# What is Onomy Protocol (NOM)?

Onomy is a Cosmos-based ecosystem designed to bring the $6.6T per day Forex market onchain. Through its community DAO, Onomy is building a decentralized, crypto-collateralized stablecoin issuance protocol, alongside a central limit orderbook DEX to facilitate instant trades between national currencies.

What is the Onomy Reserve (ORES)?

The ORES is effectively a decentralized reserve bank, enabling users to lock up supported cryptocurrencies as collateral to mint stable denominations of worldwide currencies, without losing access to the underlying collateral.

With 4 core modules - auction, parity stability, oracle, and vault - the Onomy Reserve enables FX traders to participate in a a vibrant multi-faceted stablecoin environment onchain that not just replicates but utterly supersedes the existing Forex market when combined with the ecosystem’s other products (like the go-to CLOB order book DEX focused on FX markets) and technical advancements. It’s a self-improving looped ecosystem that acts as a liquidity enabler for Cosmos as a whole, but also bringing financial maturity to still-developing markets.

The Onomy Reserve acts as a central issuer of liquid value in ever-growing on-chain economies, securely underwritten by robust assets and equivalent capital.

What is the Onomy Exchange (ONEX)?

A CLOB-based DEX allowing seamless trades between supported assets, whilst users retain custody over their funds. The DAO is working on multiple integrations to further enhance onchain FX trading, like bridges to partner chains, integration of additional stablecoins, and the adoption of perpetual contracts.
What Is the Onomy DAO?

**Onomy Protocol is be governed as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)** by holders of NOM, who weigh in their opinion and contribute to key decisions surrounding the development and evolution of the ecosystem by initiating and voting on governance proposals. In addition, **the protocol Treasury is DAO-governed,** whereby funds are outside of the control of any central entity.

What Is NOM?

The [native coin of Onomy Protocol is $NOM]https://docs.onomy.io/nom-native-coin-of-onomy/the-nom-token). NOM is used to secure the network through staking, as collateral for the minting of fxStablecoins through the Onomy Reserve (ORES), as gas, for governance in the Onomy DAO, and for additional use cases as voted in by the DAO.
How Is the Onomy Protocol Network Secured?
Staking is overseen by a decentralized network of performant validators that guarantee the security of Onomy’s Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain. **Users can participate in the validation by delegating their NOM to their preferred validator, obtaining yield in exchange for supporting the network**. Validator honesty is incentivised, whilst ill-willed behavior is promptly penalized through slashing.

In addition to securing the network through validators, Onomy’s products undergo a comprehensive development process, where system specifications and logic are first defined using a mathematical language called TLA+, then formally verified and audited by leading cybersecurity firms once developed.