OmiseGO: a Story of a Failure
Blockchain technology exists for ten years and this period appears to be long enough for some companies to pass all stages of life: inception, rise, and decline. OmiseGO is one of the vivid examples.
OmiseGO was big in 2017. It seemed that OMG’s team was almighty and the value proposition seemed to be really awesome. The project was supported by such people as Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon. Moreover, it was quite notable that OmiseGO was promising solutions capable of improving numerous spheres of our lives. But the promises fell short, the team appeared to be weak, advisors who seemed to control the situation surrendered, and the OMG fan-base split and vanished gradually after all. Below you can see how it all happened step by step.
February 2017
On February 17 there was the first announcement on Twitter saying about the launching of the platform on the Q4 of 2017 and the token sale in Q2. So it looked like you could buy tokens in spring and get rich on Christmas.
May 2017
Then, on May 3 there was a tweet with a photo of Poon and Buterin chatting with the OmiseGO representatives. Then there was a picture of OMG with Poon and Thomas Greco. Finally one week later there was whitepaper written by Poon.
OMG boasted such people as Buterin and Vlad Zamfir on the company’s advisors list, but actually, Buterin wasn’t involved in OmiseGO although he probably had contacts with the team. Vlad Zamfir dismissed his participation in OMG in his tweet and the company replied trying to turn it into a joke.
OmiseGO states: “The OmiseGO network is intrinsically agnostic between fiat and decentralized money: as far as adoption and use go, the system is constructed so that the best currencies will win.”
Now when over 1.5 years have passed there still so little was done. Considering the increasingly competitive market such productivity is just awful. Numerous points of the platform’s roadmap were failed.
June 2017
ICO started and OmiseGO CEO published an article on Medium stating “Omise signed up over tens of thousands of merchants to our payment gateway across Asia-Pacific” although there were only a few thousand of them, not tens of thousands of merchants. Lies is such a bad strategy in the transparent era.
August 2017
The things get worse as the company starts to tweet more pictures of Vitalik Buterin and Thai bank hoping to prove its consistency.
October 2017
A new Roadmap was posted on Twitter. Nothing of this roadmap was accomplished, no comments were made.
December 2017
At the end of the year, Jun (CEO of OmiseGO) thanked everyone for the support of his project and kindly advised to HODL OMG while there was still no actual info on cash in/out which was truly frustrating.
January 2018
There was an awkward tweet about soon (but not too soon) launch of Plasma. No ETA.
April 2018
The new strategy was revealed in the article. There’s a quote: “For the purpose of incubating large transaction volume and diversity of tradeable assets for OMG from the get-go, we’ve decided the best route is to hatch Chicken 0x05: Crypto Trading. To this end, Omise will launch a new subsidiary which will aggressively develop a user-facing crypto exchange network this year.”
It’s quite hard to grasp if the author meant to say that the subsidiary launches this year, but the development still needs to be started or the exchange is supposed to be launched this year.
Actually, the statement got no further explanations or development. Moreover, the company failed to launch an exchange or DEX. Nothing.
Also in April OMG released a new roadmap and the company acknowledged that there are some problems. Of course, that’s not something people were waiting from them.
The Fall of 2018
The entire summer brought almost nothing. In September / October the company started to lower the expectations. The new roadmap has no dates. In November OmiseOG comes up with the testnet. This move makes the followers a little bit happier.
December 2018 — Nowadays
The company admits that this year it cannot present the product that was planned to be released in Q3. Everything OmiseGO does seems to be obscure. There’s a lack of info about the people working for this company, a lot of back and forth changes in plans, lies, etc. What started as a brand new multi-layered super-modern project had stuck and it seems that now OmiseGO is not able to compete with the newer platforms.
Not long ago OmiseGO had finally released an alpha version of Plasma. Reportedly this version has bugs. The company promises to fix it soon, but as we might know from experience it is hard to rely on the OMG promises.
