What Is Behind the Launch of the EOS Mainnet?

A year after EOS was launched by the developer Daniel Larimer and the company Block.one in June 2017, there are still many aspects that are not quite clear about this project. EOS 1.0 blockchain was released on 2 June. Although many followers are enthusiastic about the project, which raised $4 billion during its ICO, fraud and hacker attacks have significantly undermined its reputation. Some vulnerabilities recently discovered in the EOS software have also had a negative impact.

Features of EOS work

EOS token was developed for the EOS.IO software, which will become a ‘new block architecture designed for vertical and horizontal scaling of decentralized applications.’ EOS will be an operating system where one can create applications programmed in CPU clusters.

Another feature of this software is that it will use the same consensus mechanism called Delegated Proof-of-Stake that is used in Steemit. DPoS performs mining functions through a system of continual approval of votes. Parallel code execution will occur in the same way. The advantage is that the system will provide one hundred thousand transactions per second and with a short waiting time. Besides, responsibility for the payment of each transaction will be solely in the hands of the developers of each DApp, which will free the user from payment.

From the Bitcoin protocol, this system has inherited the use of SegWit (Segregated Witness), which eliminates data of transaction signatures to save space in the block. And from the Ethereum blockchain, this system can use any virtual machine that has sufficient performance to integrate with EOS.IO API.

The current distribution of EOS tokens

1,000,000,000 tokens will be distributed via Ethereum, of which 100,000,000 are intended solely for developers. According to TokenAnalyst, there are 896,149,492 EOS in circulation, which means that without them, there are 3,850,508 EOS remaining. These analysts also claim that the total supply was 2,805,886,393 EOS, which includes all these tokens, including those in reserve and in circulation.

Daniel Larimer, who is behind the development of EOS.IO, has also been involved in other projects. In 2014, he developed Bitshares, which was delisted from the Bittrex exchange in October 2017. Most likely because it was a competing exchange. In 2016, Larimer participated in the creation of the decentralized and monetised social network Steemit. On Reddit, some users believe that Larimer is ‘not good for long-term projects.’ They believe that he had to bring the existing projects to perfection and then switch to a new task.

Detected vulnerabilities and rewards

On 29 May, Chinese researchers have discovered a number of vulnerabilities, which compromised the work of EOS blockchain. It was found that more than 50% of EOS token addresses have not yet been registered on the network, and that remote execution of custom codes in the nodes may become available to attackers. Given this, Larimer attempted to delay the launch of the network until the bugs are fixed. He also posted a tweet promising a $10,000 reward to developers who would help detect new software failures.