Asset holders to earn interest from fees on decentralized exchange OmniDex

The Omni Layer Foundation recently released the latest version of its Decentralized Exchange, OmniDex 2.0. Omni holders will soon start receiving 0.05% of the exchange volume as interest, after an introductory month of fee free trading.

The project initially launched as Mastercoin in 2013, raising over 5,000 bitcoins in industry’s first crowdfund, about $500,000 at the time. “We claim that the existing bitcoin network can be used as a protocol layer, on top of which new currency layers with new rules can be built without changing the foundation,” stated the original Whitepaper.

The protocol works by embedding messages in Bitcoin transactions. This provides all the benefits and security of transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain, while at the same time adding powerful new features such as asset creation, management, and distribution.

The Mastercoin brand was retired in 2015, and a new decentralized community was established. The Omni Layer Foundation went on to sponsor hackathons and developer bounties with the funds,focusing on a two key projects; OmniDEX, and the easiest way to access the exchange, Omni Wallet.

“We have delivered on the social contract set out 3 years ago when the foundation was funded by the first crowdsale over Bitcoin. The OMNI token that was created then will throw off growing income to its holders as our market making pulls liquidity from the existing high-volume markets for Omni Layer assets.”
— – Patrick Dugan, Omni Foundation General Manager

OMNI serves as a binding asset, between bitcoins, smart properties and smart contracts created on top of the Omni Layer. The majority of the 620,000 OMNI that will eventually exist were sold in the 2013 crowdsale.

The token can be bought on a variety of exchanges. Patrick Dugan, Omni Foundation General Manager, told BNC that OMNI holders will shortly start receiving interest from the exchanges 0.05% trading fees.

“When OMNI is useful as collateral for leveraged smart contracts,” Dugan explained, “we’ll have replicated much of the utility of a brokerage account into decentralized software available to the whole of humanity.”

The original iteration of the decentralized exchange was developed in March 2014, during the aftermath of the MT.GOX collapse. The idea was simple. Anyone could place an order to trade a quantity of one currency for another on the Bitcoin blockchain, and anyone else could match the order and have the trade complete automatically.

“Five popular digital assets issued on Omni Layer, with a total market capitalization above 60 Million USD, can be traded for the lowest fees with no custodial risk.”
— – Craig Sellars Co-Founded Tether & Omni Layer Foundation CTO

Following in the footsteps of Bitcoin, OmniDex 2.0 is decentralized by design. “The foundation ceasing to exist would mean that future development would be subject to the interest of other parties rather than salaried developers,” Dugan explained. “We’re now at the point where that’d be less tragic considering the perpetually operable exchange functionality we’re activating.”

Along with the new release, the Foundation announced a strategic partnership with us here at BNC. Having been impressed with the progress of OmniDex for some time, we’ve contributed to the development of futures contracts being built directly into the Omni Layer protocol.

BNC has provided the indexing technology, used in the Bitcoin Liquid Index, to supply professional-grade, reliable, real-time pricing data to OmniDex users. “When this feature is complete,” Dugan said, “a Bitcoin/Dollar contract settled directly over the blockchain will compete to become the premier price discovery mechanism for Bitcoin, along with contracts tracking global stocks, currencies and commodities.”

"Being a layer on top of Bitcoin means OMNI needs no proof of work issuance to incentivise miners,” states BraveNewCoin CEO, Fran Stranjar. “Combining this hyper-deflationary element with the introduction of trading fees paid to OMNI holders makes it like a bond, whose yield we can track."

“We are very excited for this partnership. It is a great fit with our core vision of powering next generation Digital Asset trading. After MtGox, MintPal, Cryptsy and dozens of other heists and collapses in the Bitcoin Exchange industry, the world has been waiting for a completely decentralized platform. It simply cannot run off with user’s funds.”
— – Fran Strajnar, BraveNewCoin CEO

The Omni Foundation continues to work on upgrades to their DEX, including more ways to hold fiat currencies in a way that is tradable and fungible, while the Omni Layer continues to expand.

“We have Omnicore QT, which looks a lot like Bitcoin QT but with many balances possible,” Dugan explains. “We have Omniwallet which is a web wallet where you can generate a private key in the browser and hold custody of it through a UUID that is emailed to you and a password you have to remember. We also have an app called OmniPortfolio built off of the OmniJ work Sean Gilligan did which will act like Omniwallet Desktop effectively, sort of the Electrum of Omni Layer.”

“We have lots of start-ups who have used the open-source tech over the last two years to create great products of their own,” Dugan explaines. Ambisafe provides Enterprise-class multisignature support, Fuzo provides a BitSIM chip overlay that will allow feature phone users to send each other transactions based on their mobile number.” Dugan added.