
• As of 7-2019 on the partner & clients list of ZeppelinOS.
• Part of the WBTC community
• Is a founding member of the ECF
• From Messari (3-6-2020):

"The OMG Network joined the Messari Disclosures Registry. As a participating project, OMG Network has committed to transparency by providing regular project disclosures and updates."