LONDON (Bywire News) - For most of the past three years, EOS has been a cautionary tale for crypto enthusiasts. It was the story of a super-fast blockchain that was supposed to carry the fight to Ethereum but quickly sunk in a hail of corruption and lawsuits. Now, though, it’s back thanks to a popular revolution led by Yves La Rose and the EOS Network Foundation (ENF). It’s an inspiring story which might resurrect EOS. If it does, the implications for the wider blockchain community could be huge.
The ENF was launched in August with a mission to support the EOS community. Since then, it has invested millions through a scheme of grants, a crowdfunding platform and working groups designed to set a roadmap for the future development of EOS.
Those roadmaps are now being finalised with the publication of a series of blue papers which set out a vision for the future of EOS.
In the meantime, it has launched a popular uprising that side-lined Block.one and put the community back in control of EOS. It’s the stuff that decentralised dreams are made of and has injected new life into an ecosystem that many people had written off.
The long and winding road
It’s a world away from where we were last year. Back then we were interviewing hackathon winners DAOBull who openly discussed their disillusionment with Block.one and EOS. They were not alone. Developers and major figures were leaving EOS in their droves as the support Block.one promised failed to materialise.
EOS, which had been billed the ‘Ethereum killer’ just a few years before was being widely written off as a failure.
Things had started out so well. Block.one launched EOS as an open-source platform which would do everything Ethereum could do but much, much better. It was faster, had more capacity, involved effectively no fees and would enable developers to create decentralised applications which would not be possible anywhere else. It was a developer’s dream and seemed to have everything in place to displace Ethereum.
The big eye-catcher, though, was the world breaking ICO. Block.one raised more than $4bn for the development of EOS and boasted the backing of some serious names in the community including Peter Thiel, Brock Pierce and others.
However, things quickly started to go wrong. The ICO faced constant scrutiny from the regulators with concern over irregularities such as wash trading, vote trading and the majority of the network being owned by China.
The $4bn raised in the ICO seemed to disappear with critics complaining that Block.one had simply taken the money and run. Development work stalled and Block.one faced action from the SEC who accused it of raising money for unregistered security. Block.one would eventually reach a $27.5million settlement, but the damage had been done. Sentiment within and without the community soured.
There was the sight of several wallets being frozen after accusations of theft in a decision made by a few stakeholders in China without the consent of other network participants. This, along with the rampant practice of vote trading for money, left many people questioning B1s promises of a truly decentralised system.
Legal woes continued. In 2020, a crypto investment vehicle called the Crypto Assets Opportunity Fund launched a class action lawsuit against Block.one for failing to carry out the decentralisation it had promised.
The network fell apart. Dan Larimer departed in 2019 starting a brain drain of talent from the company. Development work on EOSIO slowed with Block.one apparently losing interest in developing the network. At a time when other blockchains and tokens were powering ahead, EOS holders saw the value of their tokens stagnate and then drop. Developers began looking for greener pastures elsewhere.
The road back
By last year, EOS was being spoken of in the past tense. Articles were posted across the crypto sector pondering ‘why’, not ‘if’ EOS had failed. It was an assessment with which Yves La Rose appeared to agree. In a blog post launching the EOS Network Foundation, he said bluntly that ‘EOS, as it stands, was a failure’, and he wasn’t pulling any punches about the reason why.
“At this point, it is the consensus of the majority of token holders that I speak to, inside and outside of EOS, that Block.one knowingly misrepresented their capabilities and this amounts to negligence and fraud,” La Rose wrote.
It was a brutal assessment and it set the tone for relations between the ENF and B1 going forward. Tensions came to a head when the block producers voted to block $270million worth of tokens that were due to be vested to Block.one over the next five years.
Since then things have, if anything, got even worse recently with the announcement that the ENF would be looking at what legal action it could take against Block.one.
This aggressive approach caused some ripples – not least an angry phone call between La Rose and Brock Pierce whose new venture had been due to receive much of those tokens. However, it has signalled to the community and the world at large that EOS is under new management.
That management has been putting all the pieces together which had been missing. There is funding through recognition grants and Pomelo and there is development through the publication of the blue papers.
The Wallet+ Blue Paper highlights several improvements across various components including UX/UI standards, wallets and SDKs. The API+ Blue Paper fills the critical gaps in the public infrastructure to accelerate adoption. The Core+ Blue Paper sets out proposals to transform EOSIO into a leader in blockchain technology while the Audit+ Blue Paper provides the framework for security analysis and contract audits on EOSIO.
With its research now published, the ENF is moving quickly onto execution. To do that it recently announced a partnership with Object Computing, which assisted Block.one in the development of EOSIO. They will be developing the recommendations in the API+ Blue Paper.”
For the first time, it feels as if there is real development in the EOS ecosystem. EOS’s critics may need to think again. Everything which made that ICO so exciting back in 2017 is still there. EOSIO is still the fastest, most efficient and greenest blockchain around. It offers much more for developers than Ethereum and with money coming in from the ENF, the support Block.one refused to offer is there. Activity is ticking up. The token price is beginning to show signs of movement, developers are coming back, and it is one of the fastest-growing blockchains in terms of Total Value Locked.
There’s a long way to go, but EOS now has everything in place to fulfil its vast potential.
(Writing by Tom Cropper, editing by Klaudia Fior)