What is OmiseGo?
OmiseGo (symbol: OMG) is a new cryptocurrency designed to help lower the cost of currency and asset exchange. The OmiseGo token sold out its $25 million initial token offering during the pre-sale period from June 7–23, 2017. The result was over 140 million OMG tokens with an estimated market capitalization of $35.6 million USD ( or $0.254 per token). With the current price hovering around $6.79, OMG has seen a meteoric rise of 2570% in under 2 months — 142% just this week.
Omise Corp
The brainchild of the Omise Corporation of Southeast Asia, OmiseGo is their attempt to use the blockchain to address the need for an inexpensive and accessible payment system for the large number of people in the region who do not have credit or debit cards. According to their white paper the eventual OmiseGo blockchain will allow people to conduct financial transactions between many different fiat and cryptocurrencies, including BTC, ETH, and others. But that software is not complete yet. Omise plans on having initial pieces available in Q4 2017, but the completion date is unknown.
OMG Token
Right now, OmiseGo is simply an ERC-20 token based on the Ethereum blockchain. Eventually, the plan is for the current OMG token to be used as a Proof-of-Stake currency for validating transactions on the future Omise blockchain. But in a the wake of the recent Plasma announcement, the OmiseGo team says they'll be the first project to launch using Plasma. This isn't surprising since the creators of Plasma (crypto-rockstars Joseph Poon and Vitalik Buterin) are both advisors to the OmiseGo project. But as a result it is not clear if the OmiseGo blockchain will simply be built on top of the main Ethereum blockchain using Plasma or if they will use a completely independent blockchain and Plasma.
So why is OMG price climbing so fast?
Solid Foundation
The parent company Omise is "a venture-backed payments company with operations in Thailand, Japan, Singapore, and Indonesia". Founded in 2013 and with over 100 full-time employees Omise is legitimately positioned to integrate vendors and point-of-sale devices with their blockchain solution. Omise even recently acquired one of the three major payment providers in Thailand: Paysbuy. With experience in the payment management arena, Omise provides OMG with a solid base for expansion into the cryptocurrency space.
Name Recognition
OmiseGo has some high-profile advisors. As mentioned before Joseph Poon the co-author of the Bitcoin Lightning Network is the principal advisor as well as the original technical author. Also, in addition to Vitalik Buterin, other key people in the development of Ethereum are also advisors: Dr. Gavin Wood, Vlad Zamfir, and Martin Becze. The result is that OmiseGo benefits from a very high-profile and technically capable team of advisors.
Viral Marketing
the OMG team is giving directly back to the Ethereal community. On August 7, they announced the upcoming airdrop of 5% of the total number of OMG tokens directly back to qualifying accounts on the Ethereum network. The resulting 7+ million tokens will be distributed to Ethereum accounts with balances greater than 0.1 ETH. Full details have yet to be announced, but the resulting goodwill and word-of-mouth discussion should be good viral marketing for the OmiseGo brand.
Summary
Taken together OmiseGo price is rising on the standard cryptocurrency speculation backed by a sound corporate foundation, association with recognizable names, and a brilliant marketing campaign. Will it all add up to success? Only time will tell, but so far early investors have little to complain about.