Omisego announced its new plasma sidechain launch, The OMG Network yesterday, and just a week after the huge run up the price didn’t disappoint.
Only a week since Coinbase Pro announced it would be adding support for OMG, it has been on a wild bull run, which has seen the token rise from a low of $0.65 to highs of $2.10.
Although there was a pull back after the inevitable Coinbase pump, the news of the Plasma sidechain has seen it rise another 15%. But this isn’t the end of the good news for the Omisego community. Or should that be OMG Network community after its rebrand?
OMG Network Freeing Up Congestion on Ethereum
OMG Network’s Layer-2 scaling solution is the first step towards helping Ethereum scale for mass adoption, and it will start freeing up space on the Ethereum network immediately.
Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex has already announced that it will migrate its ETH-based USDT on the OMG Network, freeing up much of Ethereum’s transaction congestion.
‘By migrating USDT value transfers to the OMG Network we save costs, drive performance improvements and relieve pressure on the root chain network. This is good for Bitfinex and our customers, and the whole Ethereum ecosystem,’ said Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex.
Transactions on the plasma sidechain are 66% cheaper than the Etherum mainchain, and at thousands of transactions per second, it’s a major step forward for the whole Ethereum eco-system.
The transaction throughput will allow traders to react much faster and take advantage of arbitrage opportunities between exchanges said Ardiono.
Does This Mean Plasma Is Back In The Ethereum Scaling Debate?
Plasma was originally touted as the best layer-two scaling solution for Ethereum, but after running into several issues, the Ethereum community seemed to go cold on the idea, and shifted towards Optimistic Rollups instead.
Optimistic Rollups borrow heavily from plasma and zero-knowledge zk-Rollups, but they trade off on scalability to enable running fully general smart contracts in layer 2.
And although this scaling solution is still being worked on, OMG Network’s launch is proof that Plasma can still play a huge role in Etheruem’s future.
OMG Network’s Plasma Looks Different From Original Proposal
With OMG Network’s launch and rebrand, the plasma sidechain has cut several corners to make what they claim to be a ‘more viable plasma’.
The biggest difference is the consensus, Proof of Authority, which OMG Network say is controlled by a single entity, but supports watcher nodes that verify every transaction.
And one of the original Plasma stumbling blocks was the network of plasma chains that were to be created. OMG Network has so far cut back on this, launching just the one plasma sidechain.
Conclusion
It’s been a fantastic couple of weeks for the OMG Network, and it’s obvious now why Coinbase added support for them, but it’s also not without merit.
The big fall in price had seen OMG, become one of the forgotten tokens, but finally the hard work is beginning to bear fruit.
Let there be no mistaking, there is still a long way to go, but it’s such a bullish upgrade for the OMG and Ethereum communities, and with the speed and cost of transactions on the OMG Network, I think we will see more transitions onto the sidechain in the coming months.
Author: Tommy Limpitlaw
