Another exciting week behind us in the crypto markets:
-South Korea is considering to lift ICO ban
-Crypto exchange Huobi has teamed up with NewMargin Capital and Kiwoom Securities to launch a $93 million blockchain fund focused on China and South Korea
-Binance is creating a $1 billion cryptocurrency-based "Social Impact Fund", which will be managed through Binance Labs, to foster the growth of startups in the blockchain ecosystem
-After Binance and Huobi Ripple also announced that they're setting aside $50 million to fund university-based research into blockchain, cryptocurrencies and digital payments
But probably the hottest topic was the EOS transition away from Ethereum's blockchain and onto its own mainnet
When the team behind EOS, block.one first announced the project in 2017 (the ICO was going on for a year, and they have raised over $4 billion!), who would have thought that we are going to live until that day and AI systems will not take down humanity, or a supermassive black whole will not swallow up the planet after a screwed up experiment at the LHC.
Fortunately here we are, the company released version 1.0.0 of the EOS software on Saturday and already it's published one update to the code, version 1.0.1, a release that Block.one CTO Daniel Larimer described as preventing a "potential crash" in the update notes, along with other minor issues. I dont think we have to worry about that, this is a totally new technology, steamless mainnet launches are rare and the scope of EOS makes it more than likely (expected )that there will be issues.
Shortly explained what just happened:
When EOS raised money through the ICO, they released an EOS ERC-20 token on the Ethereum network. These tokens now will be transferred 1–1 for EOS platform tokens. So these ERC-20 tokens are now actually worthless, so that is why they freeze these tokens. To get the EOS platform tokens that will be distributed when the platform goes alive, a registration process had to be initiated in your wallet. However, the good news is that most exchanges completely resolve this for you, so owners didn't have to send their EOS tokens to their own wallets.
A bit about the DPoS protocol:
EOS will run on a DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) protocol that should eliminate the bottleneck that Ethereum is experiencing (Ethereum's blockchain currently uses PoW consensus protocol that can only process an average of 15 transactions per second). Instead of allowing all users on the network to validate transactions, EOS block "producers" (similar responsibilities as miners)allows token holders to vote proportional to their holdings (the more token you have, the more weight your vote carries) to elect a small number of users (they give all the token holders the ability to influence what is happening in the network) to validate future blocks. By significantly reducing the number of validators and requiring them to meet minimum performance requirements, DPoS makes the network quicker. They claim that the network will be able to process an average of 1000 transactions per second.
Of course not just the scalability, what is amazing in this protocol, for example DPoS can allow developers to freeze the network when a broken application is identified (developers can fix the problems without negatively affecting other accounts in the network).
There is still a lot of confusion within the EOS community on how this voting process is going to work, and of course they have a long road ahead, but with the launch of the mainnet it is undeniable that EOS is now an official rival of Ethereum.
On the other hand, Ethereum is also speeding up their solution to these issues, Vitalik Buterin at a recent OmisoGO AMA has shed some light on the subjects of Sharding and Plasma while essentially suggesting that Ethereum's network will ultimately be capable of supporting tens of thousand of transactions per second.
"While Sharding is a scaling solution that uses shards, or micro-chains, to process separate types of transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, Plasma, similar to Bitcoin's Lightning Network, adds a second layer of off-chain branches to the main Ethereum blockchain in order to process high-volume smart contract protocols more quickly.
The reason I think layer 1 and layer 2 [networks] are complementary is because ultimately, if you look at the math, the scalability gains from the layer 1 improvements and layer 2 improvements do ultimately multiply with each other. If you have a Sharding solution, the Sharding solution itself might increase the scalability of Ethereum by a factor of 100, or eventually even more. But then, if you do Plasma on top of the scalability solution, then what that means is, you're not just doing 100 times of the amount of activity but you are doing 100 times the amount of entrances, the amount of exits, and despute resolutions"
Of course it is early to say if EOS or Ethereum will be "better", especially since the EOS mainnet is barely live yet, but it will be very interesting to see what will come out of it. Here at CoTrader we are also eager to see how EOS will work, and later on we will definitely run some tests on EOS network and see how it goes.