Block.one, the developers of the extremely popular cryptocurrency smart contract platform, EOS, have recently released EOSIO1.0 – the EOS mainnet. This comes after EOS wrapped up its year-long ICO – the longest cryptocurrency ICO to date – at the beginning of June. In total $4 billion was raised, with $185 million of that raised in the first five days alone, making it one of the top grossing ICOs of all time.
Although the mainnet software was released on June 2nd, the mainnet didn’t actually go live until just a few days ago on the 15th. For the launch to go ahead, users who were holding the ERC20 EOS tokens had vote for who they wanted to lead the new network. Once 15% of the total EOS tokens had been tallied, the leaders (called “Block Producers”), who are the equivalent of miners on the Bitcoin network, were elected and the EOS mainnet migration began.
The EOS mainnet will operate very differently from the Ethereum network, where the original ERC20 EOS tokens were produced. These changes will include improved features along with a new voting and governance system. If you want to be a part of the new EOS mainnet, you can read this guide to learn how to begin investing in cryptocurrencies.
The EOS mainnet will introduce impressive new features
EOS was initially unveiled by Block.one at Consensus 2017, where they promised to deliver a more scalable and easier-to-use blockchain than ever seen before. As described in the EOS whitepaper, EOS is a decentralized, blockchain-based environment designed to enable vertical and horizontal scaling of applications. By providing essential services such as databases, authentication, and processing power, the EOS framework allows users to build massively scalable, cheap to run, and easy to maintain software.
Thanks to the promise of these features, there has been a lot of hype around the EOS launch. Leading up to the launch, EOS has managed to beat the current bear market and increase its price from $4 to upwards of $10 in the last 3 months, while Bitcoin has fallen 16% from $7700 to $6500.
Massive scalability
Block.one understands that if blockchain-based services are going to be able to compete with massive companies like Facebook, Uber, and Amazon, they need to be able to scale efficiently to handle huge amounts of users. These platforms receive millions of users each day without interruption and EOS plans to to match that.
With EOS’s Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism, it will be able to handle many more transactions per second than traditional proof of stake or proof of work mechanisms. With this, Block.one aims to achieve blazing fast block processing times of 0.5 seconds and transaction confirmation times of 1 second. This is compared to block times of 10 minutes and 10 seconds for Bitcoin and Ethereum respectively.
The real key to the unlimited scalability of EOS, though, lies in the inter-blockchain communication feature that has been implemented. With inter-blockchain communication, EOS is not limited to just one blockchain, which will only be able to achieve a set amount of transactions per second (TPS). Instead, Block Producers will be able to run as many parallel blockchains as required to meet user demand, theoretically allowing the EOS network to scale infinitely.
This revolutionary feature will allow EOS to easily surpass the capacity of the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, which currently only process an average of 3 and 10 transactions per second. EOS will be a cryptocurrency that can finally compete with centralized companies such as VISA, who have the capacity to handle up to 65,000 TPS.
No transaction fees
Another important consideration for the adoption of a decentralized network is the availability of free-to-use services. The EOS network has no transaction fees, meaning that the applications it hosts will be able attract more users and compete with centralized services.
EOS will be able to offer an environment free of transaction fees – unlike the Ethereum network which it’s commonly compared to – due to its DPoS consensus mechanism. With this mechanism, each EOS token represents partial ownership of the EOS network. For example, if you own 5% of all EOS tokens, you can make use of 5% of the processing power, memory, and so on, of the EOS network.
As each person holding EOS owns a portion of the network, they don’t have to pay someone to process their transactions – They can just use their share of the network to do it!
EOS is now a democracy
As previously mentioned, the EOS project uses the Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm; a set number of nodes are chosen through voting to operate and govern the network. In the case of EOS, there are 21 “Block Producers” (governing nodes). By having only a few high-powered validators in the network, transaction processing becomes much more streamlined.
For their work, the Block Producers will receive freshly minted EOS tokens as block rewards. These tokens are being continuously created as blocks are processed; the amount of tokens created each time is voted on by the Block Producers themselves. To ensure there’s no runaway inflation due to excessive block rewards, Block.one has set a hard limit such that the total supply of EOS will increase by no more than 5% each year.
How does the voting work?
As there are only a limited number of Block Producer positions available, not everyone can be one. Instead, users have to vote for who they want to represent them. The amount of voting power each user has is equal to the amount of EOS tokens they hold. This makes sense, as those with more invested into the EOS network will have more of a say in how it operates.
More specifically, each user can select 30 Block Producers to vote for. Voting for many different Block Producers doesn’t split your votes between them, though, it applies the same amount of votes to each one. For example, if you have 100 EOS tokens and you vote for only one Block Producer, you will give them 100 votes. On the other hand, if you vote for 10 Block Producers, you will give each of them 100 votes – a total of 1000 votes. So if there’s a few different Block Producers you like, don’t be afraid to vote for them all!
Another interesting feature offered by the EOS mainnet is ‘proxy voting’. If users don’t want to spend time researching Block Producers and making informed votes, they can designate someone else to make their votes for them. This is great for users who want to contribute and be apart of the new EOS network without having to commit as much.
Conclusion
The EOS mainnet launch is an exciting time that will definitely start to mix things up in the cryptocurrency world. With potentially unlimited scalability, fee-free transactions, and an innovative new governance system, EOS is sure to continue gaining attention to fuel its growth as the next big cryptocurrency platform. If you want to be apart of this journey, follow this guide to learn how you can purchase cryptocurrencies.
