This post should give everyone clarity on the current state of the Ethorse dApp, work being done and the Roadmap. Recently, races have been paused due to severe congestion on the Ethereum network. We haven’t been able to receive prices on Blockchain because of the congestion and races were going in to refund state despite the high fees we have been spending (~1 ETH a day). Before we paused, we had some races with a pool size around 10 ETH. Such interest even during these times shows huge potential for the Ethorse dApp. We are hoping this will be resolved soon so the races can run uninterrupted.

Oracle

Oracle solution used to fetch price and automate races have been the main bottleneck for the past few weeks. The team has been working on exploring several alternate solutions to overcome issues caused by relying exclusively on oraclize. This is an initiative to reduce the number of refunded races as much as possible. There are several Oracle services other than Oraclize that are currently being developed. We have been experimenting with them over the past few days.

1. TownCrier is a service that serves as a decentralized oracle which offers features similar to Oraclize. Unfortunately, TownCrier does not offer scheduled calls. Scheduled Oraclize calls have helped our automation to a great extent.

2. ChainLink is an oracle solution that we are eagerly looking out for. They have a secure method as well as a distributed way of fetching the results from an API endpoint. This reduces the central point of failure to a great extent. Also, they claim to handle scalability issues caused by Ethereum network. Considering the above-mentioned features and the off-chain capability of ChainLink, its inception into Ethereum mainnet is going to be very useful for Ethorse. We have been interacting with their team and going to use their services on Kovan Network.

3. Aeternity, an interesting solution, have their oracle living in an oracle state tree as a full node on-chain. The data availability and advanced data formatting provided by Aeternity will be very useful in reducing the number of queries. This will improve the time, cost and reliability of fetching data. They are expected to come out with a mainnet solution by the end of June 2018.

Other than these solutions, the team is also exploring Plasma/Channels /Sidechains. We have also begun interacting with teams of ConsenSys Oracle, GoChain, etc. Though the current situation with the network is not looking good for dApps, with these solutions the future looks very bright for greater performance and user experience. While we wait for these solutions, we are not going to be idle for months waiting for these solutions to arrive and mature on mainnet. We always want to keep the horses running! We have decided on an in-house implementation of an oracle which runs on our web server and acts as a backup to the existing Oraclize methods. Oraclize is given priority for fetching the results which is indeed the best method to get untampered data with TLSNotary proof. There are instances when Oraclize callbacks are either delayed or lost in the re-org. In these cases, we have given a slack time up to 30 minutes for the callback to get back. If prices don’t arrive even after the slack time, our backup functionality will kick in. In our fallback method to fetch prices, we use a secure TLS GET method to fetch the prices. The prices fetched through the fallback mechanism will be displayed on a portal with a timestamp so that users can cross verify it with Coinmarketcap. We will be releasing this after thorough testing over the next few weeks. Until then we will continue to run the races on varying frequency depending on the network quality at the time.

Roadmap

Oracle (Q2-Q3)

As described above, this is one of the top priorities of the project. We want to have a have a temporary solution (our own oracle) to keep the races running, research Oracle solutions for long-term (Chainlink/Plasma/Sidechains) and implement them immediately when they are ready, to improve the dApp quality irrespective of the Ethereum network state.

2. Automated seeding (Q2-Q3)

Seeding races have proven to be very successful in increasing user participation. The team has made significant progress on automating seeding, which is currently under test. This will be rolled out soon. We will also be increasing the seed as the user bets increase. This will encourage the users to bet more and increase the volume.

3. Exchange listing (Q2-Q3)

We promised to get HORSE token listed on at least one high volume non-DEX exchange by the end of Q2. Exchange listing will bring a lot of attention to the product and will bring on new users to try the dApp. We want to make sure the dApp is ready for that. Due to the technical challenges we have had, unfortunately, this had been delayed so far. However, we are very confident about doing this by the end of June or early July 2018. The team has allocated a considerable amount from the crowdsale funds for this and have started reaching out to the exchange/s (again but with more fund allocated). Additional exchanges will be added in Q3.

4. Dividends portal (Q2)

A portal to claim dividends will be developed by the end of Q2, where users will be able to claim dividends similar to claiming winnings from a race. Dividings claiming period will begin on July 17, 2018, during which all the tokens transfers will be disabled for a week.

5. Improvements to the UIUX (Q3)

We have received numerous great ideas on improving the dApp experience. Many of them will significantly improve the experience such as a visualization of the race progress. These ideas have been captured and discussed on our subreddit. We are prioritizing them based on user interest and the ease of implementation.

6. Price source (Q3)

Once the Oracle related updates are made, the team will move from using Coinmarketcap to our own price index that is based on data pulled directly from multiple exchanges and aggregated.

7. Marketing (Q3)

We have not yet started marketing on a big scale for reasons you may have witnessed over the last few days with network related dApp performance. However, we are hoping this to be resolved soon and starting to run our marketing campaigns by early Q3. This will include ads in popular sites such as Bitcointalk, Coinmarketcap, trading platforms, etc where most visitors are crypto savvy and interested to speculate on the price. This is where most of the bitcoin casinos have succeeded. We will be extending language support to appeal to the Asian market in Q3. We are reaching out to leaders of popular trading communities and groups (on Twitter, Youtube, Telegram, Discord) to form a partnership enabling their community members to bet on the price using our dApp. We are expecting this to run in full force in Q3.

8. Voting Platform (Q3)

A voting portal will be developed where HORSE token holders can vote on the important decisions for the project.

9. Adding more coins to the race (Q3)

We are planning to add more large volume coins to the races including BCH, XRP, EOS, etc. There will be different race categories with varying bunch of coins. This along with more game types and increased frequency, will make the dApp entertain users 24x7.

10. Mobile Support (Q3)

Currently, the dApp works to a certain extent on Cipher browser for mobile. However, we will be releasing updates to make it very smooth to be used on Cipher. We will be providing support to other mobile platforms as well.

The team will continue to increase marketing efforts and add more functionality to the dApp during Q4 2018 and in 2019. Please note that the Roadmap is subject to reprioritization based on several variables including traction, community feedback, new technology or partnerships that the team will keep exploring.