In less than one year EOS has made it to the top 5 of coinmarketcap, and, what's more important, remained there. Its price has skyrocketed 58% just in 2 days, which is exceptional even for cryptocurrency realm. These facts alone speak high of the project, but let's delve deeper into what's so special about EOS.
(Artwork by @rubenalexander)
Like almost any project that ran an Initial Coin Offering, EOS addresses certain problems, namely:
- scalability
- user fees
- DAPP deployment speed and creation ease
Unlike any project that ran an ICO, the one of EOS has been going for a year instead of several hours or days and managed to collect amounts of currency that were unheard-of before.
EOS, being a DAPP platform, an operational system for creating DAPPs, to be more precise, can't escape the fate of being compared to the ETH, and some went as far as to call it the "Ethereum killer". While that may be a bit overboard, at least for the time being, and a lot would not agree with it, none can deny that the project has vast potential, great idea, and an experienced block.one team, capable of bringing it to reality, including Dan Larimer, creator of Steemit and Bitshares, but that's not the point here, you can watch this video for more detailed information on the EOS, or, better yet, read their Whitepaper.
Roughly 50%, according to this report, of all EOS tokens are held by only 10 addresses, 85% - by 1000 addresses. EOS implements the Delegated Proof-of-Stake algorithm to achieve consensus, in brief, you are letting the person you vote for use your voting power to produce blocks, forfeiting some decentralization in favor of faster transactions and lower fees. EOS intends to have a group of 21 "active" block producers, which are to be chosen in a democratic election process where each EOS token can be used to vote for up to 30 delegates. See this official post for further information about voting.
Good thing is that virtually anyone who holds some EOS tokens can be elected as a block producer, though that pretty much equals to "any citizen can become a president", but what's really important, is that only 1 out of 21 validators is chosen by the number of votes and that the quorum for the elections to be valid is only 15% (150 MM tokens.) This means that 10 addresses held by <=10 individuals can largely influence or even determine the outcome of the voting and that 1000 addresses, held by an even lesser than 1000 amount of entities determine the entire state of the blockchain. Not much for the decentralization, is it? Even assuming that the chosen nodes will act fair, and won't be used for any kind of attacks, it's still possible to influence the voting process in order to choose the favored nodes to act as validators purely for the money incentive, and it's quite big.
As Dan Larimer confirmed these addresses to belong to exchanges, FUD has decreased substantially, but if the addresses from 10 to 1000 (holders of 35% of the tokens) come to a certain agreement, it can theoretically influence the situation in much the same way. And even though the problem is not nearly as dire or as important as some media picture it to be, it still exists and eosDAC aims to be a part of the solution, at least I hope so.
eosDAC has been air-dropped from April 15 to May 15 to the holders of the EOS who possessed 100+ EOS tokens when the blockchain snapshot was done at April 15 at 1:1 ratio, essentially creating money out of thin air, but that's what cryptocurrencies do, right? Some call it vote manipulation, or even bribery, with some nasty threads popping out on Reddit, when, in fact, the truth is somewhere in-between and I prefer to think of it as of a clever trick. In eosDAC "DAC" stands for decentralized autonomous community. It's also worth noting that only 20 seconds of their 1:20 introduction video are actually dedicated to explaining the concept rather than the whole tech. revolution.
The name may be somewhat confusing, for it may imply for some that it's EOS's main DAC when, in fact, it's just another BP delegate, though maybe it should be this way in order to bring attention. As everything in crypto, sounds quite flashy, but essentially it means that the network is governed and controlled by its token holders and the board members vote to run its operations. 75% of the eosDAC tokens were airdropped to the EOS token holders, with the remaining 25% going to the team, advisors and community supporters.
Aside from the DAC part, eosDAC will also be providing DAC toolkits for the EOS community so that anyone could build their own DAC, as well as possibly creating some DAPPs.
Pic I've proudly
stolentaken from hacked.com
There's not much to say about the token itself aside from 2 things:
- It's creating the necessary funding for the development of the project; its value will increase should it prove to be a success and is likely to correspond to the development of EOS (grow or decline alongside it)
- Should the community not like what the eosDAC is creating, or if it won't be chosen to be a BP, it's value will rapidly become zero or very close to zero.
The voting process is only about 60% finished as of the present moment, thus it's yet unclear whether the eosDAC will be chosen as one of the BPs, I personally believe it to be so. In fact, with how much name recognition their stunt with tokens has gotten them, I'm almost sure of it and even kind of wonder why didn't a single other BP delegate do this. I'm also sure others will try so in the future, but the effect will be similar to the forks of the Bitcoin, with only the first one being somewhat successful.