Disclaimer : The coins I write about are my personal opinion. Invest in them at your own risk.
It has been almost 3 months since I started investing in cryptocurrencies despite studying about it for almost an year now. Hey, don’t curse me just now! We Indians have reservations when we need to spend money on risky business. So, it all started with Ethereum. 2xed my portfolio soon enough. It was awestrucking to me. And then I came to know about other altcoins. Read their whitepapers. Read more. Diversified my portfolio. Started getting better returns than Ethereum alone could manage. And then the greed grew. It became a never ending desire to have a greater return than what I was getting. So I ventured into other relatively smaller exchanges like Kucoin and Cryptopia from Binance, where I could find smaller market cap coins which had the potential to go 50x. And then came the nightmare of maintaining a host number of public keys. And then it occured to me, the problems the whales and experienced traders must have had all this time. So, I explored possible solutions that existed in the market and I bumped into Ethos token.
What is the Ethos token?
As stated on their website, ETHOS is an access token that enables anybody to securely manage their cryptocurrency wallets, keys and coins. For a more in depth roadmap and vision of the company, I would suggest you to read their whitepaper. Simply put, they are trying to create a democratized economy that makes the cryptocurrency market accessible and trustworthy to the average user, accelerating adoption of blockchain technology and democratizing ownership of both digital and traditional assets. They plan to create a universal wallet to efficiently manage keys with the help of Ethos token and reward people for promoting financial knowledge.
Is it the solution?
What Ethos is trying to do is definitely a problem worth solving, the reason why they are roughly placed at the 78th position on the CoinMarketCap in terms of market cap.
The team they currently compose of have a wealth of experience at their disposal. But there are definitely some points noticing before someone invests in them for the ecosystem they are trying to create.
Token Allocation
Out of the total 225 million Ethos token, only about 75 million is in circulation. That means about 60-70% of the total supply is kept by the founders. By the cryptocurrency markets in general that is greedy to be honest. Plus when Ripple is somewhat viewed as a centralised currency in the crypto space, I fail to understand why fingers are not raised for this coin on similar grounds.
Github Repository
If someone is looking to invest in a particular cryptocurrency, reading the source code of the repository somewhat brings trust about the work the company is doing on day to day basis. Now, if you would go searching for Ethos github repository, sorry to disappoint you, you won’t find any. And that’s because they are a closed source project right now. Despite an active telegram group, close sourcing the project is just purely contrary to the belief that the crypto world today is built upon, and sadly a big red flag when it comes to due diligence of a coin.
Partial Decentralisation
Given that the Ethos as a company would cater to a Fiat gateway, they will be implementing regulatory measures such as KYC and AML measures which means they will have trust factors introduced in the ecosystem they are trying to create which ultimately may become a roadblock operating and competing with other decentralised options.
Conclusion
The problem of key management is undoubtedly a massive problem right now to solve in a decentralised manner. The fact that Stephen Corliss, ex- COO of BlackRock joined Ethos shows the underlying strength of the Ethos team and credibility of the token. What they are trying to achieve is highly ambitious but it remains to be seen whether they truly deliver what they envision given the questioning decisions they have taken so far.
References
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethos/
https://www.ethos.io/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethos_io/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethos_io/comments/7t9stg/1_wallet_owns_66_of_all_ethos_tokens/
https://www.altcoinss.com/news/news-what-is-ethos-an-in-depth-look-at-the-coin-universal-cryptocurrency-wallet-portfolio-manager?uid=7401