EOS (EOS)

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EOS is a Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) Layer-1 blockchain built using the open-source Antelope protocol.

EOS
TypeCoin
Ticker symbolEOS
Consensus mechanismDPoS
Total supply1,000,000,000 EOS
Websitehttps://eos.io/

Basic

  • Started in:
  • Mainnet release: 1-2018
  • Created by Block.one, a Cayman Islands exempted company providing end-to-end solutions to bring businesses onto the blockchain, from strategic planning to product deployment. EOS.IO is the only product mentioned on block.one website. Peter Thiel & Bitmain were the lead in a new investment round in Block.one. Block.One was scheduled to get 10% of the EOS supply, however in 12-2021 the community revolted and halted their payments, citing that Block.One had failed to deliver on their promisses.
  • Short explanation: Decentralised applications and smart contracts.
  • Longer explanation:

EOS is building a platform for building decentralised applications and smart contracts. It is often compared to Ethereum that does much the same thing already, but EOS claims to be much easier for developers to build on, as well as having a broader range of features.

History

"EOS’s founding team Block.one raised around $4.1 billion in a 2017-18 ICO but slowly stopped supporting the network with core development and ecosystem funding. B1 released the open-source EOSIO codebase in mid-2018. A week after, the EOS Network, built using the EOSIO framework, launched. After launch, B1 slowly stopped upgrading and maintaining the core EOSIO protocol. It largely did not re-invest ICO proceeds back into the EOS Network and ecosystem and instead directed resources to other projects outside of EOS, including social network Voice and centralized exchange Bullish. In 2021, the EOS community began to reverse course, starting by formally distancing the founding team from the project. Led by a community-formed EOS Network Foundation (ENF), the community voted to freeze the founding team’s token vesting contract in 2021 and fork the open-source codebase in 2022. ENF working groups have led to ecosystem and protocol improvements, including most recently an IBC implementation."

Audits & Exploits

  • Block.One has announced a $10.000 bounty for every bug found in its software. Within a week, a single security researcher was able to rack in $120.000 by finding and reporting bugs. Of course I am not saying bug bounties are a bad thing and I realize that any software will have some bugs, but this just seems a bit too easy.

Bugs/Exploits

  • EOS patched a critical vulnerability in EOS EVM which could allow draining of the the EOS EVM contract (25-5-2023).

Governance

  • "Power originates with the token holders who delegate that power to the block producers. In theory. At the launch it was already evident that EOS is more centralized and can change parameters at crucial moments. "
  • "DPoS can take many forms, but on EOS, 21 nodes have all the power over the chain. These 21 nodes are chosen by token holders, who stake EOS coins in a vote for up to 30 BPs. The ones with the most votes serve in the top 21, and the vote is effectively continuous. That means BPs can move in and out of the top 21 at almost any time. The top 21 earn significant revenue, and another roughly 50 (this number is not fixed) earn meaningful revenue as standby BPs, both sharing a portion of the 1 percent annual inflation of EOS tokens."
  • Block producers are given “limited and checked” authority to freeze accounts, update defective applications, and propose hard forking changes to the underlying protocol.
  • Before any change can be made to the blockchain the block producers must approve it; if they refuse to make changes desired by the token holders then they can be voted out; if they make changes without permission of the token holders, all other non-producing full node validators (exchanges, etc) will reject the change
  • In a survey filled out by block producers in 12-2018 it was made public that for most of them the average break even cost was $4 per EOS token. At the time of writing the price was $1.80

Worker Proposal System

  • Update (26-3-2020):

"EOS blockchain explorer Bloks shows that the first phase was approved on March 24. EOS Nation — the block producer (BP) who proposed the system — claimed in a recent tweet that the 34 positive votes by BPs on the proposal is “the strongest consensus reached on any EOS Mainnet proposal”."

"EOS may turn to a DAO-like model to fund ecosystem development, but Block.one CEO Brendan Blumer has expressed concerns. Two block producers have revealed the details of EOS’s Worker Proposal System, which will allocate funding to developers and creators that wish to build on the EOS blockchain. EOS Nation and Attic Labs revealed the specs for WPS in a Mar. 9 YouTube video, which was released alongside a new website that demonstrates a testnet version of WPS.

WPS allows any EOS coin holder to propose and vote on funding proposals. Once a 30-day voting period concludes, funds will be paid out based on rules coded in a smart contract. Funding for winning proposals will be drawn from EOSIO accounts that originally gathered revenue from account name auctions and RAM fees. Right now, 50,000 EOS ($100,000) has been set aside for WPS, but the balance may be topped up with another 25,000 EOS in the future. To prevent spam, users who wish to request funds for their own projects or another project will need to pay a 100 EOS fee. Proposals will also need to pass certain voting and budget thresholds.

Previously, it was mainly held back by the fact that EOS needed to burn tokens in a “savings” account and slash inflation rates from 5% to 1% before launching WPS. Those changes were necessary to prevent future WPS users and block producers from abusing a constantly-growing reserve of funds. The EOS community performed the required EOS burns in May 2019 and February 2020, destroying $300 million worth of EOS in the process. They also agreed to reduce inflation during the second burn.

Brendan Blumer, the founder and CEO of EOS parent company Block.one, has criticized the plan.

He argues that allowing block producers to control funds without guaranteeing that they will provide a return on value is “risky” and could lead to corruption. He adds that WPS could alienate the blockchain community and make EOS’s success overly dependent on the new funding system."

Vote Buying

"A new service makes it easier for EOS block producers, the nodes elected by holders of the cryptocurrency to validate transactions on the network, to share their block rewards with those who voted for them. The service, known as Genpool, was introduced this month by GenerEOS, which itself is a block producer candidate.

While similar services have launched in Asia, Genpool appears to be the first in the English-speaking EOS world explicitly designed to help token holders find the best payouts for their votes from block producers.

There is nothing stopping a validator from acting is if it were more than one entity, allowing whales to hold multiple spots on the governing council of block producers, effectively mounting a Sybil attack, the research team at the Binance cryptocurrency exchange wrote in a report released Feb. 18.

"A single actor may register multiple block producer accounts and multiply their voting weight at a negligible cost,” the report said. “Simultaneously, having multiple BP entities allows [that actor] to allocate more block rewards to voters, increasing the competitiveness of the underlying actor."

Brendan Blumer, the CEO of Block.One, which created the software that runs the EOS blockchain, has also come out in favor of vote-buying. "Voter rebates just drive value back to token holders," Blumer tweeted earlier this month. "I’m a huge supporter." Blumer tweeted Feb. 19 suggesting the company could start voting its tokens this year."

"In EOS, token holders can vote for block producers (validators) and the top 21 block producers participate in the consensus process and share inflationary rewards. Since private keys controlling EOS tokens can also vote in governance, exchanges have effective control over the governance rights of the tokens custodied with them. Huobi, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, was found to accept bribes from block producers in order to elect them."

Government proposals

  • Most changes such as to freeze an account, change account code, update the constitution, etc. require 17/21 vote of elected block producers.
  • From this CoinDesk article (19-9-2019):

A “constitution” had been drafted, but it had not passed a referendum of EOS users. It was never entirely clear where legitimacy originated from on EOS, but when the chain started, 15 percent of the tokens needed to be staked for a vote in order for it to launch. So that 15 percent figure became the consensus figure for giving a governance document legitimacy, but it never happened. That consensus was documented as a rule in a draft constitution that never got ratified.

Today, here’s what EOS governance has settled on: At any time, any decision can be made if 15 of the 21 BPs move to support it. It doesn’t matter if in the next set of blocks those BPs change dramatically. To reduce the prior decision, that new set of BPs would need to establish a new supermajority of BPs. There is a system in place to run a vote across all EOS holders, but now, according to EOS New York, referenda are simply a way of gauging the interest of holders.

The theory had been that BPs would use inflation rewards to fund new tools, code improvements and dapps to improve the ecosystem. One of the first consequences of EOS’s failure to agree upon a shared decision-making process was the burning of approximately $167 million in the EOS savings account that had been designated for the worker proposal system.

As previously reported, the proposal system had been a way to fund dapp development on EOS (as well as community functions, lobbying costs and security audits), but without a way to agree on how to distribute the funds, they just accumulated, diluting the market cap to no purpose. So, all 34 million EOS got burnt on May 8, 2019 – with potential funding for thousands of new applications going with it.

Broader changes were already underway as that decision was finalized, though. In February, EOS New York proposed an EOS User Agreement (EUA). In April, the EUA was ratified by 15 of the 21 BPs at the time, according to a spokesperson for EOS New York, who took a role shepherding it through. What’s notable about the EUA is what it doesn’t address: in particular, vote-buying. The interim constitution explicitly forbids vote-buying but the EUA is silent on the topic.

Lumi Wallet recently compiled a comprehensive list of reform proposals floated by different parts of the community, assessing the pros and cons of each approach."

  • EOS NY released (14-10-2019) their own governance proposal with among other changes:
  1. Dynamic inflation is replaced with static inflation (e.g. 50MM flat per year vs. 5% of supply per year).
  2. 1 Divisible Vote replaced 1 Token 30 Votes.
  3. If too few tokens vote then staking rewards are shut off, total inflation reduces, and 100% of inflation is now awarded to BPs until such time as the voting threshold is met again.
  • Dan Larimer released (15-10-2019) a new governance proposal (Proposing the creation of 6 different staking pools).
  • One community member (and maintainer of an independent EOS Block Producer ratings platform called Mereo.io) proposed (6-10-2018) "WHISPER: An EOS Whistleblower Initiative; A Counter-Incentive to Combat Corruption". However, as of 12-2019, this has not gathered any traction.

Savings Account

"Despite 4% total inflation going to the savings account, there was never a defined use for it. Block producers saw the fund as becoming excessive and a potential honeypot for attackers. As a result, block producers chose to burn all the tokens in the account several times. They first burned 34 million tokens (worth $165 million at the time) in May 2019. In February 2020 they burned the remaining 34 million tokens in the account (worth around $140 million at the time). Along with the second burn, they passed a proposal to eliminate the savings account allocation, reducing inflation to 1%. The savings account was later re-enabled at 2% in August 2021, to create ongoing funding for the ENF."

ENV Fund

  • From a commissioned Messari report (3-3-2023):

"In November 2022, block producers passed a proposal to create and fund a new ecosystem fund managed by EOS Network Ventures (ENV) with ~68 million tokens, matching the amount previously burned. The ENV uses the fund to invest in ecosystem projects and also to launch accelerator and incubation programs."

Token

Launch

  • Security is the most important element of any blockchain project. The fact that Block.One’s internal systems have been hacked during its ICO, leading to millions in investor’s funds being stolen by phishers, does not provide for much confidence in the company’s abilities to make secure systems.
  • The EOS mainnet was launched on the 1st of June, 2018 after a 12 month crowd sale. It is therefore very early, and has a long way to go in proving that it is a viable crypto in its own right, let along a possible alternative to Ethereum.
  • There are speculations that the EOS team pumped up their own ICO. "...the fact that EOS had massive outflows from the crowdsale contract DURING THE SALE is hugely problematic. Why did they depart from the established best practice and do this". EOS did not release the promised audit demonstrating that Block.one had not recycled funds into its own ICO (thus gaining a free and hidden stake of EOS)

SEC Settlement

"EOS maker Block.One must pay $24 million in penalties for conducting an unregistered securities sale, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced Monday evening. The SEC said in a press release that Block.One “raised the equivalent of several billion dollars” over a one-year period in an unregistered initial coin offering (ICO). (A total of $4.1 billion was raised.) Block.One agreed to settle the charges, according to the SEC.

The fine amounts to 0.58 percent of the initial raise.

Notably, the press release highlighted that Block.One’s token sale began shortly before the SEC released its DAO Report but “continued for nearly a year after the report’s publication.” The company did not secure an exemption from securities registration requirements and did not otherwise register the sale, the SEC said.

In its own press release, Block.One said the settlement only applies to the sale of the original ERC-20 token it sold. EOS holders swapped their ethereum-based tokens with the proper EOS tokens when the network first went live. More significantly, Block.One’s statement said that its ERC-20 token is no longer in circulation “and will not require the token to be registered as a security with the SEC.”

Token allocation

"Block producers earn block rewards funded by 1% network inflation. Of this 1%:

  1. 75% (0.75% total inflation) is allocated to block producers in proportion to the number of votes they received in the past day, thus rewarding both active and standby BPs.
  2. 25% (0.25% total inflation) is allocated to block producers in proportion to the number of blocks they produced in the past day, thus rewarding only BPs who were active then."

However, later in the report it mentions 3% inflation, with 2% going to a 'savings account'. About 68M tokens also got burned through votes.

  • Proceeds from ICO will be the revenue of block.one and will be used at the company’s sole discretion. 90% — to contributors, 10% — to the block.one company. However, Block.one itself is the largest token holder. Block.One was scheduled to get 10% of the EOS supply, however in 12-2021 the community revolted and halted their payments, citing that Block.One had failed to deliver on their promises. Before the freeze, B1 received around 32 million tokens, leaving around 68 million frozen. These tokens are currently still being staked, with no plans to unfreeze, burn, or do anything else with them.

Inflation

  • According to a Messari report (Q3-2023) it has 4.9% inflation at that time.

Utility

  • From a commissioned Messari report (3-3-2023):

"EOS Network’s native token EOS is used for security (validator and delegator staking) and resource allocation (CPU, NET, and RAM fees). Since launch, EOS tokenomics has changed several times. As it stands, EOS inflates at a 3% yearly rate with no burn mechanism."

Coin Distribution 

  • In December 2021, EOS block producers passed a proposal to freeze B1’s EOS token vesting contract (beyond the ICO, B1 had received 10% of the initial EOS supply at launch, which was unlocking linearly over 10 years).

Block.one's Stake

  • Block.one hinted that they may begin voting with their stake (which is the largest in the ecosystem) on the EOS mainnet soon. Update (30-7-2020): "Block.one has allocated 85 million EOS ($259 million) to its proxy. These tokens represent 10% of the entire token supply and almost all of Block.one’s 100 million EOS holdings."

"By the summer’s end, Block.One, still the largest holder of EOS, started to make noise about voting its stake in favor of the teams it deemed the most technically proficient.

Block.One holds so many tokens that it could all but handpick the top 21 BPs (or at least exclude any BP that did not get its nod). Yet more than a year later, it still has not cast its first vote."

Update: "Blumer tweeted Feb. 19 suggesting the company could start voting its tokens this year." And block.one announced (8-4-2020): "Plans to Begin EOS Voting in May 2020".

Tech

"Developer teams are building an EVM solution that supports the most popular Web3 language Solidity." Update (3-7-2023): "So far, the [EOS EVM] network has accumulated over $1 million in TVL and averaged 5,100 daily transactions."

  • Development language used. From a Messari report (3-3-2023):

"EOS’s smart contracts are written in C++, but further SDKs for Rust, Go, and AssemblyScript are under development."

Transaction Details

How it works

  • From a commissioned Messari report (3-3-2023):

"Many blockchains have a gas-based resource model. Users spend a gas token to cover the various costs of a transaction, including processing the transaction and storing the data. On EOS, the resources typically combined into one gas fee are separated into their own components.

The three resource components on EOS are:

  1. NET — A space-denominated resource that measures the network’s throughput capacity in bytes.
  2. CPU — A time-denominated resource that measures the processing time of a transaction in microseconds.
  3. RAM — Measures the network’s data storage capabilities in kilobytes.

Together, NET and CPU cover the bandwidth costs of the network. The allocation model for these resources has evolved several times.

Originally, NET and CPU were regenerable resources that a user could reserve in proportion to their share of staked EOS. When a user made a transaction, their available bandwidth decreased by the NET and CPU required for that transaction. But the resource was only temporarily consumed. After 24 hours, the user would once again have access to their full amount of NET and CPU.

To prevent inefficient resource allocation, EOS launched the Resource Exchange (REX) in 2019. This feature allowed users to stake EOS and lend their excess bandwidth resources to borrowers. In return, lenders received a REX token, a rebasing version of the EOS token that accrues REX borrowing fees, RAM trading fees (see below), and fees generated from premium EOS account name auctions.

In early 2021, EOS began transitioning to the current PowerUp resource model proposed by B1. This model helps make resource management more user friendly and efficient. Instead of staking EOS to reserve bandwidth, users can pay a small EOS fee to power up their account bandwidth for 24 hours. To further improve user experience, many wallets provide free PowerUp subsidies daily and abstract resource management away from users. Users can often also receive free PowerUp subsidies from other infrastructure providers like block explorers.

As it stands, the REX is no longer used for resource lending and borrowing, but it still distributes all the fees from the previously mentioned sources, as well as PowerUp fees, to EOS stakers. At the moment, REX TVL is over $62 million.

EOS accounts have two different types of keys:

  1. Owner keys add, remove, and manage active keys. Each account has one owner key.
  2. Active keys sign transactions. Each account can have many active keys.

Furthermore, owner keys can set up active keys with custom permissions. For example, there could be an active key that can only mint NFTs from one specified contract. A user could also create several keys and require multiple signatures to execute transactions. A wait timer feature allows owner keys to set up active keys such that there is an inputted time delay before a signed transaction is executed. This system has similar effects to account abstraction, as it significantly improves UX and security compared to traditional accounts that are not smart contracts."

  • Uses DPOS; Those who hold tokens on a blockchain may select block producers through a continuous approval voting system. Anyone may choose to participate in block production and may produce blocks proportional to the total votes they have received relative to all other producers. DPoS has the problem of forming cartels.
  • To learn more about EOS’s technology, read its technical whitepaper

Fees

  • Often touted as having free tx. But instead of calling transactions free, it would be more accurate to say that transaction fees are imposed on everyone who owns any EOS, in the form of inflation. 5% on a yearly basis to pay the block producers. (2018-2 found this info: “EOS will have an annual 5% inflation rate (the developers are thinking about reducing it to 1% but many questions remain) and the community is able to vote on the recipients of the inflation. Although the exact distribution of the funds is still unknown, it’s very likely that a large portion will go to the block producers.”
  • Besides inflation, it also has a 30 EOS staking minimum for an account in order to make a single transaction. From this article by EarnBet (formerly EOSBet) (25-11-2019):

"Once billed as “free transactions for all,” effective EOS transaction fees now surpass even those of BTC. Instead of needing to pay $0.25 to transfer BTC, EOS users need to stake over $100 of EOS to make a single transaction on the network.

The only feasible way to make transactions on EOS is by purchasing resources for 30 days via the REX system contract. What started as “zero transaction fees” turned into the most convoluted and confusing transaction fee model in the history of blockchain. Even worse, the REX contract has been in “emergency shutdown mode” for over three weeks, where users cannot withdraw their EOS and new REX loans cannot be issued. 

Imagine you’re a new EOS user who wants to make around ten to twenty transactions per day. To get started on the EOS mainnet, you’d need purchased thousands of dollars of EOS from an exchange to stake into your newly created account." 

"EOS addresses the spam problem (since there are no fees) by using a unique resource model. Holding EOS tokens gives an account a set amount of transaction, computation, and storage bandwidth to use. The more tokens a user holds, relative to other users in the system, the more resources available to the user. This limit is elastic. In low blockchain usage conditions, each token provides more bandwidth. As overall usage increases, bandwidth allocation shrinks.

It’s important to note that this bandwidth restriction is enforced by block producers in a subjective fashion. Since a block is produced by a single block producer, the producer can unilaterally reject a transaction if they think that it’s wasteful.

EOS is capable of parallelized dApp execution. This is technically very impressive and allows EOS to be horizontally scalable, something Ethereum and Bitcoin is not.

Essentially, blocks are split into different threads with each thread assigned a group of accounts (which could include dApps) by the block producer. Two accounts can be safely assigned into different threads if there are no transactions referencing both accounts at once. This is made possible by the fact that the state of an EOS dApp only depends on the messages it receives, and the system has a constraint that messages generated in one block cycle can only be delivered in the next cycle.

Upgrades

Staking

"Unlike some other PoS systems, delegators do not stake their tokens to a specific block producer. Instead, they generally stake their tokens to the system and then vote for up to 30 BPs. If a user stakes 1 million tokens, each BP they vote for will receive 1 million votes (ignoring voting power decay, detailed below), whether the user votes for 1 or 30 BPs.

The top 21 block producers based on voting rank are known as “active BPs”, and they participate in consensus each round. Consensus rounds last 126 seconds, consisting of 252 blocks (each lasting half a second). At the beginning of each round, active BPs are selected and sorted alphabetically. Each BP then produces 12 blocks at a time until the round ends, at which point the process repeats.

With each active BP producing 4.76% of the blocks each round, regardless of stake, EOS limits the concentration of block production. Block producers outside the top 21 are known as “standby BPs” and do not participate in consensus for that round."

Staking Stats

  • From a commissioned Messari report (3-3-2023):

"Although only 21 BPs can participate at a time, there have been 65 total BPs since launch who have produced a block. Others have participated just as standby BPs, and there are currently 100 BPs with votes.

In total, over 317 million EOS (27.6% of the token’s total supply) from almost 100,000 addresses is staked. However, only around two-thirds of staked tokens are used for voting. Most notably, the frozen B1 tokens (64 million tokens) are staked but are not participating in governance. Thus, the amount of tokens delegated to BPs is closer to 212 million EOS ($254 million as of February 22, 2023), around 18.5% of the total supply."

Interoperability

  • From a Messari report (3-3-2023):

"One of the Antelope Coalition’s first initiatives was to implement a light-client-based inter-blockchain communication (IBC) protocol. The design is similar to Cosmos’ IBC (although it does not use a hub and spoke model like Cosmos) and built on the work of 0rigin, the development team of Antelope-based chain UX Network. Implementing Antelope IBC allows Antelope-based blockchains to securely communicate with each other and scale horizontally. For example, a popular dapp could spin up an Antelope sidechain and validator set to have its own execution environment while remaining connected to the ecosystem. In January 2023, Antelope IBC launched on EOS mainnet, with a successful pilot transaction between EOS and UX Network."

Other Details 

Oracle Method

Their Other Projects

Roadmap

  • Can be found [Insert link here].
  • EOS has a proposal which would change its consensus mechanism (27-4-2021):

"The proposal for stake-based voting and rewards on EOS basically follows the model that blockchains like Cosmos and Cardano use and that Ethereum has been working to deploy: sharing block rewards directly with users who stake to support validators (like Bitcoin’s miners) on the network."

 Usage

  • EOS had an inscription peak of a day which translated to $60k in revenue, instead of the below 20k of the previous times. TVL of EOS EVM went to $2M (1-2024).
  • From a commissioned Messari report (3-3-2023):

"Since the start of 2021, daily transactions have fallen 65%, but daily active addresses have increased 7%. The downtrend in daily transaction count reversed in October 2022. Since then, daily transactions have increased 218%, although daily active addresses have decreased 25%. This recent trend indicates a rise in power users.

Year-to-date, the network is averaging 1.3 million daily transactions and 38,000 daily active addresses. However, the latter figure is inflated by a large outlier. On January 31, 2023, daily active addresses spiked to 436,000. There is no clear cause for the spike, and the ENF is unsure what drove it. Almost the entire spike was due to addresses interacting with the EOS system contract – which manages functions like delegation, resource management, and more – rather than an increase in any dapp-related activity.

So far in 2023, EOS is averaging 1,785 new addresses per day, a decline from 2022 (over 2,600) and 2021 (almost 13,000).

Over 75% of TVL comes from Defibox, a decentralized exchange and lending protocol. Defibox averages around $470,000 in daily trading volume as of February 21, 2023. The exchange’s top trading pool is EOS/USDT with around $6.2 million in TVL and around $380,000 in daily trading volume as of February 21, 2023."

"Developers working on the EOS platform fell more than 85% compared to a year ago, according to a new research report from Outlier Ventures. As a result, code updates tracked on Github were down a whopping 94% for the beleaguered protocol over the same time period. What’s more, as Decrypt reported in April, EOS dapp activity is down 70% over the last year."

"The daily activity on EOS during Q3 was down 27% since last year."

But Decrypt gives conflicting data (11-10-2020), saying EOS daily active wallets hit 5% and:

"The EOS protocol also picked up momentum in Q3; Defibox, Dmd.Finance and the DeFis Network generated over 4,300 daily active wallets."

Relay Bridge (ETH-EOS)

  • From the Kyber blog, who made it possible (30-7-2019):

"In the previous post we focused on one side of the equation — relaying payment data from EOS to Ethereum. This time we share our work for moving assets the other way around, from Ethereum to EOS. We demonstrate it by having the Kyber Experimental DAO move a KNC token to the EOS blockchain.

The bridge development itself took on some prominent challenges:

  1. Implementing POW verification logic (Ethash) on an EOS contract.
  2. Maintaining the longest chain of relayed blocks.
  3. Verifying data authenticity through traversing modified Merkle Patricia tries."

"According to a June 2020 report from Outlier Ventures, EOS lost 85% of its developer pool over the course of a year as its Github code updates evaporated to just 6% of the previous year's level."

Projects building on EOS

  • Gambling DApps on EOS make up the majority of all transaction volume, accounting for around 65 percent. In the first quarter of 2019, blockchain bots made up 51 percent of unique accounts–and more than 75 percent of transactions. EOS NYC responded
  • From Bitcoin.com (7-2-2020):

"Anchain.ai, an artificial intelligence security company published a report in the summer of 2019 that said a good majority of transaction volume stems from “malicious bot activity” on dapps (decentralized apps) and exchanges."

  • EarnBet moved (25-11-2019) to ETH; "Following our rebrand from EOSBet and some additional marketing, our platform has grown rapidly, with many new players joining the community. Non-EOS token deposits have increased sharply, and last Saturday we distributed a record 34 ETH in dividends!"
  • "Notably, Synthetix began trying to implement their protocol on EOS, decided (8-2019) it was a mistake, and have doubled down on building on Ethereum."

"The story concerning what’s being built on EOS differs wildly depending on whether you read the narrative being peddled at eosprojects.org or the unofficial one recorded by Dappradar.com. According to the former, recent projects of note include Equilibrium, a smart contract solution for creating EOSDT-backed stablecoins, and pro-privacy market research project Insights Network. Other than that, the handful of projects listed on eosprojects.org are either dead or dying, such as Eos Time, an auction site that hasn’t been heard from since the start of February."

"Dappradar paints a far rosier picture of EOS adoption, even if its killer use case isn’t the one that Dan Larimer envisioned. It turns out that EOS is great for running gambling dapps, thanks to its free transactions and fast block times. Centralization concerns aren’t an issue here either: for gambling purposes, EOS is decentralized enough. Top dapps include Dice, Hold’em Poker King, and GP Casino. There are also a few gaming dapps in the top 10 such as Prospectors and EOS Knights."

"Scout around, however, and there are signs of life. Tech collective Ghostbustersx, for instance, are beavering away on some interesting EOSIO projects including a DAG for the independent nation of Liberland."

According (5-6-2020) to DeFi Prime, there are 22 DeFi projects building on (among other platforms) EOS. Among these are DEX's Newdex, WhaleEx and YOLO.

"Games and gambling apps dominate the top 20 apps on EOS, although a decentralized exchange, Newdex, boasts daily volumes around $15 million."

  • From Crypto Briefing (6-8-2020):

"Prohibitive development costs led to a decline in new dApps on the platform. In July 2020, only one new dApp appeared on EOS, compared to 32 on Ethereum."

Antelope (fka EOSIO)

"In September 2022, the community-ownership effort culminated in a hard fork from the EOSIO codebase to a new Antelope codebase, along with several new features. The open-source Antelope protocol is maintained and upgraded by the Antelope Coalition, a group of teams from EOS, WAX, Telos, and UX Network — all networks that were originally based on EOSIO."

  • EOS.IO is a software upon which one or more blockchain platforms can be built; whether it will actually happen is up to third party developers who will hold at least 15% of EOS Tokens (not the team). (Update (2019): EOSIO is live)
  • Is intended to be used by third party developers as architecture to build their own blockchain platforms on. The technology focuses on meeting the needs of DApps to gain a widespread use: the EOS.IO software (“EOS.IO”) is supposed to enable scaling to millions of transactions per second eliminating user fees and enable DApps’ quick and easy deployment.

Mainnet EOSIO projects

Testnet EOSIO projects

  • Jungle
  • Kylin
  • Local
  • BOS (Testnet)
  • Telos

Other projects on EOS

"EOS blockchain has partnered with automated liquidity provider Bancor to launch a platform to boost the network’s DeFi ecosystem. The platform, called xNation, will enable anyone to launch and fund liquidity pools for any EOS token, and receive the fees generated by the pool in proportion to the amount that was funded. Liquidity pools allow users to trade tokens through on-chain transactions, without needing an order book. The platform aims to increase liquidity and trading volume, while generating an additional source of income for token deposits, the release says."

Projects that left EOS

  • Effect Network, which called itself the “most-used and largest project” on the EOS mainnet to date, has left EOS due to “unfulfilled promises to address the many issues that plague the EOS mainnet”. It left towards BSC (26-3-2021).

Scams on EOS

"EOS Ecosystem, a wallet app that has promised high returns for users’ EOS deposits, has shut down the platform, and its creators appear to have run away with approximately $52 million user funds, according to a local report. ChainNews previously reported that EOS Ecosystem does not have an EOS node as it claims and has been running a pyramid scheme. In 2019, the project was sued in a local court in Tengzhou, China, for allegedly carrying out a pyramid scheme involving over 33 million EOS tokens (around $81 million at press time). 

Ever since development studio Block.one released the open-source blockchain software EOSIO in 2018, several firms have carried out investment scams centered around the blockchain’s native cryptocurrency EOS. EOS Vote, EOSCUBE, and EOSFIN, for example, all revealed themselves to be fraudulent platforms."

Pros and Cons

Pros

"The network boasts enticing technology that, on paper, outdoes Ethereum at scalability and ease of development. Moreover, EOS-based dApps don’t ask users to pay for transactions, making them more friendly than expensive Ethereum-based dApps."

Cons

Centralization concerns

  • In the end, there is a high risk EOS will become a highly centralized system with the top 20 block producers forming a rigid cartel.
  • There are significant centralization concerns with EOS. Block producers have tremendous power and there are weak on-chain mechanisms to replace a block producer. If you so happen to be one, you’d likely have a disproportionately large amount of EOS tokens which basically secures your block producer status. Not only that, being a block producer also entitles you to a large portion of inflation income. You will also have the ability to modify contracts and censor accounts. This is a scary amount of power to give to a select few.
  • It is also very hard for a user to become a block producer. Besides the paramount task of getting enough votes to be in the top 20, a user will also need to operate high performance computers with large storage capacities in order to support intensive blockchain operations.
  • From this CoinDesk article (19-9-2019):

"BPs froze seven accounts that had been shown to hold stolen tokens (tokens attained by tricking users during the migration of assets from ethereum – upon which Block.One ran the token sale – to the actual EOS blockchain). The decision to freeze those accounts presaged the controversy the blockchain is facing now, because the top BPs did so without any kind of agreed-upon governance process.

In early September, EOS Tribe, which participated in the launch of the first EOS chain, announced on Steemit that it was stepping away from EOS as a block producer (BP) candidate, focusing on other blockchains and other implementations of the EOSIO software.

EOS Tribe’s Eugene Luzgin wrote in the post: “We at EOS Tribe have never participated in the game of vote trading and stayed true to our principles, and hence while we leave EOS as Block Producer, we are also free to speak truth and give warnings to the rest.”

Luzgin left, in short, because he said it is no longer possible to earn funds for maintaining the blockchain without support from major EOS whales. The BPs that Luzgin believes have the strongest technical proficiency have overwhelmingly been relegated to lower-tier rewards or no rewards at all.

Luzgin lamented developers who have put all their creativity into EOS moving down into standby BP or even unpaid status. He pointed to companies like Bitfinex and Huobi who are participating in its consensus.

“EOS is a just a side gig for them. It’s just extra revenue,” Luzgin said, comparing the exchanges to companies that are all-in on the blockchain’s potential. “That view is very different. They aren’t really participating in the community.”

Huobi and Bitfinex were among a handful of BPs that never replied to CoinDesk’s inquiries.

Brock Pierce, an early member of the Block.One team and still an active member of the EOS community, would make waves in June 2019 with a speech at the Tulip Conference when he suggested that EOS is now governed by a “Chinese oligarchy.”

As of this writing, a majority of the BPs indicate their locations as within China. Sources tell CoinDesk that multiple others are also located in China despite outward appearances."

In his post, EOS Tribe’s Luzgin noted that shortly after EOS launched it started to see BP candidates joining the top 21 who hadn’t participated in the launching of the chain at all, propelled there by supportive votes from whales. By the summer’s end, Block.One, still the largest holder of EOS, started to make noise about voting its stake in favor of the teams it deemed the most technically proficient.

Block.One holds so many tokens that it could all but handpick the top 21 BPs (or at least exclude any BP that did not get its nod). Yet more than a year later, it still has not cast its first vote."

“We see top BPs missing not just blocks but whole rounds,” Luzgin told us. “They are supposed to produce 12 blocks. They miss all 12.

Another way that dapp developers see EOS as losing ground is in the area of application program interfaces (APIs). APIs make it easier for apps to query the state of the chain and push transactions. The most robust APIs allow a dapp to query the full history of EOS. Since the blockchain is generating thousands of transactions, this is an expensive service to offer.

Cox of Gretmass argued: “BPs should be providing API access since they are the ones building the actual blocks, and providing direct access to their internal networks (through APIs) gives users a direct path to submit transactions.”

On Sept. 6, 11 BPs were currently providing some kind of API at that time, according to Cox. There are different APIs and different levels of quality of APIs, too. “Subjectively, it feels wrong that the lower-ranked BPs are the one shouldering this cost,” he wrote, while also noting that a good API requires hardware and skill to run, such that even well-funded BPs may not be equipped to run one. On Sept. 13, EOS Nation’s BP scanner only showed two entities providing full-history APIs.

EDNA’s Simpson told CoinDesk that the unreliability of some BPs required EDNA to revise its code so it checked more than one API, for when some weren’t operational or when blocks were dropped.

And it is worth noting that there are other services a BP can provide that can also benefit the community that don’t fit neatly into these buckets.

For example, CertiK, a security company, noted that it provides security services to the network rather than APIs. Newdex said it directed votes to BPs providing useful services in order to help them earn funds.

  • The firm Whiteblock published (1-11-2018) a report that described the EOS chain as nothing more than a “cloud service for computation.” 
  • From Crypto Briefing (6-8-2020): 

"While EOS was able to bootstrap a community at its launch, it failed to retain it. The platform’s high centralization and prohibitive usage costs have forced many to create forks and migrate elsewhere. Discussions between EOS block producers (BPs) and Crypto Briefing revealed that the network was initially supported by a grassroots movement, a healthy characteristic for any public blockchain. However, as the stakes increased, large players joined and took over EOS governance. With the advent of services like GenPool, it has become even harder for new players to enter the block production committee. Such services incentivize users to support the top-positioned nodes to maximize rewards. 

The EOS constitution prohibits gaming the system for profits, but with no enforcement. The constitution, designed to prevent this kind of governance capture by block producers, has no impact on the network. EOS Core Arbitration Forum (ECAF) should have become the enforcement branch, but it failed after the community’s backlash.

Moreover, besides an on-chain oligarchy, EOS shows signs of having an off-chain one too. For instance, in 2019, one of the block producers, EOS New York, revealed that a single entity registered six BPs.

Like BPs, developers of decentralized applications (dApps) feel unwelcome on EOS. Interviews conducted by Crypto Briefing showed that while EOS technological stack and tools are convenient for building applications, deploying them is expensive due to the high price of computational resources on EOS. EOS developers eat the cost of onboarding new users. In line with the EOS architecture, deploying a dApp requires renting resources like CPU and NET, and buying RAM. If the dApp user base increases down the road, more resources need to be allocated by developers. EOS resources create secondary markets, which can be skewed by speculation. For instance, RAM prices can spike, which can hamper dApp development. At the current EOS and RAM prices, buying storage per account comes out to just under $0.9, which is very expensive for dApp deployment. For instance, scaling Voice on EOS to a size of Facebook would require paying over $2 billion just for creating accounts.

Instead of fixing EOS’s overarching issues, Block.one singles out certain in-house projects like Voice and focuses on promoting them. The company takes more risks by pushing several selected teams instead of creating an attractive environment for all the developers in the first place. Instead of making its previous projects successful, Block.one is following the money by launching more products that are likely to fail."

Nic Carter's 2018 Roundup

  1. It did not release the promised audit demonstrating that Block.one had not recycled funds into its own ICO (thus gaining a free and hidden stake of EOS)
  1. EOS devolved within weeks into a Kafkaesque bureaucracy wherein an unelected arbitrator gained the right to reappropriate funds from users at will
  2. Block.one decided to scrap the constitution they launched with and rewrite it entirely
  3. Block producers, as expected, created a mutualistic system of vote-assignment, entrenching the oligarchy and reducing churn in the validator set
  4. EOS continued to demonstrate in myriad ways that it lacks the social scalability to become a neutral layer for global value transfer
  5. EOS actually ground to a halt due to a bug and was offline for several hours before being restarted

Attack Vectors

  • A korean team found multiple attack vectors

Professor Yongdae Kim of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) university in Seoul led a team of four students to research “fundamental problems stemming from the EOSio design,” the operating system for the EOS cryptocurrency. In a paper to be given 13 August 2019 at the USENIX symposium, his team will report having introduced “four attacks whose root causes stem from the unique characteristics of EOS.IO […] one of which is confirmed to be fatal.” 

Kim described the four research students as coming from a “software security background,” with authors Sangsup Lee and Daejun Kim being the primary researchers who “came up with the EOSio attacks.” Their block delay attack, SCP CPU-drain attack, SCP RAM-drain attack, and a RAMsomware attack are all detailed in the paper, along with mitigations, preventions, and redesign proposals.

The attacks’ “root causes stem from the unique characteristics of EOS.IO,” the KAIST team notes, “including intentionally slowing down the block creation time—which can disrupt the essential functions of its blockchain and incapacitate the entire EOS.IO system. In addition, we find that an adversary can partially freeze the execution of a target smart contract or maliciously consume all the resources of a target user with crafted requests.”

The team reported to the EOSio Foundation all of the threats they found, one of which was confirmed to be “fatal.” CoinSpice asked Professor Kim about the EOSio foundation reaction to the news, and he insisted they “patched it 5 days after we reported it. We received a Bug Bounty of $10,000.”

Competition

  • Competitor with Ethereum and other dApp platforms. Also has a bunch of EOSIO competitors, like Telos.
  • A range of network forks, including Telos, WAX, and Boscore emerged.

BP's

The original 21 BPs at the chain’s launch were:

  • EOS Canada, EOS Authority, eosDAC, EOS New York, EOS Cafe Block, EOSCannon, EOS42, LiquidEOS, Bitfinex, EOSHuobiPool, EOS Gravity, Cypherglass, EOS Argentina, EOS Rio, EOSYS, Sw/eden, EOS Beijing, EOSeoul, MEET.ONE, EOS Store and EOS Asia.
  • "EOS shows signs of having an off-chain one too. For instance, in 2019, one of the block producers, EOS New York, revealed that a single entity registered six BPs."

Other well known Block Producers are/have been:

  • Stake.fish provided services for EOS and is a block producer
  • EOS Tribe, which quit in 9-2019
  • "Many BPs (9-2019) that were once often seen in the top 21 now no longer even qualify for rewards as standby BPs, including BP candidates such as EOSSphere, ShEOS, EOSAmsterdam, EOS Detroit, EOS Dublin and EOS Venezuela."
  • Big.One; which "welcomes participants to stake votes for the blockchain and profit for doing so"
  • EOS Wiki; which "responded to a question about what the company had done to help create new dapps in a statement delivered via Telegram: “We would not answer this question although we are incubating dapp/app. All is because this is not a ‘legal duty’ of being a block producer, please read the EUA.”"
  • Attic Lab; "out of Ukraine, was able to point to one particular metric where it stands out. Aloha EOS has tracked a benchmark test for BPs since the very early days, and Attic Lab has consistently scored the highest on those measurements. Aloha EOS scores the benchmark by asking each BP to run a calculation and timing it. Recently, Big.One, the second-most-backed BP, and the BPs run by two exchanges (Bitfinex and Huobi) have scored the lowest."
  • Greymass; is, lately (9-2019), a standby and not a full BP. However "many dapps have told his company that its is the fastest providing direct access to their internal networks (through APIs) gives users a direct path to submit transactions. “Subjectively, it feels wrong that the lower-ranked BPs are the one shouldering this cost,” he wrote, while also noting that a good API requires hardware and skill to run, such that even well-funded BPs may not be equipped to run one."
  • Meet.One; "has been providing news about EOS in Chinese languages for that audience, contributing code updates, new developer tools and funding meetups in China."
  • Google Cloud is becoming a BP (7-10-2020).

Team, partners and users

  • Currently, a few companies have expressed intents to build on EOS. The most prominent of which include Everipedia, a blockchain-based fork of Wikipedia, and EOSfinex, an EOS-based decentralized exchange by Bitfinex.
  • Although the company’s team is 14 people, only five were mentioned as the current team working on EOS.IO during the team’s presentation at Consensus summit on May 22, 2017. Those five form a strong team, but it is unclear whether there are other people (e.g. developers) working on EOS.IO. The team members have other current employments except for block.one. Three of them hold key positions at the ii5 company which provides software and services to elevate, train and support Indian realtors. (Pre-launch of the main-net situation)

Team

  • Blumer, Brendan; CEO, is founder of 4 other startups related to using technology in real estate sector and online gaming, including ii5 where he holds a CEO position. The ii5’s main product is 1Group app for brokers which is in fact a complete Indian property database. Has been in the blockchain industry since 2014. Blumer is owning an estimated 15% of Block.one.
  • Larimer, Dan; ex-CTO, left on 11-1-2021 (his 3rd time doing so with one of his crypto projects)
  • Bliss, Andrew; CFO, is a former senior internal auditor and financial analyst at Rockwell Collins, a multinational company providing aviation and high-integrity solutions for commercial and military customers around the world. He is now head of financial operations at both ii5 and block.one. Similar to him, Wendy Lee works as Chief Legal Officer at both block.one and ii5.
  • Cox, Thomas; governance, “ interim Executive Director Thomas Cox, former Block.one VP of Product“ now also on the EOS Alliance

Partners

  • Grigg, Ian; partner, cryptographer who’s been building cryptographic ledger platforms for 2+ decades.
  • 'Mylos'
  • Pierce, Brock; partner (co-founded Block.One) stepped down as chief strategy officer at Block.one after his past legal issues came up in the media. But came back as board member on the EOS Alliance.
  • Shen, Bo; partner
  • Xiao Lai, Li; partner
  • Cao, Michael; partner
  • Stake.fish provided services for EOS and is a block producer

Funding

  • Novogratz, Mike; a renowned billionaire ex-hedge fund manager who was an early investor in Ethereum, is an investor in EOS through his venture capital firm, Galaxy Digital. Galaxy Digital and block.one announced in January the formation of a whopping $325 million fund that would be used to invest in EOS’s ecosystem.
  • TomorrowBC, the blockchain investment arm of Eric Schmidt’s venture firm, TomorrowVentures, also announced a similar EOS ecosystem investment fund.
  • Blockchain Capital, Fenbushi Capital, crypto-exchanges Bitfinex and Yunbi, Aurora Investment Advisors and the HyperChain Capital hedge fund have all presumably invested into block.one, although no further details are publicly available.
  • Part of the portfolio of 8 Decimal Capital
  • Has investment from Consensus Capital ("we’re a partner who supports their growth.")
  • Part of the portfolio of SVK Crypto
  • "The commonwealth of Virginia gave Block.One a $600,000 grant to help build out its U.S. headquarters in Arlington, a suburb of Washington, D.C. The company has existing operations in Blacksburg, Va., as well as a major hub in Hong Kong." (9-2019)
  • Block.One was scheduled to get 10% of the EOS supply, however in 12-2021 the community revolted and halted their payments, citing that Block.One had failed to deliver on their promisses.

EOS Alliance

  • In 8-2018 the EOS Alliance was launched. Initial Board Members Include Prominent EOS Influencers Brock Pierce, Bancor and LiquidEOS Co-Founder Galia Benartzi, and Music Artist Akon.

“The EOS Alliance will launch initially with a seven (7) member Board, expanding as needed in a process currently under draft.

Within 12 months, the EOS Alliance intends to have a fully elected board, to include members of diverse backgrounds and geographic regions, representing a variety of EOS community stakeholders and perspectives.

The initial board members are expected to be:

  1. A seat reserved for special appointment, held in the interim by Lightning Clearwater III, also serving as the Alliance’s General Counsel
  2. Brock Pierce, Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation and former partner at Block.one
  3. Galia Benartzi, Co-founder of Bancor and LiquidEOS
  4. Peter Li, founder of EOS Gravity, a community leader and Block Producer
  5. Hai Feng, of EOS Store, an EOS Block Producer
  6. Nix Nolledo, Philippine billionaire, founder of blockchain startup ODX
  7. AKON, multi-platinum music artist and blockchain enthusiast

In addition, two observer seats have been established for representatives to be selected by the paid Block Producers via a mechanism to be decided by them.

Staff initially will include interim Executive Director Thomas Cox, former Block.one VP of Product (where he led the work on EOS’s governance mechanisms), Deputy Executive Director Myra Wang (Dan Wang), formerly of the influential Chinese community EOS Gravity, and Communications Director Kevin Wilcox, co-founder of EOS Go.”

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