[EOS 101] Introduction to EOS

What is EOS?

EOS was created as a network that will act as a foundation for building decentralized applications (dApp) for commercial use. Other coins, like Ethereum and NEO, have been developed for similar purposes. The innovative benefits that EOS brings to the table are that EOS has zero transaction fees, confirm a transaction within seconds, and process thousands of transactions per second.

According to EOS whitepaper, this is because the network uses Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) protocol as its consensus algorithm, different from Proof of Work (PoW) used in Bitcoin and Ethereum. In DPoS, each EOS holder can vote for block producersthey trust. A total of 21 producers will be elected and they will be responsible for processing transactions by hashing them into blocks. Blocks will be produced exactly every 0.5 second and exactly one producer is authorized to produce a block at any given time.

The DPoS protocol is what allows the network to handle transactions within seconds and free of fees. Fewer nodes are required to verify transactions, so blocks can be produced much more frequently and less energy is required to operate the network as a whole. Although very few, processing transactions still consumes a certain amount of resources of the network. Instead of paying for, transaction initiators just need to rent for resources (specifically speaking, CPU & NET) they want to use by staking in EOS tokens. Usage of resources will be cleared every day, and resources that are no longer needed can be returned at any time to get EOS back. This resource leasing model eliminates transaction fees so it would be free for users to transfer tokens and use all kinds of dApps on EOS.

DPoS is also very robust under misbehaviors in a trustless network. The election process ensures that stakeholders are ultimately in control of block produces because they will lose the most when the network does not operate smoothly. Anyone can participate in block production if they collect enough votes, and block producers will be re-elected every 63 seconds (126 blocks produced, which is 6 blocks for each of the 21 producers). A block producer caught cheating will quickly be voted out. Byzantine Fault Tolerance is also added to EOS network by requiring 15 producers to sign the blocks to make them irreversible. This article explains how DPoS can resist a variety of bad behaviors in more details.

EOS provides parallel execution of smart contracts through Horizontal Scalability, which allows the EOS network to process up to 100,000 transactions per second. Horizontal Scalability combines several hardware and/or software entities into a single entity that acts as one to process transactions. Traditionally, most networks have used Vertical Scalability, which involves adding more computing power to a single entity (i.e. adding more CPU or RAM to a single computer) that processes transactions.

EOS Team: block.one

The EOS platform is developed by block.one, a private company registered in the Cayman Islands. The CEO Brendan Blumer is a blossoming figure in the crypto world since 2014. He started his career as an entrepreneur selling digital assets in MMORPGs and has since created several successful businesses, including okay.com in 2010. The CTO Daniel Larimer (a.k.a BM) is the inventor of the DPoS algorithm. He created the cryptocurrency platform BitShares in 2014 and co-founded the blockchain social platform Steemitin 2016, both had implemented the DPoS protocol.

EOS Past Roadmap

Announcement

On May 22, 2017, block.one revealed EOS to the world and announced their intent to launch “a new blockchain operating system designed to support commercial decentralized applications.”

EOS Token Sale

Block.one used a novel model for their Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Unlike most of the other ICOs which usually last a month, EOS’s ICO lasted for a year from June 26, 2017to June 16, 2018 (at Ethereum address 0x86Fa04…). One billion (1,000,000,000) EOS tokens were issued according to the following distribution:

• 200,000,000 EOS (20%)were distributed during a 5 day period from June 26, 2017 to July 1, 2017. A total of 651,902 ETH (worth $172,102,358 at the time) were raised.
• 700,000,000 EOS (70%)were split evenly into 350 consecutive 23-hour periods in which 2,000,000 EOS tokens are distributed in each period. From July 1, 2017 to June 16, 2018 another 6,553,200 ETH were raised.
• 100,000,000 EOS (10%)were reserved for the team block.one.

(See detail information on eosscan.io)

The EOS ICO brought in a whopping 7.2 million ETH (or $4.2 billion), a record-breaking figure that surpassed Telegram’s $1.7 billion and Dragon’s
$320 million (reference).

EOS Registration & Snapshot

Since the EOS network was still being developed during the ICO, the EOS tokens released to the community were actually ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum, which means they were held and sent on the Ethereum blockchain. It is best to think of these ICO EOS tokens as vouchers to redeem real mainnet EOS tokenswhen the EOS mainnet is online.

Block.one devised tools that they called EOS registration and snapshot to convert ERC-20 EOS to real mainnet EOS. Each ERC-20 EOS holder were required to register an EOS public key to his/her Ethereum address. When the snapshot occurred on June 2, 2018 at 22:00 UTC, it looked through all registered Ethereum addresses and their EOS balances, and then credited real EOS tokens to linked EOS public key on the EOS blockchain. All EOS ERC-20 tokens became fixed on the Ethereum blockchain and it was impossible to send or exchange them anymore.

Mainnet Release

About one week after the snapshot, on June 9, 2018 at 01:00 UTC, the EOS Mainnet Launch Group (EMLG) unanimously voted “Go” to move forward with the EOS Mainnet Launch. The launch sequence began at 13:00 UTC on 9 June 2018. Over 150 million EOS tokens voted for their trusted block producers and the initial 21 block producers are selected. The chain was officially ratified as the EOS mainnet and EOS tokens were unlocked to the community.

The EOS mainnet provides users and dApp developers with a new generation of blockchain technology. We hope to let more people know about EOS technology and provide a clear instruction for new users into EOS. For the next article (EOS 102), we will introduce EOS’s account system and resource model, which is the basic to hold and transfer EOS tokens.

t.b.c.