Mastercoin Seeks Second Start With Omni Reboot

As a result of the move, many of the remaining Mastercoin leadership, including chief architect JR Willet, CTO Craig Sellars and board member and BitAngels co-founder David Johnston, will migrate to Omni to solidify their message and clear up marketplace confusion that they feel has held back their efforts.

Speaking to CoinDesk, the Omni team sought to reframe its offering as the only crypto 2.0 protocol that provides a tested platform that can support ambitious projects like decentralised recordkeeping network Factom, decentralised Internet provider MaidSafe and currency-backed token project Tether - all of which use the rebranded Omni layer.

Despite public perception, the Omni team remains confident that it has identified its core weakness, messaging, which it believes has failed to properly tout the core technological competencies of the project to the wider community.

Johnston is speaking of how Omni will seek to promote its efforts, by relying on the community of projects that uses its protocol to speak to its attributes.

One of the first projects to hold a crowdsale, Omni argues that, because of such misconceptions, the Mastercoin Foundation was often looked to as a company that should be responsible for building on top of, instead of evangelizing for its platform.

Two of Mastercoin's projects - its decentralised exchange and Omniwallet, for example - will be operated by the Omni Foundation.

Johnston portrayed Omni as a project that would empower those building on it to take the lead in its efforts.

Michael Terpin, CEO of PR firm Social Radius, which is now working with Omni, cited the fact that MaidSafeCoin, an asset on the omni protocol, has a $13m market cap at press time - which is greater than that of both Counterparty's tokens and Mastercoin, now Omni's, tokens combined.

As to how exactly Omni would inspire its developers to be more vocal about the Omni protocol, Sellars was less clear, though he said efforts are on the way to highlight the technological capabilities of the platform.

Sellars also emphasized that all of the tools available on Bitcoin Core are now available to Omni developers, and spoke to the positive feedback Omni has received on the ease of use of its technology.