SOMA and Ethos: the marketplace and the wallet
It’s so hard to find good projects these days
In a cyptocurrency landscape riddled with vaporware, exit scams, and overvalued projects, it’s refreshing to encounter the rare blockchain project with a) a real-world use case, b) a dedicated, hardworking, competent team, and c) a reasonable marketcap. The holy trinity of qualities.
We at SOMA believe our project has the stamp of this trinity. And we’ve found another project that does as well: Ethos. They just released their hotly-anticipated wallet across the globe, and it lives up to the hype. A beautiful interface and intuitive user experience complement the platform’s functionality. This is a product SOMA is proud to be partnered with.
That’s why, when Ethos first approached us about participating in their initial airdrop, we were thrilled to take part. Early subscribers to the Ethos wallet waiting list got SCT — among other participating digital currencies — pre-loaded into their Ethos wallet. “Ethos is delighted to support like-minded cryptocurrency blockchain companies like Soma,” says Amateo Ra, Lead Marketing Director at Ethos. “Driven by a mutual sense of community, we’re excited to be a collaborator in their effort to build the next wave of blockchain powered services.”
Like Ethos, SOMA has been working on a platform. In our case, a social marketplace with provenance tracking. And, like Ethos, we want to disrupt the status quo and create the best UX/UI possible. We recently released our minimum viable product on Google Play and are gathering community feedback for the next iteration. So, when we say that Ethos has produced a fantastic product, we know a little bit about what it takes to pull this off.
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Functionality
SOMA and Ethos share some common traits. Both aim to expand their respective product fields well beyond the expected functionality. In SOMA’s case, we’re blowing up the ecommerce model to integrate social functionality, social monetization, and provenance tracking. Ethos, in turn, takes the cryptocurrency wallet and adds so much additional functionality that one doesn’t know whether the product is more wallet, portfolio tracker, trading platform, or market research portal. It combines all of the above into a seamless and beautiful — yes, I’ve already mentioned it’s beautiful, but really, it is — interface.
Currently, the Ethos Wallet supports more than 100 tokens/coins, SOMA’s SCT among them. It allows users to both store and track tokens. That is, it functions much like other crypto wallets (e.g. Jaxx) while integrating the functionality of a portfolio tracker (e.g. Blockfolio). This latter feature, dubbed ‘Watchfolio,’ allows one to enter assets for tracking whether those assets are held in the Ethos wallet or elsewhere. In this sense, Watchfolio stands on its own as a competitor to Blockfolio and Delta; integrated with Ethos’s other services, it enables a one-stop-shop of cryptocurrency services.
Impressive as its current arsenal of services may be, Ethos is only just getting underway. The company plans to integrate a fiat gateway, peer-to-peer payments, and a debit card. Indeed, it aims to be a complete “self-custodied blockchain asset management architecture.” Say that five times fast.
The power of social integration
Like SOMA, Ethos recognizes the importance of social interaction in financial transactions. Also like SOMA, Ethos has built social functionality into its product.
SOMA integrates social features with an online marketplace. Trading, after all, was once a highly social activity. Traditional ecommerce platforms have largely removed the social element and stripped commercial interaction to a purely financial transaction. SOMA allows users to interact with one another and with one another’s wares. Users can monetize social influence by reselling, referring, acting as trusted third parties for such services as escrow, and much more. Items that accrue significant social interaction have those interactions recorded in their Interactive Item Card — a digital avatar and historical record of the item — and may accordingly fetch a better price. Social validation, after all, is a powerful thing.
Similarly, Ethos brings social validation to the act of cryptocurrency trading and portfolio management. Users can quickly view the ratings and reviews of others for various digital assets. Cryptocurrency investors can share knowledge and reward one another for doing so. Another aspect, Ethos Experts, is a “social trust layer” whereby a competent investor can become known as a trusted expert by sharing expertise and earning reputation points and badges for doing so. Eventually, as Ethos builds out its Experts program, users will be able to invest in “baskets” or diversified portfolios of cryptoassets based on the picks of specific experts — much as you subscribe to a Spotify playlist by that music-loving friend.
While Ethos’s vision — not to mention current product — is impressive, we at SOMA are perhaps most excited with these social innovations in the realm of crypto investment and portfolio management. After all, they’re a natural companion to our own project of bringing social interaction to trading online.
