With momentum building for the project on the heels of their recent announcement of an ICO, OneName Global, Inc., a company registered in the US state of Delaware is causing buzz among both cryptocurrency fans as well as avid social media users eager to secure monetization of their content. With a fully functioning platform already accepting users, onG is unique in a season crowded with promising ICO’s.

The Product

The user experience revolves around a dashboard which allows you to connect to the API of your other social media accounts. In the beta release onG allows connection to Facebook, G+ and LinkedIn. Users can originate content on onG and automatically post to other social media accounts with onG acting as the control center using powerful account management tools that are seen elsewhere as premium services.

These free tools include features like analytics and calculators that estimate money being generated by the user’s posts. This income being generated is automatically integrated into a “bank” which is saved in the native token, onG Coin. One of the early primary goals is to have the token tradeable on popular exchanges so that the user can freely exchange the native currency for Bitcoin and even fiat.

Pre ICO Valuation

Many companies in the blockchain/cryptocurrency space choose to incorporate in more regulation friendly jurisdictions. By choosing the state of Delaware to incorporate, OneName Global is exposing itself to the full regulatory scope of the United States. The challenges of that are obvious, but one of the benefits is that the company has taken the steps to get their corporate entity valued and even before the official launch that figure is $25 million USD. Most ICO’s consist of buying a token in exchange for the hope that the developers make good on the ideas presented in a white paper. onG has a working platform and assets at ICO.

IBM Incubation

It’s clear that years of work went into creating this platform. IBM has been incubating this project since 2014 and it shows. This type of development takes external monetary support. The usual path for development in the crypto space consists of developers creating a website and white paper and taking the idea to an ICO with the hope of getting funding so that the project can begin. In this case, IBM assumed the early risk which has resulted in a very advanced product coming to market.

Dual Blockchain

Being so early in the maturation of the ICO space early adopters have witnessed the impact of the mania that can surround a hot launch. Recently early adopters of the Bancor project severely impacted the Ethereum blockchain to the point where prominent exchanges like Poloniex completely disabled withdrawal of Ethereum. onG addresses this by being only the second ICO to utilize two block chains, Ethereum and Waves. Utilizing two block chains builds in redundancy and stability during heavy network loads. onG has built the onG Coin to ERC20 standards which allows them to tinker with the network algorithm that distributes the token while not compromising the actual security of the platform.

Initial Coin Offering

The ICO for onG’s cryptocurrency (onG Coin) is slated to be launched on July 17, 2017, where 25% of the total cryptocurrencies will be released, with the remaining 75% released systematically as rewards on the onG.social network over the next twenty years.

Headwinds

As with any attempt to break into social media, it’s important to recognize the challenges that this new company faces. It is extremely difficult to build community, just ask Google. Even with their huge war chest for development, Google+ never really hit home and languishes as a second-tier platform. Users are very hesitant to change and learning a new interface for social media is a heavy lift. onG is betting that people can be incentivized by actual money to try something new. They have enlisted MMA legend Kenny “KenFlo” Florian in their marketing efforts and have brought in YouTube heavyweight Alexander Laserev aka Sasha Daygame to manage the community. Both very influential with the male crowd. It remains to be seen if this project can attract female users, who are critical to the success of any social media platform.

If onG is going to compete in the top tier of social media they will have to address this sooner rather later.