Whatever happened to EOS? After the biggest ICO in history, the former top 10 token now languishes around number 53. But the community has since taken back control and is determined to restore the smart contract platform to its former glory.
If you’re a newcomer to the crypto industry, you may not even be familiar with The Biggest ICO in History, which launched EOS.
EOS began in June 2018 with great fanfare, an active community and strong tech. Led by Dan Larimer, of Steemit and Bitshares fame, there was a palpable area of excitement with the introduction of new tech, including the delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) system and EOS Worker Proposals to fund projects that grew the ecosystem.
Block.one, the company behind EOS, raised an astonishing massive $4.1 billion over 12 months.
And then… nothing much happened. The community waited and waited for the promises to be fulfilled.
“I was very disappointed when little or none of those ideas came to fruition,” Douglas Horn, CEO of Goodblock, tells Magazine. “To be honest, I would say Block.one did a deceitful ICO, whether that was planned from the beginning or not. That’s my personal assessment.”
The exact reasons EOS didn’t go anywhere are disputed, but development dried up, and the community often felt left out. Some say they volunteered to take on the development of new projects but weren’t supported — or even told to halt work by Block.one, as their efforts encroached on developments of its own. In other cases, micro-grants were given on the proviso that no other funding could be used. Typically, those micro-grants were not enough and those mini-projects also ran out of runway.
Also read: Journeys in Blockchain — William Quigley of WAX
There are some success stories, with WAX and Alien Worlds the exceptions that prove the rule, but otherwise, it was a moribund ecosystem. In the interim, Block.one came to an agreement with the SEC to pay a fine of $24 million in order to avert any suspicion that the token was a security (an agreement that has subsequently been overturned and which may cause significant new problems for Block.one).
Two white elephants
Despite the many promises, Block.one basically stopped developing the base tech, then termed EOSIO, and diverted its focus to two vanity projects: the $150 million Voice decentralized social media platform that has since transformed into an unimpressive NFT marketplace; and Bullish, an exchange that ostensibly used the ICO money to provide liquidity. Trade volumes are around $200,000 a day for its BTC/USDC pair.
(Block.one, former chief technology officer Larimer and CEO Brendan Blumer were contacted for comment.)
So in 2021, the community started fighting back with the formation of the EOS Network Foundation. Enter Yves La Rose, CEO of EOS Nation, an original block producer, into the fray. Block producers in EOS provide the tech to validate nodes, with the top 21 receiving a fee for maintaining the network.
La Rose is not without his critics, with some of those in the original Block.one brigade calling him a bully. On the other side, the newly energized EOS community sees him as a bit of a hero. And since history is written by the victors, it looks as though La Rose is going to emerge as the latter.
Who is Yves La Rose?
La Rose is a self-confessed nerd who started tinkering with his own computers when he was only six years old. Years later, he read the Bitcoin white paper and became a miner. But this didn’t last very long. He could see there was very little scope for lone miners, and he didn’t want to join a mining pool.
By 2016/2017, he could see a resurgence that offered more choices. ICOs were starting to become popular and CryptoKitties famously log-jammed the Ethereum blockchain. La Rose also became aware of Larimer and was seriously impressed with his crypto record and the new tech he was building for EOS.
“I chose EOS early on,” says La Rose. “And I made the leap into blockchain full time, forming EOS Nation back in January 2018 prior to the launch of the mainnet. And we waited.”
He was not the only block producer to find out that while ICO promises are easy, execution is hard.
‘None of those ideas came to fruition’
Horn, previously the architect of Telos, is now the CEO of Goodblock, which provides foundational Web3 tools. Like La Rose, he was attracted by the potential of the tech offered by EOS – by DPoS, the governance systems and the planned worker proposals. He, too, grew disillusioned and co-founded the Telos Blockchain in direct response to the absence of any perceptible activity by Block.one on the EOSIO code.
“In my personal opinion, I…
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