(This is Part-1 of my 2 part series on The Top Ten BPs in our assessment )
As a sizable amount of EOS investor and a VC in the technology space with a long term experience, with the outlook of sustaining this ecosystem, I took a deep look at the various candidates who have been dominating the voting scene, their skills and abilities (technical and managerial) and general intentions and truthfulness. I have personally interviewed a lot of these founders and management and having done the due diligence, I feel they are worthy of being in the race and being supported. My overview is from the outside-in look rather than the inside-out look. With a low voter turn out, it is hard to imagine that B1 and many large whales will not be dominant determinants of this election and race to victory of many. Being selective as an investor, I limited my choice of votes to 10 votes in the interest of not too highly diluting the intent of my investment goals in the EOS space of block producers and application developers.
Some have hyped themselves by marketing messages and hanging all around the place on telegram to woo voters, while some Chinese and Korean cartel of investors holding 15 to 20 million tokens will be soon dominating the scene and that show down is yet to come for the grand finale. At the same time, what is to be acknowledged is that many down the list beyond the top forty are just languishing and never making a progress due to voter's apathy and laziness to do any due diligence. An undue limitation put by Block One of limiting standbys to those receiving only 0.5% of the total votes cast, will put many of those out of the race and business. This is an inevitable outcome which even the most hardworking and best of some BP candidates will have to try to cope up with in days to come.
What motive or incentive is there for a normal token holder than just to make a few votes from the top of the list so that they can unlock the chain when the 15% votes are cast? All the smartly couched messages of community, doing selfless work and all have been the outcome of clever marketing tactics by some early contestants to get the favor of B1 and some voters. But when it gets to business and day to day reality, we have to see what really pans out. You can't believe everything every one says. Take a look at the management, people, technology and how dependable and reliable they are. There are many fly by the night entrepreneurs just trying to jump ships the sooner they make some money.
Brock Pierce really hyped six months ago that a thousand Apps will launch when EOS launches. I am yet to see one good one launch and hit the market. That sounded a bit like Cleopatra launching a thousand ships. Let's search for the reality of what we want to see in a good block producer and a company that can achieve those goals and why you must take a deeper look at some of the candidates I am enlisting. Following are the Block Producers with their producer names as seen in many voting portals bracketed. Be sure not to vote for some counterfeit producer names that mimic the real ones.
PART 1:
CryptoLions (cryptolions1)
EosCanada (eoscanadacom)
BlockPro.one (blockpro1eos)
EosysKorea (eosyskoreabp)
EosAuthority (eosauthority)
PART 2:
EosLove (eoslovebirds)
Liberty Block (libertyblock)
EOSphere (eosphereiobp)
LiquidEOS (eosliquideos)
Eosdac (eosdacserver)
CryptoLions (cryptolions1)
This Ukraine based company is one of a kind. Their founders and technical gurus have become the darling overnight of many in the EOS BP space. Very congenial and entrepreneurial as they are, they have burnt the midnight oil to keep the EOS flame alive and helped many budding BP candidates come up to speed and be producing blocks and gaining expertise. All with the help of their Jungle based testnet - which even today after the launch of EOS is being used as the first test bed for any latest developments and revisions. Many a problem reports and suggestions and worker proposals do emerge from their long and enduring work hours which they put out with non complaining attitude.
They are very well known in the community but yet hardly rewarded for all the things they have contributed. It is my hope that they be fairly well rewarded to be promoted to a position of an active producer given the technical know and in-and-outs of the EOS software base they have accumulated over the past year and having worked on building a whole team of testers and aspiring block producer candidates.
EOSCanada (eoscanadacom)
EOSCanada is a very well talented and polished team of executives and technocrats. Their whole initiative to boot strap the whole process of launch and making it all an easy one click process with their Biosboot mechanism deserves great credit. Alex, their technical lead and CTO had been a very nice person both on and off the screen to the entire community of BP candidates working tirelessly to make this whole launch process to sail as smooth as possible. Nevertheless, there was a quake in the works by a sparring group calling themselves as EOSCore which wanted their exclusiveness behind the iron curtains amidst a world of decentralization. The extreme adroitness and politeness with which Marc and Alex their founders handled the whole process is very worthy of admiration and rewards.
If you had only one vote to cast, I would definitely say, go and support these guys at EOS Canada. Long term, they will be of great value for the ecosystem as a whole and they have both the business acumen and gentlemanly nature which is hard to come by to see is in a dog eat dog world of technical entrepreneurs. Except for their hard work and polite ways of dealing with defectors and offenders, there would certainly have been a fork in the EOS chain right on the day of the launch.
BlockPro.One (blockpro1eos)
Though the name sounds like Block.one, I would say, this company is very well managed and the founders have a far deep and thorough skills in managing many technology ventures. They are based in Silicon Valley and Bangalore in India. The founders come with a lot of experience working with top fortune 500 companies as well as having founded their own ventures and succeeded in them. In my conversations with them when I asked why they are in this EOS space, their frank answer was, it is not for the block producer money - but for the long term goal of developing enterprise and social governance grade applications. The senior management possesses a lot of managerial and technical experience and are ably assisted by a very technically strong team in US, Europe and India.
They are diversified into a lot more areas than just EOS in the blockchain space - which includes consulting, DApps development and working with various Governmental and NGO agencies. That being said, the CEO/CTO has an ideological set of goals in spreading the mission of EOS in to various sectors of the people's lives among the developing and developed worlds. Given his long experience in making success of startups and a diversified team, I could not let it pass by.
Eosys-Korea (eosyskoreabp)
Eosys is one of the top level technology companies from Seoul, Korea and is ably assisted by a well experienced founder. EOS is not their only business and they have deep expertise in blockchain based solutions development and are being backed by a deep rooted venture capital firm, they have a wide variety of talents, technical know how and entrepreneurial and managerial abilities to deliver the goods that are deemed necessary for a long term sustenance and growth of the EOS ecosystem.
They have been leading a lot of efforts in bringing together the Korean and Chinese investment community together with their technical teams and various entrepreneurs and their marketing and evangelistic approach to promoting EOS has broadly benefited many in the west as well.
Personally, I felt so deeply impressed by their CEO and having had personal communications with him on many business matters concerning our venture business, I can say that EOS in Korea and Chinese continents could not be in any better hands than Eosys.
EOS Authority (eosauthority)
As the name does stand out, EOS Authority had tried to be an authority on EOS matters from the days before the launch to the days after also. Their tools for checking ethereum to eos token registration of keys and various tools to monitor the voting process have been used by many of the people in the token holder community. Roshan and Rohan who run this venture working days and nights have done a remarkable job supporting the community with the various stages of launch of the EOS project. Some of the snapshot validation and verification tools and portals developed by them have been a very important contributing factors to the launch of EOS.
EOS Authority very much deserves the respect of the EOS token holder community and I believe they will continue to be very ably monitoring the health of the system and coordinating the work of many BPs and participants in this ecosystem in the days to come.
In the next part of this 2 part series, I will cover the five other BP candidates. By far, an overwhelming majority of my decisions have been made considering all factors that go into the selection of a diverse variety of participants to fully support and evolve an ecosystem that EOS was developed to bring forth.
The link to the 2nd part of this article is below:
https://steemit.com/eos/@robbspeare/top-ten-eos-bps-in-my-list-an-under-the-hood-analysis-part-2