Some of you may have noticed that the EOS price dropped a fair bit yesterday and then remained mostly flat.
You're probably wondering if this is a problem? Have people already given up on EOS?
No.
Despite what some people are saying the hype around EOS is still very much alive, especially in China.
There are two main reasons EOS had a bad night:
1. Yunbi Crash:
Right now 85% of EOS is traded at one exchange in China. Last night that exchange crashed for multiple hours and so there was no trading there:
Since these users couldn't buy, sell or even access their EOS the price dramatically dropped on other exchanges. Then when Chinese users were able to get back in to the exchange they were in a panic because they saw the western markets crashing and they began to sell off their EOS.
2. MetaMask Problems
Unlike other ICOs, the EOS ICO is configured as a DAPP that requires a system like MIST or MetaMask in order to access it. While you can buy tokens through a classic ERC-20 compatible wallet those instructions aren't readily provided and can be confusing for most users, so the EOS.io site encourages you to use MetaMask.
The issue is that if you used MetaMask yesterday you likely saw this:
MetaMask relies on a limited number of connections to the blockchain in order to access DAPPS via the Chrome browser without running a full node on your system. Yesterday (and still today) they were hit with so much traffic that most users couldn't connect to DAPPs through MetaMask.
This meant that very few people were able to contribute to yesterday's stage of the ICO. While Sunday's stage had over 44,274 ETH contributed resulting in a price of roughly $6.17, yesterday only 26,000 ETH was able to get through resulting in 2M EOS being distributed at a price of $3.63 each and driving back down the price.
What's Next?
With Yunbi trading again we're going to see a lot more volume there and so they will continue to dictate the price of EOS on other markets for now. But, until problems with MetaMask are fixed or it is easier to contribute to the ICO without MetaMask we're going to see the price stay fairly level.