LONDON (Bywire News) - After a consultation period, Block.one has announced it is updating its model. The new approach, dubbed power-up will, they say, alleviate many of the resource challenges users currently face.
Resource management
The traditional method of managing on-chain resources has been to use transaction fees which rise and fall depending on demand, collected by mining. The EOS public blockchain adopts a different approach in which EOS tokens are locked up to reserve resources. In terms of the EOS public blockchain there are three key resources:
- CPU: which is the amount of time it takes to process a transaction, network bandwidth
- NET: the size of a transaction measured in bytes.
- RAM: the method for storing data on-chain measured in bytes.
Under their current system EOS tokens are referred to as owning digital real estate. When you own a percentage of EOS you are controlling a percentage of the total on-chain resources. Any time you lock up your tokens you reserve a percentage of the total available resources. How much of the CPU and NET you receive would be proportionate to the number of tokens you lock up. 1% of tokens = 1% of resources.
However, EOS says this model has challenges. Not everyone chooses to lock up their tokens in order to access resources. Some do it for security; others to have voting rights. This meant a certain level of resources were sitting idle.
Users also struggled to access resources. They would have had three options:
Purchase more EOS which is time-consuming.
Obtain resources from the resource exchange (REX). The amount of resources available from REX has fallen many times in the past and it is not clear REX has enough liquidity to support the allocation of resources across the network.
Use a wallet that covers the resource. While this is a good option, new users may not know about these wallets. Many also rely on REX which brings us back to the liquidity issue.
Since autumn Block.one has been consulting on a new model which they call EOS power up. They believe it provides greater freedom and efficiency for the EOS public blockchain. They provided the bug bounty program and block producer voting program to incentivise engagement with the code. So far, more than 250 people have joined in the conversation on Telegram and more than 40 block producer candidates have provided feedback, all of which has been positive. Nobody has so far reported any vulnerabilities.
The model gives users two choices. Either they pay a small fee to power up their account for 24 hours with CPU and NET bandwidth which you can use to fulfil your transaction needs, or you can deposit idle tokens to receive a percentage of the fees generated by the entire EOS public blockchain.
Depending on how much you use, the total amount of tokens deposited, the fee collected may offset the fees you use to power up your account. All of this happens to ensure greater availability of system resources.
“We believe that the EOS PowerUp Model alleviates many resource challenges on the EOS Public Blockchain and seeks to increase alignment between token holders and usage of the EOS Public Blockchain,” said EOS in its announcement.
“It is our expectation that similar to the EOSIO 1.8 consensus upgrade that occurred in Q3 and Q4 of 2019, leadership from within the rest of the EOS community will emerge to lead the development, deployment, and adoption of the EOS PowerUp Model. We look forward to participating as a member of the EOS community.”
You can see a more detailed technical description of the model on their website.
(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klaudia Fior)