What is EOS?
EOS has attained celebrity-like status in the cryptocurrency market – on the back of a very successful ICO, and because it’s seen a healthy rise in its price ever since news of its mainnet hit the markets. EOS is a decentralized operating system based on blockchain technology. It is designed to support of decentralized applications on a commercial-scale by giving all the required core functionalities. These enable businesses to build the blockchain applications in a manner that stays similar to that of web-based applications.
This blockchain network has also claimed to remove transaction fees and conduct millions of transactions within a second. The token name is EOS. It has a few major notable tech designs, such as DPoS consensus, 100,000+ TPS, zero transactional fees, ability to alter codes, etc.
EOS Development
At BlockShow Asia, on November 29, 2017, Block.one revealed a publicly available testing environment, known as EOSIO Single-Threaded Application Testnet (EOS STAT).
The entire plan of EOS was published in 2017 in a whitepaper.
The EOSIO platform was developed by a private company, Block.one and was further released as an open-source software on June 1, 2018. To ensure that the native tokens were distributed widely at the launch of the blockchain, around a billion tokens were sold on the Ethereum platform by Block.one. This provided a distribution network that everyone who owns the token can start using it once the EOS blockchain software is released.
10% of these tokens are reserved for Block.one. Total of 20% EOS tokens was sold on Ethereum in the first 5 days of the entire 341 days long token sale. The remaining 70% tokens, that stand under the majority, are to be sold and produced at market value.
The startup, EOS ICO, managed to get $170 million in the first step, regardless of critics from numerous representatives on the blockchain community. EOS is presently the fifth leading cryptocurrency of the world by market capitalization.
What are the Benefits of EOS?
The objective of EOS is to provide a decentralized platform to host applications, implement smart contracts and use blockchain for businesses while hoping to solve the scalability issues faced by pioneering cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
It will also eliminate the fees charged for transactions. It will accomplish this by using delegated proof-of-stake of the consensus protocol as well as by being multi-threaded (being able to run on various computer cores).
The target of EOS is to be the very first operating system that will be decentralized. EOSIO provides a better developmental environment for decentralized applications, such as, BitShares, a platform for the decentralized exchange of cryptocurrency and Steemit, a social networking platform with monetary incentives.
The native token, EOS, is a utility token that gives both storage and the bandwidth on the blockchain. It is proportionate to the entire stake (owning only 1% of EOS tokens permits the usage of up to 1% of the total bandwidth).These tokens also permit the owner to participate in the on-chain governance of the blockchain and to cast votes, in proportion to the stake of the owner.
The EOSIO platform will drop its vote for 21 block producers at the time of its launch that will further validate and generate blocks within the block time of 500 ms. The smart contract and general language for building the entire platform is WebAssembly (C, C++, Rust) and a portable machine build at World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
How to Buy and Store EOS
The EOS coin is listed for trading on various trading exchanges all around the world, and is paired with a few major cryptocurrencies like BTC, ETH, BNB, KRW, and USDT, which is a pro for the user of EOS as this allows the users to access or obtain the EOS token by using their present ETH, BNB, BTC, USDT, or KRW. The entire list of trading exchanges for EOS token include major global exchanges such as Binance, KuCoin, Bitfinex, Huobi, and more. It has over 120 pairings available across nearly as many exchanges – allowing users to purchase EOS using BTC, ETH, USDT and other major cryptocurrencies.
While cryptocurrency exchanges provide you a platform to buy or sell the EOS cryptocurrency, CoinSwitch comes in to help you make the right decision by providing the prices for EOS on multiple crypto exchanges. It supports more than 140 coins and 45,000 pairs of cryptocurrencies. You can choose whichever pair you want with your token and compare the prices at exchanges. This way you can choose the best deal for you!
What’s more – with CoinSwitch, you do not rely on a separate wallet from the exchange to store your EOS cryptocurrency. Instead, all transactions happen to and from your own personal private wallets, the benefits of which we’ve spoken about here earlier.
EOS Storage
EOS was an ERC20 token – which means it could be stored on any wallet that supported Ethereum. This changed with the release of its own mainnet on 10 June 2018, after which wallet support was provided by the following services:
EOSIO: EOS’s software – EOSIO – offers a command line (no graphical interface) wallet of its own. This may require some technical competence and familiarity to use, so other, third-party wallets can be looked at if you’d rather avoid this. Bear in mind that other wallet services, though reputed, are not officially endorsed by EOS.
R1 Elliptic Curve: As stated on the EOS website, – “EOSIO supports the R1 elliptic curve, which means every iMac Pro, MacBook Pro, iPhone and iPad can use the secure enclave as a biometrically-secured hardware wallet. The same R1 curve is used on many smart-cards and Android devices.”
Infinito Wallet: A third party multi-crypto wallet that supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and many other cryptocurrencies.
What is the future of EOS Token?
EOS’s company, Block.one, is registered in Cayman Islands. It began offering EOS tokens to the public in June 2017. It raised $700 million during its ICO – a fairly large amount and a testament to the support it has received from the masses.
An online, wiki-based encyclopedia, Everipedia, has announced its plans for using EOS blockchain technology on 6th December 2017. As soon as the Everipedia is decentralized and hosted on EOSIO platform, few countries such as Iran and Turkey that have blocked Wikipedia, will not be able to block it any further via Everipedia’s fork.
EOS Global Acceptance
The Market Cap ranking of the EOS cryptocurrency is 5th, and it holds a market capitalization of $10.9 billion USD as of June 2018. A total number of 900 million EOS coins are in circulation.
Future Prospects
The EOS platform allows developers to build decentralized applications in a public environment. Above all, scalability can be achieved easily with the help of EOS as it is able to support thousands of commercial decentralized applications thanks to its architecture – which is Proof-of-Stake instead of the slower Proof-of-Work that cryptocurrencies generally use. EOS is gaining more traction day by day. (See BlockGeeks Article: Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stake).
EOS saw an increase of over 15x between the closing months of 2017 and opening months of 2018 – going from around $1 to over $15. Impressively, despite the decline the market saw in general, the price of an EOS coin continues to hover around the $15 mark as of June 2018. This may be supported by news of its upcoming mainnet launch.
The price is intended to get to $37 by the end of 2018, which would also lead to a price of around $143 in the next five years. Hence, the entire quantum of appreciation that can be gained is big enough, which is why it is worth investing in the platform. Due to multiple decentralized applications, the need for an IT infrastructure for EOS has decreased. With the increase in the number of companies starting to use the platform for decentralized applications, the valuation of the platform will increase too.
How is EOS Different from Other Cryptocurrencies?
One aspect that makes EOS entirely different and better than all the other cryptocurrencies is that it does not charge any transaction fees.
EOS is a decentralized platform that has room for far higher scalability. While both Ethereum and EOS are platforms that can run smart contracts, EOS claims to offer faster transaction times, and quicker execution. It can further support industrial-scale decentralized applications.
While Ethereum uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) model for its mining operations, EOS will use a Delegated Proof-Of-Stake (PoS) model for EOS mining – which is far faster, and will not be as energy intensive as mining generally is.
While developers on blockchains typically have to use a specific language to build their applications, EOS allows developers to compile in Web Assembly, which means developers can use C++ to build their applications!
Should You Invest in EOS?
The Good:
It is likely to be the first third-generation blockchain to reach out to the market.
Unique features:
- It has parallel processing that is good for scalability.
- It has no transaction fees, block producers paid out by inflation.
There is an inflation build in the token model, which will help the block producers earn incentives when performing their work. It will also have a process for the recovery of an account if you tend to lose your private keys. It will make human readable account names.
EOS has a massive reserve so far. Due to its initial coin offerings, it has earned billions of dollars. The platform has created a large ecosystem fund with this reserve. Companies and organizations can easily make decentralized applications with the help of this platform.
The Bad:
The on-chain governance system will lead to more politics, as you need to garner a lot of votes to become one of the block producers. It may not be as decentralized as say, ETH, as it can have only 21 block producers.
EOS has a lot going for it. This is why it raised over $700 million in its ICO in the first place. You already know how to buy an EOS coin by now. Whether you should buy and hold, is a decision that will require more deliberation, as with any other cryptocurrency.
About Sidechains
When Ethereum first introduced the world to the idea of a blockchain-based network, it sounded revolutionary, and it was. The problem the Ethereum network ran into when released from the test environment into the real world was scalability. As the ledger grew, it bottlenecked processing, and sidechain solutions developed from this.
The concept of sidechains is to allow developers to process transactions offchain, only adding to the general public ledger as needed. Sidechain capability is also what helps different blockchains interact with each other.
In this sense, what’s being built in the blockchain sectors is an interconnected web of blockchains. This isn’t much different than the distributed cloud-based model the world is already deeply entrenched in. In fact, this interconnected web is the basis of the Internet itself.
The difference in this new blockchain-based interweb is the “original” internet as we know it was built at a time when home computers weren’t mainstream, and wireless devices didn’t even exist. This new web is simply a more efficient way to do what we’re already doing, and new players like the Ethereum Foundation, block.one, and OnChain are becoming new players in the tech, business, and financial world because they created technology to fuel the next generation of the Internet.
Control over which platform makes money has always been an issue. Look at your mobile phone – if you wanted to download a game on your phone in 2003, you bought it from your carrier (AT&T, Sprint, etc). Now you purchase it from your phone’s operating system developer (Apple App Store, Google Play Store, Amazon, etc) or even the phone manufacturer (Samsung, Google, Apple).
On the blockchain, Ethereum is racing against developers on its own platform who are creating their own ecosystems. Many only use the Ethereum network as a betanet launchpad, creating a proprietary blockchain and cryptocurrency protocol for the mainnet release.
EOSIO doesn’t even need to move off the Ethereum network because it supports its own blockchain ecosystem. The mainnet (which was released June 1, 2018) can simply be developed to support other sidechain solutions like NEO.
This is one of the reasons EOS and ETH are often viewed as competing cryptos.
Block.one is Forging EOS Partnerships
I mention partnerships a lot because it’s important. Even the best-built blockchain is moot if it’s a ghost town with no development or users. We know block.one has development chops in Larimer and strong community development from engineers like Kevin Heifner. The smart contract network is solid, and ICO’s, air drops, and STO’s are ready for launch.
Who Created EOS?
EOS is created by block.one. Block.one is a research team who has an interest in cryptocurrency and how it can impact the world. Members of block.one include Brendan Blumer, Dan Larimer and Brock Pierce. Block.one plans to decentralize as many things as they can.
Larimer is the brains behind EOS, Steemit, and Bitshares, which are all cryptocurrencies in the top 100 of market capitalization. Brock Pierce is known for being one of the wealthiest people in cryptocurrency and starting Blockchain capital, an investment group for cryptocurrency.
How was EOS Distributed?
EOS was distributed through a year-long ICO where 90% of the supply was distributed. 10% of the funds were given to block.one to hold, to ensure the development teams interests were aligned with the rest of the holders.
How Do I Mine EOS?
EOS is unable to be mined and is only created through inflation. Block producers are users who validate blocks on EOS and are rewarded for their efforts. Non-block producers can vote for block producers who pass down some of the rewards.
Where can I store EOS?
EOS can be stored on the official command line wallet. The mainnet swap occurred recently so expect community created wallets to pop up soon!
How does EOS Eliminate Transaction Fees?
Through the yearly inflation given to block producers, users can send transactions for free. These transactions are then “covered” by the inflation. This is an interesting method of eliminating transaction fees but is a controversial approach compared to Bitcoin’s deflation.
One of the bigger partnerships EOS secured so far is with Everipedia. This blockchain-based wiki encyclopedia is designed to get information through government firewalls around the world and ensure educational reference material is available equally to everyone around the world, regardless of citizenship, financial means, or social status.
EOSBet is one of many gambling apps developed on EOSIO to compete with Ethereum-based Augur. The dApp began on Ethereum and ported to EOS to avoid bottleneck issues, a bad sign for Ethereum.
These are just two of many dApps being developed in this thriving ecosystem. The development support and partnerships being forged today will feed the EOS Platform for years to come.
The network is expected to handle upwards of 6000 transactions per second too. Slow transaction processing times plague early cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH. This means these applications can run simultaneously with no lag, so long as they have enough EOS to stake the resources. And while the EOS economy sounds great in theory, it’s already been tested in practice.
Feel free to read more about your best options for investing in Cryptocurrency IRA.
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