The creation of Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum blockchain, has been targeted by competitors many times already, and today, we would like to discuss the EOS project which has all the chances to scooch Vitalik and his Ethereum from the title of King of the hill, that is the hill of leading platform for ICOs and decentralized apps.
We are about to review what EOS is and what kind of prospects does it hold.
The background of the project
Behind the EOS blockchain there is company called Block[.]One which specializes in developing software for business purposes. The CTO of the project is Daniel Larimer also known as co-founder of Steem and BitShares platforms.
The goal of EOS is to create an operating system for developing and launching decentralized applications. Unlike Ethereum, which network processes 20 transactions per second, the scalability of the EOS blockchain should reach several thousands or even millions of operations per second. Besides this, the developers have promised to simplify the process of interacting with the platform and minimize the commission fees per transactions. In other words, EOS is to become the fastest, cheapest, and the most convenient blockchain.
EOS ICO
Project EOS has held the longest and the most expensive ICO in the world at the time of recording this video.
Overall, 1B EOS tokens have been created. 200M coins were sold for $170 during the first five days of the first ICO stage. Then, on July first, 2017, a second ICO stage had began which lasted almost a year until June 1st of 2018. Each day, only 2 million tokens were put for sale. This was made on purpose so that as the platform developed, they could raise the price of the tokens.
As a result of the longest ICO, the EOS team raised $4B in investments, overshadowing the TON ICO of Pavel Durov for more than twice.
The Block[.]One developers have left the remaining 100M tokens for themselves, for black days and further project development, per se.
Current condition
As of this day, the EOS ICO has been successfully finished, and the developers from Block[.]One have released the software for the network launch. It is known that the main network is running and is in the state of final testing.
If you look at the data from coinmarketcap.com , you’d see that EOS is in the top 5 of cryptocurrencies by capitalization, but predicting its next move is gonna be problematic. You see, as Block[.]One has initially stated, they have released the software and removed any responsibility for the future of the project. They do not refuse to improve their software, but as for the launch of the main network and its development, the ones responsible must be its users.
EOS downsides
There are two main questions addressed to EOS now. The first one — how good is the programming code? More than 10 critical vulnerabilities have already been found on the network. As developers put it, they have all been successfully fixed, but there’s still a high probability of new bugs occuring during the workflow.
The second issue within EOS is its high centralization. In order to process transactions quickly, a decision was made to apply POS-mining, which features 21 nodes responsible for processing operations. The network validators are chosen by the EOS token owners throughout voting. The power of the vote depends on the quantity of money stored in the wallet, wherein almost half of all the tokens are located on only 10 addresses, meaning the owners of these wallets will be able to appoint their own validators in an individual order. This way, EOS may turn into a corporate blockchain which could be controlled by a small group of people.
What determines the success of EOS
The future of EOS depends on three factors. First of all, the stability of the network workflow. Secondly, the real level of decentralization. And thirdly, the Ethereum users.
EOS is not the first project that’s faster and more convenient than Ethereum, but Ethereum has got a multimillion army of users. The demand for the EOS blockchain is what determines if the Ethereum users would want to move on to another platform. Because it’s not enough to write a good programming code, you would have to make it popular too.