I’ve been looking at a new ICO that launches next month called Ethertote, and when I was reading through the whitepaper, it immediately reminded me of another token I held…..Ethorse.

It uses something called pari-mutual betting where you bet on the performance of a crypto (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin) and whichever one performs the best is the winner, and if you bet on that particular crypto you win more Eth. All the Eth from all the bets gets lumped together and anyone who bet on the winning crypto gets a share of this pot of Eth.

So as I say, the idea behind Ethertote is definitely not new, and Ethorse have already been doing this for quite a while now, so at first I was ready to just forget about this new ICO and move on. Anyway I decided I would at least finish reading the whitepaper as I was interested to see if Ethertote proposed to do anything differently to Ethorse, as it made no sense to me to release another coin that does the exact same thing.

I started working my way through the Ethertote whitepaper, and decided to compile my own list of key differences between Ethorse and Ethertote.

Based on the whitepaper and the website, here are the differences I could see.

Some of the things I found particularly interesting in my comparison chart are as follows:

Number of tokens in circulation. There are a lot less Ethertote tokens in exsistence than Ethorse tokens (10million compared to 125million) which means they could arguably be seen as “rarer” and be of more value. Ethertote are retaining far fewer tokens, both amount wise and percentage wise than Ethorse, which means they are theoretically far less able to influence token price. Ethertote are stating that their token is a “utility” token. Whether or not is actually true remains to be seen, but if it is, then that would mean that certain countries are not restricted in owning or trading their tokens, which means a much bigger global audience for token trading (namely US and Asian markets) Ethertote allows you to trade on 25 cryptos, whereas you can only choose from 3 on Ethorse. With Ethorse it is fixed to picking either Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin (a fixed, three-horse race). What’s interesting about this is that these three crypto’s are “hard fixed” in their code (https://github.com/ethorse/ethorse-core/blob/master/contractsFlat/Betting.sol) so it cannot be changed unless they create new smart contracts. So what happens if Litecoin goes bust (OK that’s highly unlikely to be fair) or something else happens to one of these three crypto’s? With Ethertote you have 25 cryptos to choose from and it seems to be the TOP 25 crypto’s, so this will always be the top 25 crypto’s that the public seem to be most interested in. Also, Ethertote includes a “stablecoin” which is Tether, so it’s interesting that you can bet on this crypto when the market is heading in the wrong direction. Game duration is an interesting one. Ethorse games last for one hour, compared to Ethertote games which each last one week. I’m not sure which is better here. I guess it’s down to whether you want your games fast and regular (like real horse races!) or if you want to have one bet, and then come back a week later and see how you got on, almost like a weekly lottery. Claiming winnings are automatic with Ethertote. The winnings just get paid straight into your wallet. With Ethorse you have to manually claim the winnings yourself and you have 30 days to do so. Dividends for the two companies are the same, both set at 5%, but what is interesting is the way these dividends are paid. With Ethorse you have a small claim window every 12 weeks to get your dividend, but if you miss it for any reason (sick, holiday, forgot, etc) then you miss claiming the dividend. Now the sole reason for owning Ethorse tokens is to claim dividends, so I don’t think it’s a good idea to be so restrictive when it comes to claiming the dividend. Ethertote do it differently whereby they state a specific “moment” every 12 weeks, and if you held tokens at that “moment” then you can claim your dividend for 11 of every 12 weeks, even if you don’t own your Ethertote tokens any more. It means you are free to trade in your tokens if you don’t want them any more, without risk of missing out on your dividend. Also on the topic of dividends, Ethorse still haven’t verified and published their dividend smart contract code?

I find that really surprising, because without being able to access the code on Etherscan we don’t actually know what’s going on in the background.

There is also a further incentive to hold Ethertote tokens, which is that you can bet on games during something called an “extended” period, which comes after a period where everyone can bet. Basically all normal players have to stop betting, and for an additional 4 hours, people with the Ethertote tokens can then carry on betting, so it’s a betting advantage to hold them. In comparison, there doesn’t seem to be any type of advantage to holding Ethorse tokens other than claiming a dividend.

Conclusion

Based on the comparison I had made, I decided that I would sell my HORSE tokens and will use the Eth to purchase some TOTE tokens, mainly because of the lack of restrictions to the Asian markets and US markets which absolutely love betting.

Note: TOTE tokens will go on sale at 0.001 Eth per token which is currently around $0.27 per token. My personal aim is for $0.40 per token.

Additional Note: Purely by coincidence I also noticed a glitch with Ethorse today when I was doing a side-by-side image comparison in cipher for this review, which is quite worrying because they are already on main-net (Ethertote is still on testnet by the way) but a “race” on Ethorse was being reported as follows:

Winner is ETH & LTC & BTC & ETH

Ethorse and Ethertote side-by-side images from Cipher browser

Not sure what happens in that situation when the Ethorse DApp goes wrong as theoretically there should never be a tie?

Interested to know what other people think on both of these two companies.

Site links

https://ethertote.com

https://ethorse.com