EOS - Will exchanges use your tokens to vote for themselves?
It's well known by now, that many popular crypto exchanges support the EOS token swap.
This basically means, the EOS ERC20 tokens on Ethereum will be replaced by proper EOS tokens at the boot process(es).
Here a are just a few links for details:
https://support.binance.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001649171-Binance-Will-Support-EOS-MainNet-Token-Swap
http://blog.bitfinex.com/announcements/eos-mainnet-token-swap/
https://www.coinex.com/announcement/detail?id=19
http://space.bitleek.com/topic/1070/huobi-pro-announcement-on-eos-snapshot-tool-implementation-support
https://www.reddit.com/r/eos/comments/85vpe3/current_list_of_exchanges_that_support_the_token/
Consequences
What you might have heard already, is that there might be several EOS chains to be established after the token swap, maybe even on launch day.
It's quite likely that exchanges will support only the mainnet, so if you are holding tokens on one of these exchanges you should hope for a one main-net to establish and not several chains competing for being the one chain.
Aside that participation in airdrops would be at the discretion of exchanges as well.
Voting with your EOS tokens?
What i haven't heard about is, if exchanges supporting the swap will also allow you to use your tokens, especially for voting.
None of the links provided above, state anything about you to receive a proper EOS wallet from the exchanges, and the exchange will in all likelihood take hold of the proper wallet, where EOS tokens are actually stored.
Whereas you might not care about the voting feature of EOS, i assume, that they will actually register the tokens themselves and will remain the official holders and thus be able to use the accumulated voting power on their own behalf.
Just to look at the impact, according to this study out of the some 70% of EOS tokens held in the top largest wallets, 34% classify as classic whales (including b1). Removing another 10% which might still be in the crowd-funding wallet, 26% of tokens are still on exchanges, which would give them an imense voting power, to significantly influence elections.
Is this the reason behind some major exchanges to run for block producer, because the have a good chance to vote themselves in by means of tokens held in custody only?
http://blog.bitfinex.com/announcements/eos-block-producer-application/
https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/huobi-announces-candidacy-eos-block-producer/
What is your view of the matter?
Do you have additional information? Please share!
