The article was authored by Jun Hasegawa, CEO of Bangkok-based FinTech startup Omise, and was first appeared on his own Medium feed. It has been reproduced by The Bridge with the approval of him.

See also:

• Omise acquires dtac’s payment services provider Paysbuy to accelerate growth in SEA (e27)
• Omise Supplements VC Funding Through Abstemious Token Offering (ETHNews)
• Japan, Thai startups unite to support younger selves; Inaugural meeting held with ministers
• Omise secures $17.5M to become Southeast Asia’s largest online payments gateway

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While ICOs have been around for a number of years, only until 2016–2017 did we start to the a whole hosts of ICOs and ICO funded projects entering the mainstream world. I for one have made the decision to step into the center of the ICO activities with hopes that through this unprecedented experience I would challenge myself to learn and grow, while also contributing back to strengthen the blockchain ecosystem in the long run.

How did I get here?

In 2013 I founded Omise as an e-commerce platform based out of Thailand. Though the efforts to grow out this business I experienced first hand how outdated payment processors, gateways and financial institutions impeded e-commerce growth across the Asia-Pacific region. In realizing this, my co-founder and I pivoted Omise to became a fully-devoted fintech company focused on providing the most reliable and secure online payments services.

About a year after we launched Omise payment I stumbled across this technology called blockchain, and more specifically Ethereum-based blockchain. This was back in early 2015 when ETH 1 was valued less than US$ 1. I immediately became fascinated by this technology and the promise it brings to scaling Omise’s business.

Since my introduction to the blockchain technology, Omise has committed itself to supporting and strengthening ways to bring this promising technology into mainstream business.

Blockchain community

There are several aspects of what makes blockchain technology so attractive to me personally. The first is, of course, the technological potential. However, there is also another very important aspect that often is glazed over by mainstream world but I feel deserves a greater spotlight: the blockchain community and its ecosystem.

Having submerged myself in the open source technology world both through OmiseGO blockchain and Omise payment, I am truly convinced the unique value of open source technology is its surrounding community. With this, I believe it is Omise and OmiseGO’s responsibility as a member of the wider community to help contribute to and grow it.

From the very beginning of OmiseGO (initially called Omise Blockchain Lab) Donnie and I took the approach of viewing community contribution, sustainability and scalability as a core part when benchmarking our “return on investment”. For instance, Omise provided funding to support the Ethereum’s DEVgrants as well as to DEVCON 1 and 2. Every time we decided to provide funding to support a community initiative,

I’m certain our board members were thinking to themselves “Crazy Jun, here we go again”. However, I fully believe in the community approach and I do believe our contribution, though modest, have provided us with the opportunity to build stronger network of relations amongst the blockchain and Ethereum community.

I would like to reaffirm that Omise and OmiseGO are committed to continuing it’s support to the blockchain and Ethereum community as we move forward into the future.

One example is our long-term supportee “Raiden network” which has been based on Ethereum (Git link). Heiko Hees, CEO at Raiden network, is a distinguished person who has been taking an approach, from an early stage, to the problem of transaction speed (known as “TPS”) that Ethereum will sooner or later be confronted with.

Subsequently, we continued to build more and more relationship with other members including founders of Ethereum and other leading roles in this community-crypto society.

Cryptocurrency for Society

Have you ever attempted to take apart the field of finance? Today’s society employs cash, credit cards, points and other units which both express and alternate primary values in a real form. Thanks to a variety of units, it enables us to make an exchange from one unit to another. Because barter trade was often difficult to apply a measure properly to every single value, people were willing to make a common system that we all agree on.

Accordingly, community was born and currency as a common system was invented. (You can imagine a situation like “This chocolate is worth $1. Do you agree on a price?”) The idea of currency began to widely spread and the society admitted the use of currency as a measuring tool for measuring thousands of values.

Nevertheless, the political (“centralized”) orientation favoring some particular belief by each nation led to produce separate currencies which are in need of some form of administration. As it turned out, the society found a value-alternative method in a temporary sense but ended up with more complicated societies and stood too far from the establishment as a united world.

Furthermore, a form of cash advance into credit cards and other convenient figures. If you are ought to take apart credit cards, they project the amount of money he or she could afford for in advance and gather used-values into one place. In spite of this, due to the spread of the internet across the world, our societies were in search of more convenient methods.

After all, that is where cryptocurrencies came in. The cryptocurrencies were epoch-making architecture which remedies a problem caused by the centralized authority that human history has been facing for a long time. Thanks to its architecture, they make a progress of decentralized system in the true sense.

The other side of the coin is that, this unique system requires greater coordination amongst multilateral participants since participants could influence on the system itself. To put it shortly, participants in the community are really important. It has to be designed to ensure that decision-making is based on whether a majority of participants in the community agree on.

The standard practice is that we can hardly claim a majority of the population becomes the thief in our society, in the same way, wholesome and right decisions are almost surely made for the community.

Yet it is no longer the case with ICO; ICO could potentially demolish the ecosystem in the society & in the community. You might come up with the question “Why OmiseGO is associated with ICO then? We consider ICO as a revolutionary method to raise funds in the next generation and it has an unbelievable potential unless we mistake the method of investment.

Therefore, OmiseGO conducts ICO. In the meanwhile, we are aware of some points.

1. Ensure many participants can participate.
2. Raise funds only we need.
3. “Giving without expectation in return” mindset.
4. Always stay close to the community (pre & post ICO as well)
5. Transparency.

We came to the conclusion with these elements in accordance with the active discussions in Slack, Twitter, Reddit, and so on. On the basis of the above, we have been updating our ICO, including a shift form Public ICO to Private ICO.

It is quite possible to raise xx M USD in 30 seconds from a viewpoint of a demand in the current market if we release the address to the public. Still, we cannot leave the theory “rich grow richer” in this manner. Therefore, we decided to take an opposite direction, departing from a conventional wisdom in terms of the ICO. Of course, we neither treat our approach as consensus -gaining among all, nor wish that will happen. However, after all things considered with a decent amount of time we spent on the discussion on how to wholesomely sustain the ecosystem, we arrived at such conclusion.

A method of ICO will keep progressing and come into common. It is not surprising that a government will engage into ICO one day. Yet until then, testifying whether ICO is a better solution over the conventional methods in terms of the fund raising will ultimately affect our society in the future. Moreover, it is essential for a new society of the cryptocurrencies too.

We don’t mean to mention their names, but if you are the member of the society, you should keep in mind that disruption only occurs in a state with “already-developed”, not with “under developed.” We are meant to raise the standard in order to develop an ecosystem by coexisting and less conflicting each other. Harmonization is the key success factor. Personally, I am not very pleased with the ICO that seemingly intends to raise a mint of money in one year or money with no upper limit because it might corrupt the ecosystem.

(I do not deny the projects. All projects seem interesting and splendid.)

Ecosystem by OmiseGO

OmiseGO has set a goal: Online payment for everyone. Throughout our experience as a business operator in the past two and a half years allows us to explore pain points of customers and infrastructure providers. In order to solve their problems, we kept running full speed. And then we realized that in order to achieve our goal in a true sense, we are in charge of building our ideal ecosystem. Some may say our proposals are quite unrealistic and other giant corporations with sufficient financial resource will eventually take actions instead.

But what is the most important is how fast to put it into practice.  It is certainly possible that only we cannot achieve that. But as stated above, if we work together in the society in full harmony, our idea is more likely to become reality.

Omise boosts to our full speed ahead in a true sense. Omise payment continues to provide business and individual customers an acceptance that can receive values. OmiseGO constructs a network as it will serve as a useful venue for exchanging values.
And above all, we are looking forward to making a more exciting announcement in Q3/2017.