With a market cap of a little over $12 Billion dollars and a fundraising campaign that has lasted one year and raised upwards of $4 Billion dollars; the 5th most valuable cryptocurrency is ready to launch. While EOS existed as an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain for its fundraising efforts in 2017, the time for its mainnet launch has arrived.
On June 2nd at 22:59:59 UTC all EOS tokens on the Ethereum blockchain were frozen, a snapshot was taken of all registered addresses, and the tokens will be recreated 1:1 on the EOS network. The snapshot can be pictured here -
Block.one (the team behind EOS) published their software as open-source meaning the community chooses how the EOS network will run. This was the extent of Block.one's efforts after the release of their code. It's EOS's community that takes over to dictate certain aspects of the launch. This social experiment will consist of community efforts, collaboration between Block Producers, and joint consensus.
Upon the software release, Block Producers from around the world (crypto-exchanges, crypto mining operations, consultancies and groups of developers) will launch chains and must come to an agreement with a certain net launched for it to be the "mainnet". Token snapshot must be agreed upon and mirrored, as well as the security of the blockchain for it to be adopted by the community.
The blockchain infrastructure will be made up of 21 Block Producers. 21 might seem like a very low number for such an ambitious project, but comparing to POW networks (Proof of Work: which are usually fully controlled by less than ten mining pools) this number is relatively high. Brendan Blumer, CEO of Block.one, explains their role in the EOS ecosystem.
"Block Producers are 21 elected delegates by the token holders that are actually confirming transactions on the network. I always look at those 21 Block Producers elected in EOS as the same as the mining pools that you have established in a lot of proof-of-work networks. What it really does is it distributes the control to the token holders and on a geographical basis, it uses just 21 nodes to process transactions."
The 21 Block Producers will be elected by the community through the staking of EOS tokens. The voting will conclude when 15% of the 1 billion EOS tokens (150 million) have voted.
Block.one has provided the community voting through 'cleos' a command line interface. This tool can be found as a part of the EOS installation package. There are, however, community developed portals for easier voting mechanics such as http://vote.liquideos.com/ - a portal created by Bancor's LiquidEOS, who is also a Block Producer candidate. (Bancor and BlockchainIL are sister companies)
A staked EOS token can vote for up to 30 various BP candidates.
Each token = 1 vote per BP (up to 30 BP's per token).
The 21 BP's who receive the most stake weighted votes will be elected as the ‘active’ block producers (150–175 estimated standby block producers).
The release of the EOS mainnet can be seen as a confusing series of events, but also as a fascinating community effort of decentralized organization and implementation. While it's too early to say exactly when and how EOS mainnet will be launched we certainly say this is an exciting moment in the world of blockchain.
- Article on using Cleos to vote: https://steemit.com/eosio/@chitty/eos-how-to-vote-for-bp-candidates-on-cleos
- Community voting portal provided by LiquidEOS: http://vote.liquideos.com/
- EOS New York (13,638,617)
- EOS Canada (12,813,592)
- EOS Gravity (11,858,512)
- EOSdac (11,829,970)
- eoscannonchn (11,501,488)
- EOS Authority (11,263,870)
- EOS Cafe (10,042,349)
- eosyskoreabp (9,868,998)
- EOS Beijing (8,908,015)
- LiquidEOS (8,817,913)
