EOS Platform — What You Should Know
Digital Asset Platforms Series (5 part series — Part 3)
We live in an exciting modern world where Blockchain solutions have become the order of the day. EOS platform is one of the Blockchain innovations that have grown in popularity in the recent past.
The platform aims to create the world’s most robust infrastructure for the decentralized applications. EOS was founded in 2017. It’s poised to be a better alternative to other smart contract platforms such as Ethereum. Unlike other systems that use Proof-of- work, EOS employs a method referred to as delegated proof-of-stake. Instead of mining, the platform relies on delegates to confirm new blocks.
Perhaps you are already anxious, and you want to know what the EOS platform is all about. Let’s delve in and explore:
So, what is EOS?
EOS is a Blockchain platform that functions more or less like the Ethereum network but uses EOS tokens. It makes decentralized application development easy by providing a regulating set of services and functions that dapps can leverage on. The project was created by Dan Larimer, the founder of both Bitshares and Steemit.
The idea here was to integrate the best features as well as promises that various Blockchain networks out there bring to the crypto sphere. Simply put, EOS is intended to be an extremely scalable dapp platform. While Ethereum is more like a global computer, EOS should be thought of as universal operating system. It enables easy and quick deployment of dapps.
Currently, EOS is among the top 20 cryptocurrencies worldwide since its token has a market cap of over 500,000,000 US Dollars. Unlike Ethereum, to increase transaction speed, EOS uses delegate proof of stake.
EOS promises a more expandable Blockchain with suitable usability for large-scale business. While on Ethereum developers would need to create dapps from scratch all the time, EOS enables developers to customize their programs, and therefore they do not need to reinvent the wheel.
What problems does EOS seek to solve?
Conventional Blockchain platforms such as Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer from scalability issues. Other concerns include; users have to pay for service in most platforms, and this may not go well for social networks where users may not be willing to pay to access the platform.
EOS believes certain changes can be made for Blockchain technology to gain more users widespread. This includes the ability to support millions of users, unlike other blockchains that can only support tens of thousands of transactions per second thus being burdened by limited analytical capacity and extremely large fees.
Features of EOS
The EOS platform majors on the following features:
Commercial scalability
The ability to scale Blockchain applications is the main feature of EOS. Asynchronous communication, parallel execution, and other features boost the scalability of the platform. Besides separating authentication from execution, EOS can also support thousands of commercial-scale decentralized apps.
To bring it to perspective, think of Ethereum. The Ethereum platform is only able to process 13 transactions per second whereas visa processes over 20,000 transactions per second. Similarly, a social network would easily perform better than such a network. To tackle this problem, EOS utilizes a delegated proof of stake algorithm.
Mind you, the use of delegated proof of stake on EOS is not the first use case by founder Daniel Larimer. His social network (Steemit) also operates on PoS algorithm. And did we mention that EOS runs operations simultaneously in parallel to each other?
Unlike the Ethereum network that operates just on one chain, and usually these results to trouble- micro transactions can easily clog the network. EOS uses multiple chains, so it’s not possible that the network can clog and affect other apps.
Block producers
Since EOS consensus is based on a delegated proof-of-stake model, only a limited number of users are involved in validation transactions as well as creation of new blocks.
To be precise, the number of block producers to be chosen by the EOS is 121 candidates of which 21 of them will be elected through an election process whereby votes will be tallied after every two minutes. Once a block has been confirmed by 15 out of 21 appointed block producers, the block is considered irreversible.
Every token holder is legible to vote for thirty candidates, and stake weights the votes. While voters are allowed to change votes as many times as they would want, after staking, tokens are frozen for three days.
Broad distribution
In November 2017, there was a circulating supply of approximately 448 million EOS out of a total supply of 1billion EOS. To give the interested community adequate time to participate and familiarize with the project, the EOS token distribution will take place over a 341-day period. You can also find more information about token sale allocation for each stage on their platform EOS.io.
Flexibility
The EOS platform is pliable for dapp developers. This is because it offers a web assembly platform and ability to freeze as well as fix broken applications.
Equal opportunity
The EOS token price is dependent on the market demand. This eliminates bias thus allow for fair advantages to all purchasers. This way, no one feels victimized.
How does EOS work?
Well, we have mentioned a little bit about how it functions in the features section above. But let’s explore more:
EOS provides a complete operating system for decentralized applications with services such as server hosting, cloud storage, and user authentication.
On this platform, developers can build decentralized apps. For EOS token holders to fund application development on EOS network, they have to stake their coins. However, users can participate in EOS apps for free without necessarily purchasing the tokens.
Through the use of delegated proof of stake (DPOS), EOS can then meet the performance requirements of decentralized apps on the Blockchain including handling millions of users.
With EOS Blockchain, blocks are produced after every 3 seconds. Only one producer is guaranteed to create a block at any given point in time. The block generated will be skipped if it is not produced at the scheduled time.
21 unique block producers are chosen at the start of every round; therefore, blocks are created in rounds of 21. The first twenty producers are automatically selected every round whereas the last producer is chosen proportional to the number of votes relative to other producers. Finally, the selected producers are rearranged using a random number. By shuffling, all producers have equal and fair opportunity to participate.
Now, what’s next?
The fascinating thing about EOS is the fact that it is already a massive project yet it is in initial stages of development. Just like with any great innovation, we may not accurately speculate on EOS performance into the future.
With Brendan Blumer who has had over a decade of entrepreneurial tech experience under his belt together with his partner Brock pierce, a significant crypto influencer and founder of Blockchain capital, there is plenty of reasons to believe EOS will live to its expectations.
Resourceful links: Website | Whitepaper | Blog and Updates
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