What Is The OMNI Network ?- The Bitcoin Manual

The OMNI Network is one of the first side chain protocols built on Bitcoin’s blockchain. The goal of OMNI was to enable additional financial functions on top of Bitcoin. Initially known as Mastercoin, the whitepaper for OMNI was published in January 2012 by J.R. Willet, and as the project matured, it officially rebranded to the OMI network in 2015.

The Omni Layer was particularly popular in the early days of blockchain development as there were few alternatives. Omni Core, their reference implementation, is an upgraded Bitcoin Core that includes all of Bitcoin’s capabilities and additional features. OMNI allows users to tokens to represent customised cryptocurrencies or assets easily and to transact them on the Bitcoin blockchain using the Omni Layer. 

The OMNI network was also the first to mint the stablecoin USDT (Tether).

In later years as other blockchains launched, so did the one use case for OMNI migrate. Tether minted its tokens on several blockchains, but it’s worth noting that OMNI is still the third-largest network that Tether uses to mint USDT.