I recently watched a video from Andreas Antonopoulos about the most important projects under development right now in the Cryptocurrency ecosystem. He highlighted exchanges and wallets as being the most important for wider adoption of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies. You can see more of his videos here. He has been the voice of Bitcoin for several years, speaking globally about how it works and why it’s an important invention and evolution in money. You often hear of ICO’s (Initial Coin Offerings) building a fancy project for machine learning and AI, big buzzwords with idealistic visions. I don’t discredit these projects, they may one day be vitally important. However, people have yet to even adopt Bitcoin or Cryptocurrency on a basic level yet. Right now the main doorway is Coinbase, a licensed Crypto bank that started several years ago and is the go to place for purchasing Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin. Ethos was an ICO during the summer of 2017 and the name was “Bitquence” at the time. I personally thought this was a pretty bad name. However they have since rebranded and want to introduce a universal wallet for the masses. I found this appealing because it captures the most basic audience, and that is the wide adoption audience or as they call it “Noobs”.

“Bitquence’s vision is to create a people-powered new economy services company that makes the cryptocurrency market accessible and trustworthy to the average user, accelerating adoption of blockchain technology and democratizing ownership of cryptocurrencies.” – Bitquence Whitepaper (2017)

The Visionary Team Behind Ethos

The founder of Ethos is Shingo Lavine, currently a student of the prestigious Brown University, he is scheduled to graduate in 2020 under their Computer Science and Economics program. He is young (20) and has been working on entrepreneurial pursuits for several years, in high school he was the founder of the innovation club. He’s worked for the following companies: Fun Mobility, Motzie & High Performance Computing, he then founded “Jobs University.” The team is equally impressive with experience from former Blackrock, Merrill Lynch, Citrix, Freddie Mac, UBS, executives and graduates from other prestigious schools such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

What Ethos Will Do

One of the key features Ethos will bring is universal access to all Cryptocurrencies and Tokens under one private key. Currently, you have to use various wallets to access your holdings. Usually this is done via “Hardware Wallet” such as the Ledger or Trezor. These have been very popular because they add a layer of security which is the most important feature of any Crypto wallet. You can also create a “Paper Wallet” which is simply a printed out version of your Public and Private Key. For those who don’t understand what that means, your Public Key is how you receive Crypto payments, and your Private Key is how you will store and access them. Anyone can see your Public Key, if your Private Key is known, it can be accessed.

Aside from Hardware Wallet and Paper Wallet, there are also “Hot Wallets” which are stored on a computers desktop, such as “Exodus”. These have good security, but they do interact with your computer, which interacts with the internet and can also be vulnerable to hacking. Many of the popular Tokens require the users to download a “Mainnet Wallet” to their desktop because they are not able to interact with Ethereum based wallets requiring ERC20 Token Standards. The ERC20 Token Standard simply means that it has to be a Token that was developed for Ethereum. So if you are holding a Token built on it’s own Blockchain, it won’t interact with the Ethereum Blockchains wallet such as “My Ethereum Wallet”, “MetaMask” etc. As you may have noticed understanding these basics can be a headache, and this is why Ethos is being developed. With all of these complications there can’t possibly be faster adoption until this is solved. They want to solve this.

Additional Features

Ethos wants to also be a beacon of understanding for new Cryptocurrencies and Token projects. As of now, you are required to do hours and hours of research on new projects, or rely on ratings sites to make investment decisions on new ICO’s. People often “Shill” their own Tokens because they want them to be more popular. The ratings system that Ethos is planning to build will be P2P (Peer to Peer) and help determine which projects have good potential for future development and adoption. I like systems that are P2P because the trust factor goes up. If we rely on a centralized source for information, we don’t always know what goes on behind the scenes. We don’t know why one project is rated higher than the other. Ethos community creates a layer of transparency that will allow a meritocratic environment causing the project to have to prove its worth as opposed to being proven without a reason other than blind reviews. Ethos is a project that I believe will happen. They will be hosting a summit in Rhode Island on April 14th and you can RSVP to attend by clicking here.