No.282
Omni Network OMNI
the bridge-keeper who carries messages between Ethereum's island-rollups
🎭 a quiet ferryman in borrowed armor, walking the plank between two shores all day, then one morning answering to a new name
💬 “Ethereum got crowded, so its traffic split off onto a dozen separate islands. I walk the planks between them, carrying messages and money from shore to shore. The armor I wear? It's Ethereum's own, lent to me.”
- The job: a Layer-1 that connects Ethereum's many separate rollups so apps and liquidity aren't stuck on one chain.
- The trick: it doesn't guard itself alone. It borrows Ethereum's security as restaked ETH through EigenLayer, on top of staked OMNI.
- 2024: mainnet went live and OMNI was a Binance Launchpool reward; supply is capped at 100 million.
- 2025: it changed its name to Nomina (NOM), swapping 1 OMNI for 75 NOM. OMNI is now the old ticker.
📖 The Story
2021. Austin King and Tyler Tarsi started Omni Network around a problem that was only getting worse. Ethereum had become so busy that builders moved their apps onto rollups, faster side-chains that settle back to Ethereum. The trouble: each rollup was its own island. Money on Arbitrum couldn't easily reach an app on Optimism; users on Base were cut off from the rest. Early backers like Pantera, Two Sigma Ventures, Jump Crypto, and Coinbase Ventures put in roughly $18 million to fund the fix.
The fix was a bridge-keeper. Omni built a Layer-1 whose whole purpose is to ferry messages between those islands quickly, with very little work for developers. Instead of every app building its own rickety bridge, they could hand the crossing to Omni.
April 2024. The mainnet launched under the name Omni Armageddon, Phase 1. This is where the clever part arrived: rather than gathering a brand-new army of validators, Omni borrowed Ethereum's. Through EigenLayer, people who had already staked ETH could re-pledge it to also guard Omni. The keeper put on armor it didn't have to forge. Omni was the first EigenLayer service to pull in over a billion dollars of restaked ETH. The same month, OMNI was the 52nd token handed out on Binance Launchpool, where people parked BNB or stablecoins to earn some.
Autumn 2025. Then the keeper molted. Omni rebranded to Nomina (NOM) and redenominated its token at 1 OMNI = 75 NOM, with the new coin trading from around October. The work stayed the same; the name on the gate changed. OMNI became the legacy label, the chapter before this one.
📊 Stats
These are our editorial ratings, a quick read on the coin's character, not market data.
🧩 How it works
Picture Ethereum's rollups as scattered islands. Instead of building a separate bridge between every pair, each island plugs into one shared hub in the middle: Omni, a fast Layer-1 running CometBFT consensus, a battle-tested way for validators to agree on the order of events. An app on any island hands its message to the hub, and the hub delivers it to whichever other island it's meant for. The unusual part is what the hub stands on: Omni's validators put up two things at once, staked OMNI and restaked ETH through EigenLayer. That staking is what keeps the keeper honest.
🌗 Light & Shadow
- Solves a real and growing pain: Ethereum's rollups are genuinely fragmented, and connecting them is useful plumbing
- Borrowing security as restaked ETH meant it could launch with serious backing instead of begging for validators (first EigenLayer service past $1B in commitments)
- A real hard cap of 100 million tokens, so the supply can't quietly balloon
- Interop is a crowded, contested field. It competes head-on with bridges and messaging layers like Wormhole, and cross-chain bridges have a long history of expensive hacks
- Leaning on EigenLayer means it inherits restaking's risks too, if that shared security stumbles, so does the keeper
- The 2025 rename to Nomina and the 1-to-75 token swap add confusion: charts, tickers, and old write-ups now disagree about what it's even called
🧬 Evolution lineage
Not a fork of anything. Omni is an Ethereum-native interop Layer-1 that draws its security from Ethereum itself, through EigenLayer restaked ETH. In 2025 it evolved in place into Nomina, a rename and redenomination (1 OMNI = 75 NOM), not a hard fork.
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❓ FAQ
- What is Omni Network?
- An Ethereum interoperability Layer-1. Ethereum spread its traffic across many separate rollups (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and more), which left apps and money stranded on one chain at a time. Omni is the messaging layer that lets those rollups talk to each other.
- Why does Omni use restaked ETH?
- Its security is a dual model: the network is backed by both staked OMNI tokens and restaked ETH borrowed through EigenLayer. Omni was the first EigenLayer service to gather over $1 billion in restaked ETH commitments, so it leans on Ethereum's own security instead of building it all from scratch.
- How many OMNI tokens are there?
- The supply is capped at 100 million OMNI. About 10.39 million were circulating at genesis, including roughly 3 million handed out in a launch airdrop. The token is used to pay gas across rollups, to vote on governance, and to stake.
- Is OMNI still its name?
- Not anymore. In autumn 2025 Omni rebranded to Nomina (NOM) and ran a redenomination swap at 1 OMNI = 75 NOM, with NOM trading from around October 1, 2025. OMNI is now the legacy ticker; CoinGecko lists it as 'Omni Network [Old]'. (Information only, not investment advice.)
⚠️ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only.