EOS – Infrastructure for Decentralized Application

https://eos.io/

White Paper.

EOS is trying to compete with Ethereum as a platform for Blockchain applications by focusing on scalability and speed for decentralized applications. It is based on Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) Consensus algorithm invented by Daniel Larimer (Co-founder of EOS). Video link to different consensus mechanisms by Andreas M. Antonopoulos here.

EOS has a unique ICO starting 2017 which has already raised more than $196 million.They created an unusual and controversial way to distribute their tokens, through a continuous ICO that will last 341 days in total.You can check the token sale page here.

EOS holds the current marketcap of 9.7 Billion USD. Looks like EOS has grown more than 500% times since the ICO.  EOS currently trading at 15 USD as per coinmarketcap.

EOS is built under the umbrella company called Block.one.

Lets deep dive into EOS and how its different than Ethereum. To begin with the EOS was founded by team Brendan Blumer, Daniel Larimer,  co-founder of BitShares , Steemit, Brock Pierce,  Ian Grigg.

EOS is still work in progress and recently launched public testnet.Daniel Larimer build platforms like BitShares and Steemit based on the concepts on Delegated Proof of Stake. He decided to leverage his experience to build EOS for other future decentralized applications.

EOS only supports C++ based smart contract. EOS would like to build itself more like an decentralized operating system for smart contracts. Which means, it will provide tools and utilities for smart contracts like hacked account recovery, human readable account names, dynamic account permissions, contract freezing/replacement, contract level governance, built in data structure, hard consensus, soft consensus and others.

With delegated proof stake, approximately every 3 seconds new blocks will be produced whether there is transactions it or not. This assures the speed of execution. Also, EOS plans to support concurrency or multi threaded environment to improve speed.

The Good:

• EOS supports C++ based smart contract, which might be  good and bad. Good because C++ is a well known language a compared to completely new language like Solidity for Ethereum.
• EOS plans to be a enterprise grade decentralized application platform with utilities and tools.
• EOS plans to improve the performance and scale to millions of transactions per second.
• Delegated Proof of Stake might be better than Proof of Work which requires burning of energy and time.
• There is no mining involved due to proof of stake consensus.

The Bad:

• EOS currently only has a single threaded Testnet released , with no clear date on the production ready EOS platform.
• EOS developer community is extremely small as compared to Ethereum. With non existing customers or contracts.
• Ethereum will be bringing up great new changes in its Metropolis release, which might catchup with EOS.
• There are 350 rounds of token sale, which is extremely excessive. That too even after already raising $200 USD. And the bigger problem is significant inflation caused by these token lengthy token sale cycles.
• Proof of Stake is less decentralized consensus algorithm and makes rich richer.
• Proof of Stake still has malicious node attack possible, if a nodes gets back the stake after a certain amount of time.
• Proof of Work is more secure than Proof of Stake.
• The token sale feels like an auction war and and there is no point participating in Token sale, because the price of the token reaches almost the same as on exchanges.
• The token sale gives an extremely negative experience to the investors and contributors because of the extended token sale phase of EOS.
• New EOS tokens are injected consistently and this causes prices to drop significantly, that makes EOS token a less preferred investment.
• With more than 200 million USD raised through token sale. It is not clear why EOS needs to continue with such an extended token sale.
• Raising huge ICO using Ethereum (which is a competitor), might cause risk of foul play by EOS, by dumping ETH to cause damage to Ethereum market sentiment.
• The current EOS Tokens are not the ones which would be used for Proof of Stake for EOS platform. Investors need to register their public keys for the same.
• Article states that EOS has problems with its token sale, does have some merit.
• Still in very early days with only testnet and no customers.