LONDON (Bywire News) - It’s fair to say that EOS sits at a crossroad. The last few weeks have been marked by controversy, conflict and disagreements. With all sides giving slightly different accounts, we sat down with the man who to some is the saviour of EOS – the founder of the EOS Network Foundation Yves la Rose.
He opened up about the negotiations with B1, rumours of a bust-up with Brock Pierce and why he believes the future is bright for EOS.
First, though, we need to see the recent negotiations through his eyes.
“When the chain launched the BP launched it with the notion that B1 would be contributing to EOS for a period of ten years," he explains.
He added, “The idea and this was recorded, was that everything was based around having ‘skin in the game’. If you have skin in the game, you are incentivised to participate and that was the carrot that was being dangled.
“Those tokens rightfully and legally belonged to the network itself and the network was paying B1 over a period of ten years to remain in the ecosystem... In big part, it was for B1 to fulfil its commitments it did during the token sale."
In other words, the EOS network was effectively paying B1 to support the ecosystem and one of the key, most tangible, elements of that was maintaining core code on EOSIO.
“What we had seen is that about a year ago or so things started moving down rapidly,” he adds. “We saw a rapid decline in the amount of code being produced but more importantly, the quality of the code being produced.”
This culminated he says, in Dan Larimer and other developers leaving B1. Some developers left for other ecosystems such as Ethereum while Larimer returned to the EOS community.
As a block producer at the time, La Rose says, the big impact he saw was a void in terms of the codebase. The code produced from B1, he says, declined in quantity and quality over time until the summer of 2021 in which there was ‘practically no code’ being developed.
This is, he says, important. Rather than what many might perceive as a short-term disagreement between B1 and the block producers, this was a prolonged period of a “decline in the last peg B1 was standing on from the network's perspective in terms of their contributions to obtain the payment of those tokens.”
It was here that murmurings of discontent really accelerated with token holders becoming increasingly hostile towards B1. For his part, after his resignation from EOS Nation, it was a chance to reflect.
“A large part of me felt that I had failed,” he says. “I had been in a position to effect change and I had not. I did what I could as a block producer, but in that particular capacity, my contributions were limited and the scope of influence I had was limited.”
His response was what he describes as the ‘Hail Mary’ of creating the EOS Network Foundation. As that came into being, he says it was already becoming clear from statements made public, in private and in group calls that they were not content with the role B1 is playing and that the payments should be stopped.
It’s at this point that disagreements kick in about pretty much everything – about the rights to those tokens and to the willingness of all parties to make a deal. From his point of view, he paints a picture of a network that was reaching the end of its patience.
“These discussions had been happening with him (Brock) in the picture from around March or April,” he says. “From the BP’s perspective, this is the third or fourth time B1 has not come to the table…. They are incentivised to drag this out, the better because they get paid daily. It’s less trouble for them. Essentially, EOS is a liability to them…. This is the third or fourth time when B1 misses deadlines. It’s important to put this in context because the block producers have been through this repeatedly.”
In other words, enough was enough. As the ENF was formed the consensus was reached relatively quickly that EOS should ‘fork away’ from B1. The only question was what form that fork would take – would it happen with a deal or would see a messier divorce.
History tells us how that went, with the block producers voting to stop the payments unless B1 met one final deadline. Even at this late point, most people assumed that a deal will be done and that the nuclear option of preventing payments would be averted.
La Rose agrees that the deal is better than nothing at all. Crucially, though, he points out, that the block producers had already made up their minds. They were moving on from B1, essentially sacking B1 and stopping payments in the same way you might sack an employee who is no longer doing their work.
Their demands were comparatively minor. They weren’t expecting the IP to be transferred. They understood that B1 did not have the power to do this as the IP was owned by Bullish. All they wanted was a public statement of intent that they would work with the network to transfer that IP. Without this being made in public, any agreement was impossible.
Even this, though, seemed to be too much for Blumer. The December 7th deadline came and went with no clear statement from Blumer. With sentiment among the block producers and token holders appearing to be unchanged, there was little choice but to carry out their threat.
A matter of perspective
At heart, this is a disagreement about the status of the tokens and the right to spend them. B1, he acknowledges, sees the tokens as theirs. Any move from them, therefore, to hand over those tokens, represents a substantial investment from their point of view.
The block producers, though, disagreed. To them, those tokens were a payment dependent on B1 fulfilling a role which they were no longer doing. Any statement from B1 that was not made in public would feel meaningless, due to the missed deadlines and broken promises from the past.
Into the middle of this, rode Brock Pierce. La Rose said he learned of his involvement relatively late, around November 6th. “That’s when we hear that in the background Brock has not stopped trying to negotiate with B1 and that he has come to an intent of a deal and that Helios will be launched and Brock will be acquiring 37 of the 67 million remaining vesting EOS,” he explains.
La Rose is at pains to stress that the issue is not with the transfer of tokens to Pierce, but that B1 was effectively selling assets that were not theirs to sell. The network would be happy for Helios to have those tokens and to play an active part in the network if they paid for them in an OTC transaction.
The phone call
With so much on the table, negotiations turned sour, culminating in a one-on-one phone call between la Rose and Pierce in which the latter allegedly made death threats, including threats to ‘break his neck’ and to ensure that he ‘never saw the light of day’ if those ‘frozen tokens’ made their way to the ENF. In an interview with Bywire, Pierce denies making those comments, although he stopped short of a denial, admitting to being heated.
La Rose confirms that the comments did indeed occur and admits to being taken aback by them.
“If someone had said this out of the blue,” he says, “I wouldn’t have taken them seriously. However…. Brock has a tendency of saying repeatedly how powerful he is. What access he has…. and how he works in the background. When that was said to me – in the context of I’m extremely powerful, I can move mountains and I will essentially make sure you will not see the light of day, it was quite threatening.”
Despite these ‘unacceptable comments’ La Rose says he has ‘forgiven Pierce,’ and is committed to working with him – and anyone else who can play a positive role in EOS because ultimately, that’s what matters.
Despite disagreements about what’s happened and why decisions were made, the crucial thing is that everyone who has the best interests of EOS at heart works together to make this happen. They are on a difficult journey in which he admits, the chances of failure are high. Even so, he is optimistic for the future.
“For the first time in a very long time, we’ve got the mechanisms for people to be compensated for the work that they do. We’ve got accountability mechanisms within those sources of funding. We need to continue down that path. That’s what’s important. This drama is not important. It’s important for everyone to want to move on.”
Media sentiment, he says, is picking up, with even the naysayers claiming that no EOS is no longer B1, they are reassessing their opinions. Whether it will be enough or whether the weight of the past proves too much, time will tell. The crucial thing for everyone is to keep focused on the future and plot a course forward which allows EOS to be all it can be.
(Written by Tom Cropper, edited by Klaudia Fior)