WAX (Worldwide Asset eXchange) describes itself as ‘an all-in-one blockchain platform for digital goods’. Its protocol token is designed to make e-commerce transactions faster, easier and safer. DPoS is WAX blockchain’s consensus mechanism and it is fully backward compatible with EOS. The founders of OPSkins, one of the top marketplaces for online video game virtual assets, developed this platform. WAX was launched as ERC20 token. It was purpose-built for ecommerce. It launched mainnet in June, 2019. It has 500 millisecond block times and feeless transactions as of now.
Since its mainnet launch, WAX targeted EOS naturally as its main competitor. As it is fully backward compatible with EOS, it is easy to duplicate any EOS dApp onto WAX with just a few clicks. It also gives exposure to 6.5 million fast adopting, crypto friendly OPSkins customers and a huge video gaming community. Unlike EOS, WAX accounts are free. It prevents spam with 2FA. Developers can earn rewards in WAX tokens by voting regularly in for WAX Guilds while running their dApp.
Image Source – WAX website highlighting easy dApp migration from EOS
WAX was preparing for a battle with EOS. But none knew that vulnerability of EOS would be exposed so soon. The day was 31st October, 2019. A token named EIDOS was released on the EOS network on that date. It started to clog the EOS blockchain immediately. It was a mysterious attack on EOS. EOS CPU price rose dramatically as demand increased. All dApps running on EOS network got stalled. EOS block producers could not wake up from the slumber and the users started to get frustrated. WAX utilized the opportunity. Karma, the blue eyed social dApp of EOS, decided to move out of EOS to survive and was considering EOS.
Finally Karma declared to move from EOS to WAX on 27th Nov’19. They wrote a detailed medium article to explain their decision. They cited block producers’ lack of response to EIDOS attack, high account creation cost, high CPU cost etc. as the reasons to move out from EOS blockchain.
Image Source – Karma tweet on 27th Nov’19
Image Source – Tweet of one EOS block producer
Image Source – EOS dApp ‘Karma’ founder Dallas Rushing’s tweet on 28th Nov’19
WAX already got the fuel for battle. It launched guerilla attack on EOS. It was never easy. EOS was top 10 cryptocurrency and WAX was nowhere. Karma set the momentum right for WAX. 30 days EOS to wax challenge with high decibel digital and Word-of-mouth marketing took shape.
Image Source – WAX tweet to launch aggressive ‘EOSTOWAX’ challenge
After that, Prospectors games landed on WAX. It was an overnight success and till now it is one of the top dApps according to dApp Radar. ITAM Games, Earnbet, Dark Country, Chain Clash also moved to WAX. While writing this article, WAX ranked at no 17 in blockchain activity as per blockactivity and surpassed more than 200K accounts. A trend to move out from EOS has been created. WAX is capturing many dApps by understanding the pain areas of the dApp makers. Does EOS have any counter strategy? As of now, clear no!
Image Source – tweets of various dApps leaving EOS for WAX
