LONDON (Bywire News) - With the release of the Antelope Leap 3.1 protocol EOS has, once and for all severed ties with Block.one. Exciting times lie ahead.
Speaking about the hard fork ENF CEO Yves La Rose said: “With the hard fork now activated, we will continue iterating with the community to optimize the user and developer experiences to best leverage the new features and functionality that Leap 3.1 enables.”
The network changeover to Antelope saw block producers for the EOS public network adopt code that has been developed under the ENF. Formerly, the code for the EOSIO public network was maintained by B1 and was then acquired by Bullish.
This resulted in a non-backwards-compatible fork that resulted in a prompt for node operators to update their systems or fall out of sync with the network.
Spearheaded by the ENF and drawing on the talent of the EOS community’s engineers, the Antelope protocol comprises a code forked from EOSIO 2.0 with upgrades to match the needs of builders on the network.
The hard fork represents a culmination of a process in which the EOS community has been forging its own path away from Block.one the company that created it. Despite launching it amidst a huge amount of fanfare and a $4bn ICO, Block.one was accused by many of failing to follow through on its initial promises.
“It was undeniable that Block.one was pivoting away from EOSIO,” says Zack Gall of the ENF.
The departure of Dan Larimer, one of the key developers in Block.one was a major turning point, signalling serious ruptures within the company. It added to the sense that EOS was in crisis and, in August 2021, the ENF was reformed with EOS Nation co-founder Yves La Rose at its head. They aimed to bring EOS back to its community and inject some of the support that had failed to materialise under Block.one.
It was nothing short of a revolution. When Block.one announced it had sold 45 million (37m of which remained unvested) $EOS tokens to Brock Pierce’s new venture Helios the community was up in arms. The ENF formed a supermajority among other block producers who opted to change the network’s code and stop the vesting of tokens to Block.one.
“The line in the sand was drawn,” recalls Gall. “The tokens that hadn’t been vested yet, over the 10-year schedule, those belonged to the network.”
After an initial attempted partnership with Dan Larimer failed, in January 2022, the ENF embarked on a hiring spree acquiring talent from B1 and Bullish team members.
“We basically poached all the best engineering talent because they were working on an exchange product that they had no interest in building,” said Gall. They wanted to build the underlying technology for web3, they wanted to build EOS essentially, so we gave them an opportunity.”
As well as building their own development team, the ENF formed a partnership with OCI to rapidly scale up the engineering efforts and deliverance of system updates. These updates mean a break away from the code developed by B1 – and true independence for EOS.
The adoption of their own community-led codebase indicates the community’s efforts to create an ideal environment for builders that aligns with EOS stakeholders.
“No longer is the network reliant on a corporate entity for survival,” added La Rose.
With independence in the bag and an updated codebase created by the community for the community, the future of EOS is well and truly in its own hands.
(Writing by Samba Jallow, editing by Tom Cropper and Klaudia Fior)