EOS Blockchain — Why So Special?
Dapps are awesome, that’s not even a question. In fact, what’s not to like? They are secure, cryptocurrency-friendly, operate independently, and open for future development. Ethereum is considered to be the most popular platform for building dapps. But popularity does not necessarily mean it is without flaws. Just like Litecoin (and a fair number of other coins) tried to outmatch Bitcoin, EOS hopes to outshine Ethereum and become the biggest operating system for dapp development.
Who’s Behind It
Team block.one stands behind the EOS.IO project and Daniel Larimer (a creator of Steem and BitShares) and Brendan Blumer are the original authors. Even though they had no final product at the time, together they still managed to run a very successful and, in fact, one of the longest ICOs of all time. As a result, one billion EOS tokens were distributed and over four billion USD was raised. On June 1, 2018, EOS.IO launched their open-source software. Today their coin is one of the strongest on the market.
Token
The EOS token was originally created as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum blockchain. After the end of ICO, a Token Swap took place and EOS moved to its native coin. Currently, if you want to execute transactions for free, you need to have a certain amount of EOS to cover the bandwidth required for your transaction.
What’s so Special
The ultimate goal of EOS is to build a network for industrial-scale applications to be able to process millions of transactions.
With no transaction fee for token holders.
Is this even possible? Let’s take a closer look at EOS’ major features.
Basically, EOS aims to solve three of the biggest blockchain problems: speed, scalability, and flexibility.
Scalability
In contrast to Bitcoin or Ethereum, EOS suggests consensus over events instead of consensus over state. It means that in order to keep the blockchain up-to-date, the nodes verify events and not the state of the entire blockchain. As a result — a higher number of transactions per second can be executed.
Flexibility
The EOS platform comes with greater flexibility when it comes to dapps development and maintenance. The user gets to use the platform for free without paying any fee for using dapps. Developers are not renting but owning the resources of EOS according to their share and they can also make any changes whenever it’s necessary. This model should work better for both developers and end users.
Unexpectedly, there are no miners involved. EOS’ CEO Brendan Blumer commented on this important EOS feature on his Twitter:
“Miners don’t like EOS because miners don’t own the EOS network; they are hired by and work for #EOS holders.”
Delegated Proof-of-Stake
Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, EOS uses the delegated PoS consensus mechanism so that 21 Block Producers verify the transactions. This is supposed to increase the flexibility and help with making instant decisions. So, to put it simply, if there’s a bug it can be fixed immediately.
Usability
EOS offers a centralized file system for storing files and server hosting for their token holders. For developers, it offers special toolkits and self-describing interfaces.
Controversy
Obviously, the project that managed to raise such an impressive amount of money with almost nothing but a whitepaper (well that and a promising team) has attracted a lot of criticism. It was accused of setting unreal goals and being too centralized. EOS’ constitution that you have to follow if you want to use the platform is also not helping with general acceptance.
And lastly, a lot of bugs have been reported ever since EOS software has been released.
Conclusion
At this point, it is quite hard to make any predictions about whether EOS is going to deliver what it has promised. Considering the $4 billion budget and the strong team behind it, it has every opportunity to live up to its nickname and become the Ethereum killer.
But according to Brendan Blumer, it’s just a matter of time before the biggest blockchains start cooperating:
“Competing #blockchains will soon collaborate through side chains; religious walls will fall, communities will merge, and innovation will compound #BTC #EOS #ETH.”
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