Popular Ethereum project OmiseGO held a live streamed AMA video a few days ago. Surprisingly, Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin was present and discussed a number of points about Ethereum and its growth. For some odd reason, however, not much was discussed about OmiseGO itself. Instead it played out more as a group interview of Buterin with others just pitching in commentary periodically. Read on as we go over the AMA and what sort of questions made it into the video.
What is OmiseGO?
For those unfamiliar with OmiseGO and would like an in depth explanation, check out our article on the project here.
For those just looking for a brief overview, OmiseGO is an Ethereum based project that wants to both on “bank the unbanked” and “unbank the banked”. They plan to do this by offering a number of mobile wallet solutions and high-speed and low-cost transactions of all sorts of different kinds of value including fiat currencies. The project is also leading development of Plasma, a second layer solution for Ethereum scaling, and Vitalik Buterin is officially an advisor to the project.
Let the AMA Begin
The AMA opens in what appears to be an apartment with Vitalik Buterin and a number of the OmiseGO team sitting around a small table. Buterin is sitting across from David of OmiseGO and the two are in the middle of a game of Go. After a few moves, the team states that Buterin is a “beast” at the game.
Buterin himself is his usual, visibly uncomfortable self, but his answers are as lucid and in-depth as they always are when Buterin gives a presentation.
Buterin on the Future of Ethereum Scalability
Right away, the AMA begins with Buterin discussing Ethereum scalability and what he plans for the future of the network. Specifically, Buterin discusses two technologies, sharding and Plasma.
Vitalik Explains Ethereum at Disrupt SF, Image from TechCrunch.
Sharding, according to Buterin, is a layer one technology that will improve Ethereum itself and could potentially provide a 100-fold improvement to the core performance of the network. Plasma, on the other hand, is a second layer technology which Buterin describes as being complementary to sharding. If the two technologies are employed together, Buterin estimates that this would result in a 1000-fold increase in transactions speeds.
A follow-up question to this was in regards to OmiseGO itself. Early descriptions of the technology suggested that it would be able to support up to 1 million transactions per second alone. This, according to Buterin, would mean that if all three technologies were effectively layered together, then it would equate to billions of transactions per second, far exceeding the needs of the world’s stock exchanges, payment networks, and many other technologies combined.
The talk then moved into a more esoteric area with talks about where inspiration comes from, and what got people involved in the space. Buterin outlined that his attraction to the field of blockchain in general was due to its ability to allow regular people with regular computing power to create a sovereign currency that is free from government control. When it comes to inspiration, Buterin didn’t specify anything particular. Instead he said his inspiration comes from many sources with little bits here and there.
OmiseGO Seemingly Forgotten
What was odd about the AMA is that very little about OmiseGO itself was discussed. The OmiseGO main net was supposed to go live at the end of 2017. It is now nearly 6 months after that, and we are still only barely seeing test nets and betas for developers hitting the blockchain. As was the case with many other early Ethereum projects, they seem to have overestimated their production speed and ability to make a live product. Another example of this would be Golem which had promised a live product also by the end of 2017, and yet it only launched in April of this year..
In recent days, OmiseGO has seen generally steady token prices around $10-$15 each, and only dipping during major market crash events. This suggests that the investing public at large is still quite confident in the team’s ability to deliver exactly what they’re promising. No doubt the influence of Buterin as an active adviser to the project is helping in this regard.
