Status Announces Partnership with OmiseGo to Propel Cross-Chain Transactions and Financial Inclusivity
Ethereum-based payments platform Status announced a partnership with financial solutions-provider OmiseGO (OMG) on July 6, 2018. The partnership will see Status integrate the latter’s decentralized exchange (DEX) within its chat application to enable interoperability and transactions for participants.
Increasing Financial Inclusivity
Status (SNT) was founded in 2017 and boasts of a $100 million ICO sale within 24 hours. The open-source Ethereum platform allows users to create decentralized applications (dApps) with the function of inter-participant messaging, smart contract creation, and censor-free trading.
While still in development, Status offers a beta version of its mobile application to interested users via its website and GitHub page.
Now, Status will utilize the OmiseGo framework to implement the OMG decentralized exchange within its service for providing cross-chain transactions and interoperability for blockchain payments through several protocols, including Bitcoin and Ethereum.
For the uninitiated, the Thailand-based OmiseGo offers payment processors, gateways, and financial institutions a singular framework for enabling financial inclusivity in rural and urban areas. The OMG protocol operates across various currencies and asset types and aims to “Unbank the Banked” via the use of its decentralized token and wallet service.
OmiseGo was one of the most followed projects in 2017 by members of the cryptocurrency community. Its popularity was further propelled after Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin evangelized the platform.
Research Advancements
In a mail to BTCManager, Status revealed its close relation with the OmiseGO team, specifically founder Jun Hasegawa, as a result of both teams sharing similar ideals and visions at various research forums and the Ethereum Community Fund.
Status expressed its intent to augment the partnership into a broader vision of providing financial solutions to users in far-flung areas, where financial outposts are absent or inaccessible.
The team confirmed their involvement in further DEX-related development and scalability research of OMG’s team, adding the partnership “extends into development of the web3 ecosystem.”
Status and OmiseGO share a common vision to make the world a more open and equitable place through easy access to the Ethereum public blockchain. While OmiseGO focuses on building open infrastructure and open financial tools, Status focuses on putting these tools into the hands and pockets of people around the world.
Hasegawa told BTCManager:
“The mission of OMG is to put the capabilities of crypto to work for the needs of the real world; Status brings great value to the OMG Network with a multifaceted user-facing platform leveraging OMG’s back-end infrastructure. This partnership is a step forward for our respective projects, the community, and the blockchain industry.”
Ensuring Smooth Migration
Status will be integrating the OmiseGO SDK into its native wallet to ensure DEX accessibility. As the teams have collaborated already, a smooth transfer of data and code, alongside user feedback for the OmiseGO Network, is expected.
Status enabled mainnet by default in the beta release of 0.9.20 and have experienced a growing number of messaging and transacting users within the product. This was a significant step forward for the team, and growing community of contributors and Status foresees the partnership with OmiseGO as another step in the right direction towards decentralization.
Once integration with the OMG Network is complete, Status expects the metrics around transacting users to increase yet again–and this time using more than ETH and ERC20 tokens.
