It’s a good day for OMG, the decentralized network built as an Ethereum scaling solution. The price of OMG today surged by more than 18% within hours, currently trading for around $1.76 per token.
The pump follows an announcement from crypto exchange Bitfinex that its sister company, Tether, will now see its stablecoin (USDT) integrated onto the OMG network. This will now enable Bitfinex users to make Tether deposits and withdrawals on OMG, which according to the exchange will lower transaction costs and speed up confirmation times.
“We are committed to improving our service to better support our customers,” Bitfinex CTO Paolo Adroino said in a statement. “By migrating USDt value transfers to the OMG Network, we save costs, drive performance improvements, and relieve pressure on the root chain. This is good for Bitfinex, our users, and the entire Ethereum ecosystem.”
Ethereum’s increasing popularity has a downside as the network becomes ever more congested. Among the various consequences of this congestion, Tether transactions on Ethereum are currently bogging down gaming dapps on the network, according to a recent report from DappRadar.
This integration with OmiseGo is meant to provide some relief to that congestion. Transferring Tether as an ERC-20 token will only cost about 0.001 ETH per transaction, said Bitfinex. OMG works by batching several transactions together and charging a single low fee for each group.
The last several weeks have been huge for OmiseGo. In mid-May, Coinbase Pro added OMG to its list of offerings, sending the price of the OMG token soaring by 25%. Coinbase later listed OMG across all its platforms. Then, just last week, Coinbase began distributing free OMG tokens to ETH holders on the exchange who missed out on the initial July 2017 airdrop.