At the Consensus 2017 event in New York, BitShares and Steem creator Dan Larimer explained his project and vision to the crowd: EOS, a smart contract blockchain-based platform in which decentralized applications can be built, that solves some of blockchain technology’s problems.
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EOS, according to its creator, is a blockchain platform that completely cuts off transaction fees, and that is capable of handling millions of transactions per second. It’s potential is tremendous, if its promises are delivered, as it will allow decentralized applications to go mainstream and scale accordingly. Some already wonder if the token is going to take down Ethereum.
The token’s ICO started a few days ago and has already raised over 650,000 Ether, nearly $200 million. The token’s ICO was going to last 341 days so as to avoid whales with fear of missing out (FOMO) from using their resources to skip ahead of everybody else. A situation that previously led to $36 million being sold in 30 seconds in another ICO.
Block.one, the developer of EOS, has been great with marketing, as even Reuters and the New York Times wrote about the token. These factors have helped the cryptocurrency nearly become one of the top 10 biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap, as according to data from CoinMarketCap, EOS is currently number 9 with a $747 million market cap, each token being worth $4.68.
Former Projects
The token’s success is based on some astounding claims. These, according to reports, are backed up by its creators’ former projects: BitShares and Steem. Although he left both, these are still up, and have recently been generating large amounts of traffic, partly because of EOS.
Dan Larimer first created BitShares, a decentralized exchange, in 2014. The project introduced horizontal scalability, which allows up to 100,000 transactions per second. Steem, a decentralized version of Reddit mixed with Medium, allows users to transact without having to worry about fees, by providing means to interact with the application without these.
EOS incorporates a Delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus, just like Dan Larimer’s other platforms. This essentially means that community members elect “witnesses” that have the responsibility of verifying transactions. Some claim DPoS can indeed reduce transaction processing times, while others believe this allows a small group of individuals to predominantly control the platform.
So far, some see EOS as a game changer that is set to take down Ethereum, while others adopt a more skeptic attitude towards the new token, with an “I’ll believe it when I see it” approach.