OMG Roadmap: What the Future Holds

On October 28 2017, OmiseGO officially released their first roadmap. The anticipated announcement caused a wave of comments and market fluctuation.

In this article, we take a look at the key points in the roadmap and what it means for OmiseGO moving forward.

OmiseGO wants to “unbank the banked” and bring amenities enjoyed by those who are a part of the banking system to those without. To learn more more about OmiseGO, see “What is OmiseGO”.

OmiseGO’s Progress So Far

The roadmap started by mentioning the progress of two main points.

Firstly: the OMG airdrop. This was promised as part of the OmiseGO whitepaper. The airdrop is the method used to automatically distribute OMG tokens to all stakeholders in the Ethereum network. There has been significant development on this feature, and OmiseGO even announced that they were going to release the code to the community.

Secondly: OmiseGO announced a few of their new strategic partners, most specifically Global Brain and Krungsri Bank (MUFG). Both of these partnerships will work to strengthen the OmiseGO platform and will be beneficial in the future.

OmiseGO Milestones

The roadmap also discusses their current milestones, using what they refer to as “relevant terms” from the traditional Chinese board game “Go”.

Milestone 1: Fuseki (布石) and Sente (先手)

These two terms relate to the development of the white-label/wallet SDK. OmiseGO assures the community that their developers are working diligently on implementing these wallets, but no specific launch dates were provided.

Milestone 2: Honte (本手)

This milestone is in regards to OmiseGO’s work in laying the foundations for the Plasma network. This milestone is scheduled to be delivered Q1 to Q2 of 2018, but it is unclear as to what exactly the milestone is.

Milestone 3: Aji (味)

This milestone simply refers to the platform’s “ability to move in and out of fiat and an interface to the Omise payment gateway”. No dates or future details were given.

Milestone 4: Tesuji (手筋)

This milestone will be building on the groundwork of the Plasma network. They will introduce a basic form of Plasma with a novel bonded consensus mechanism. No further details were given.

Milestone 5: Tengen (天元)

The final milestone of the roadmap refers to the implementation of a “massively-scalable, cross-chain-compatible decentralized exchange (DEx) Plasma chain”.

Later the same week, in response to the community’s questions, a more “traditional” roadmap was released by community member “crsCR” showing dates of the aforementioned milestones.

Conclusion

The release of the roadmap caused a sharp reaction in the crypto community. Some went so far as to call it a “terribly pretentious, ‘no-show’, vague roadmap”.

The OMG coin price also reacted negatively, falling from near US$7.50 to a low of US$5.75 a few days later. Though the price has since recovered, the release of the roadmap has left the community somewhat bewildered as to what OmiseGO’s actual plan is moving forward.

Though I also found myself scratching my head about what OmiseGO is going for with this roadmap, it does not inherently change anything about what the platform as a whole is working on.

Perhaps we should be applauding the OmiseGO team for not hyping up their coin unnecessarily, which would’ve caused a sharp increase in the coin’s price. Just last week, IOTA’s price shot up nearly 600% after they announced a partnership with Microsoft. The point is not that IOTA was unnecessarily pumping their coins, but that the cryptocurrency market is fickle and easily persuaded.

Speaking about the roadmap, Reddit user “BlockchainBruno” said it well: “The focus of investors should be on partnerships, expanded use cases, and networking. Many of us entered this investment prior to the Series B funding. Think about that and reconsider whether having to wait a whole year or two is a long time”.

This is exactly what OmiseGO is doing. In late October, Omise released an announcement that they had partnered with Credit Saison, Japan’s third largest credit card company. This may just be a great opportunity to get onboard  OmiseGO at a reasonable price – if you’re looking to buy and HODL, that is.