From the beginning of this article, let’s take a look at the data.
Last year the number of EOS accounts increased by 90,000 accounts every week, while now we just have 10,000 newly added accounts per week. The current cumulative number of accounts is about 1.6 million, but the DApp 24-hour active actions just float between 18,000 to 250,000.
You can easily find that the number of EOS active users is far less than that of a common Chinese Internet company’s daily active users.
Let’s look at the EOS English telegram group, the number of users is decreasing, from more than 70,000 to 36,000. So as the BP communities where the number of active chat users is dropping dramatically.
Before the B1 June conference this year, the community had remarkably high expectations for EOS. However, as the price of EOS and the whole community continued to get down, we have heard many users decide to leave the community, some of whom are the most optimistic and active EOS users before. Sometimes, users may wonder: Is EOS really over?
Of course not! We believe EOS is still in full swing. A year ago, we realized that EOS might face the dilemma of growing new users, so MEET.ONE set the strategic development in 2019 as collaborations with big Internet companies. Because we have accumulated a certain amount of experience in the exploration of more than half a year. So we have sufficient confidence to answer this question.
1. How to Increase Users?
Blockchain users or EOS users have reached a bottleneck period in which only relying on the community to grow new users is too difficult and time-consuming. Since we believe that the blockchain is the starting point for a new generation of technology, why not focus on promoting cooperation with big Internet companies and convert their users into blockchain by millions?
Then, new questions are followed, what restricts Internet companies to adopt EOS blockchain technology? Two factors below may account for this question.
- Registration Threshold
For an Internet company, if you want to create an EOS account for 1 million users for free, the company needs to invest at least 10 million RMB at the current cost. There is no doubt that high cost has become the first threshold for companies to use the EOS blockchain.
Here I want to share my own experiences about Binance Chain and EOS Chain. In Binance Chain, users can create accounts for free easily. For example, when I help users register EOS account and Binance account, it can be obviously noticed that learning EOS and registering an EOS account cost too much, which is not an ordinary user can afford or willing to pay for.
- Access Threshold
Go back to one year ago, when the EOS mainnet dApp was extremely active, CPU issues occurred, causing users unable to transfer. The problem was fixed, and things went well later. But new users have to learn what is CPU, what is NET, what is RAM, and so on.
Undoubtedly, EOS has many conveniences, such as a 12-digit account name used as the transfer address, which makes it easier for us to use EOS. Compared to a long list of unrecognizable public key addresses, our chain behavior is more user-friendly. Here, I won’t go into details about the advantages of EOS.
Easy to say but hard to make it. The question we are facing, how to address this problem is the most important.
As far as I am concerned, we must clarify the meaning of EOS mainnet first. Is it the center of smart contracts for all large-scale commercial applications or does it have a phenomenal mass commercial application?
If the answer is the former, then IBC and more sidechains should be supported as soon as possible. These sidechains allow different commercial applications to be registered for free or at very low cost, thus completely solving the first problem of registering threshold.
In China, the Internet has been in development for 30 years, and no company has ever succeeded (in case if the company asks users to spend 10 RMB to sign up for an account). The companies, instead, usually incentivized users with coupons and other types of bonus in the early days. Although the blockchain has changed the technology, the user is still a real person in the material world, so it is necessary to solve the problem of the registration threshold.
Another advantage of working with big Internet companies is that they are not only aggregating real active users, they also have a centralized account system that naturally completed KYC. You don’t have to worry about the situation that several accounts registered by one user (Sybil accounts creation).
If it is the latter case, then B1 should take a part of the ICO funds to support different projects to create free accounts so as to complete the early-stage adoption. Now that the blockchain has created a new token economy, why is B1 limited in traditional VC equity investments?
For example, I am doing a large Internet project built on EOS blockchain, if I can apply for a small EOS account creation fee, that would be perfect. Through this way, it can help move my Internet business onto EOS blockchain and also bring substantial new users to EOS mainnet. Meanwhile, B1 can set a series of rules to ensure the funds to be used properly. Just think about it, If you want to invest in a project that is much more effective, at least the project will actually bring more users to the EOS ecosystem. If I can bring 1 million users, I need B1 to spend 1.5 million USD market value EOS to subsidize account creation. In fact, it’s hard to afford even for middle size and big corporations, but it is a good deal for B1 in some points. Because the success of million users project model can be a good example and lead to a large scale.
When Facebook launched Libra, it attracts global attention. What if there are some successful cases on EOS? it will definitely draw more attention. When a public chain has tens of millions of users, will we still worry about its future? With the users, there will be more dApps, and the whole ecosystem will thrive.
The problem EOS is currently experiencing is that most of the issues encountered by the public chain, the new users don’t lead to quantitative changes.
As a matter of fact, this is exactly what MEET.ONE Chain is exploring. We are working with a few large Internet companies, but a large project takes time, and we are also accumulating experience and hope to make it effectively available to EOS in the future.
2. How to Support Reliable BPs?
Another key issue below is the governance of EOS.
EOS has a very good idea of DPoS. In the early days when the EOS mainnet was not started, cooperation amongst block producers was driven by enthusiasm. The original vision was like: I will do more useful things for EOS, such as education or technical output and then I can get support from voters and become a block producer. But later big exchanges appeared, and to some extent monopolized votes. Plus, the current mining pool model attracted users’ votes and gave users a certain dividend. These new changes have caused the global community to fall into concerns about EOS. For instance, some people claimed that the unfair BP geographic distribution that most of Top 21 BPs are mainly located in China. Also, the previous overseas technology nodes were difficult to maintain income through real contributions, which sparked a couple of heated discussions, like “ one token one vote”, “one token multi-votes” and whether is acceptable to pay dividends to the community. EOS governance was once considered as chaos.
In practice, we have to admit the fact that governance is a complicated mechanism, so how to balance the different parties and find consensus.
From our views, we believe that “ one token multi-votes” will be the better solution than “one EOS one vote”. “1 EOS 1 vote” will result in a more vicious competition between Block Producers. Every BP wants to get the sole support of the whales. Consequently, the EOS community will fall into a new predicament and drag the entire community to a dangerous situation.
Secondly, we deem that B1 is more conservative in the voting process. At the early stage, the mechanism that encouraging BPs to obtain rewards through doing meaningful things can be a positive motivation, which is supposed to be standardized and further form a set of criteria for the whole community to follow. BPs who are really contributing to the EOS community deserve the rewards. Essentially, the community, as a result, would be united and generate stronger powers.
3. How to Build an EOS Ecosystem?
Therefore, in addition to the two points mentioned above: rewarding the contribution of BP, motivating high-quality projects to start, outstanding community participants should be taken into consideration.
I give an example. I met a group of supporters of the MEET.ONE community, they provided a lot of suggestions for the construction of the community. Some wrote articles, made videos, and some helped other users solve basic problems. These community members with full passions significantly matter to us. They are our impressive community family who should be given certain rewards too.
Like we said that governance is quite complicated, so how to distribute rewards to community users becomes a seemingly difficult thing to do. Inspired by the experience of maintaining my MEET.ONE community, here I put forward the following suggestions.
First of all, economic incentives are highly important. Anyone with a bit of economic vision and common sense will not refute my words. We should set up a charitable foundation, such as community donations, to reward users who make contributions to the global EOS community.
Apart from that, it is difficult to fulfill all users’ real recognitions to the EOS concept. At present, based on my own observations of many communities, I believe that the organization of Binance angels is the closest to this phenotype. We should step out of our inherent circle and learn from each other to support better development of EOS community.
Here are my pieces of advice based on 15 months of EOS eco-participation experience. From the users to developers, from BPs to common community supporters, if a complete positive closed loop is formed, new changes will take place in the EOS ecosystem.
In the above article, I mainly talked about problems and solutions. EOS is already is a technical leader between public blockchains, I just share my thoughts for higher requirements and longer-term pursuit of EOS.
Finally, go back to the original question, is EOS really dead?
I believe the answer is no, at least our team is trying hard and undertaking new explorations. I know that a group of excellent block producers has been insisting on doing real things. I know that a group of supporters still believe in the future of EOS and work hard without any complaint. I know that B1 is also working hard and expecting us to stay together, stay productive and stay positive.
If winter comes, can spring be far behind? Strive to go through the tough days together, behind is the rise of large-scale applications, where unfolds the future of EOS, bright and promising.
Written by Susan, MEET.ONE.
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