Race to 1 Mil: The Case for EOS
Tim Berner’s Lee, the humble genius that gifted us the World Wide Web, has recently been doing the rounds to lament the direction his creation has taken in the two decades since its birth. The British academic has watched in horror as the increased centralization of the web has produced “a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.” His vision for healing a broken Internet closely mirrors the ethos of Web 3.0 builders, with a focus on true data ownership and robust privacy measures playing a central role in both camps.
dApp developers and the Internet’s founder are in agreement that the future of the internet is decentralized. Yet, as of springtime 2019, Web 3.0 is still very much in a cocoon. With crypto beginning to mature out of the infrastructure phase, expect to see a serious acceleration in the usage of decentralized applications as UX improves and the limitations of base-layer protocol bridged by layer two solutions.
It still remains to be seen which base-layer protocol will hit the first significant adoption milestone — 1 million Daily Active Users on a single dApp. As the Race To 1 Mil heats up, it is important to get a deeper understanding of the underlying blockchains on which the applications of tomorrow are emerging.
Want to know where to place your bets? This week, we look the unique potential of EOS, alongside a few of the challenges standing in its way to the podium.
Let’s go.
What is EOS?
Unless you were snuggling under a rock in 2017, you’ve heard of the $4 billion ICO that eventually gave birth to EOS. The code to run EOS was developed by Block.one, a private company headed up industry veterans such as Brendan Blumer, Brock Pierce and Dan Larimer. Blumer serves as the CEO while Larimer, who is also responsible for other notable projects such as Steem and Bitshares, is the company’s CTO. They built and released EOSIO, a template operating system that underpins not only the EOS mainnet, but also powers parallel chains such as Telos, Worbli and Bos. Having multiple parallel EOSIO chains - each with its unique value proposition and use case - interoperate with one another feeds into B1’s grand vision of a blockchain network that can scale both horizontally and vertically (Horizontal vs vertical is very much a must know, so I’ve here is some reading material for your learning pleasure. You’re welcome.)
Why EOS Can Win the Race to 1 Mil?
First of all, its fast and cheap. EOS was built to become the home of dApps by solving some of the key problems holding Ethereum back from glory. A new block is produced every 500ms, making it several orders of magnitude quicker than its competitors. Furthermore, there are no gas fees on EOS. Instead, it employs an ownership model for network resources. In order to use the network, developers and users require three network resources namely CPU, NET and RAM. CPU refers to the time it takes to process a particular transaction, while NET measures the amount of space the transaction takes up on a block. CPU and NET are regenerable resources that can be acquired by staking EOS tokens. RAM, however, is a scarce resource available for purchase from the eosio.ram smart contract and is sold directly back to the contract.
Moreover, the culture within EOS is one of cooperative competition. Despite competing with one another for votes of EOS token holders, Block Producers have proven effective at cooperating when the health of the chain is at stake. While EOS inflates at 5% every year, only 1% is paid in rewards to block producers. The remainder accumulates in a savings account controlled by the top 21 BPs who can vote to use the funds however they so wish. Now, instead of allocating the money to themselves under some bogus justifications, the BPs recently voted to burn the contents of the savings account. BPs took the course of action that was good for the network as a whole instead of enriching just themselves, and for that, a tip of the hat to them.
What is Holding It Back?
Remember CPU, NET and RAM? Well turns out the markets for these network resources is pretty inefficient. RAM, in particular, is in extremely short supply which makes it unnecessarily expensive to build dApps. Just yesterday, (May 27th 2019) Block.one brought $25 million worth of RAM, causing the price to skyrocket to over $1 million a GB of RAM. Now imagine trying to build Facebook on EOS while having to cough up a million dollars just to store data. CPU has also been known to run out erratically, hurting the user experience of EOS dApps.
I’m also missing IBC. The grand vision of EOS sees a family of parellel chains transferring value seamlessly between one another. Interblockchain communication would enable multi-chain applications to run separate components on different EOSIO chains. Block.one have promised an IBC solution, but until it is delivered EOSIO chains remain isolated silos of value.
Notable EOS dApps
A brief scroll through the top-performing dApps on EOS and you’ll see that a majority of them are gambling sites. However, unlike Tron, EOS has a number of serious non-gambling dApps gunning for the coveted 1 million DAU milestone. Karma, a social media platform that incentivizes its users to share their acts of kindness, is a do-gooders Instagram that already counts a couple of thousand daily active users amongst its ranks. For gaming fanatics, there is EOSKnights, a constant fixture at the top of dApp Radar’s rankings. Effect.AI has generated alot of buzz since it decided to migrate its decentralized mechanical turk platform from NEO to the EOS mainnet. And, if you’re looking for something really cool, head over to Infiniverse who are building a digital land registry for augmented reality universes.
Will EOS break the finish line ribbon or do its resource limitations and lack of IBC weigh too heavily on its shoulders?
Stick around, we’ll be putting Loom and Cosmos under the microscope soon.
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