EOS Was launched back in 2017 claiming to be the Ethereum Killer, because of its' faster transaction times, better scaleability, zero transaction fees and developer-friendliness.
Block one, the company behind EOS, raised a record breaking sum of $4 billion during a year long ICO (ironically on Ethereum) and in April 2018 EOS had a market cap of $70 billion and was a top 5 crypto currency...
EOS had just about as much hype as a blockchain could wish for, and Dan Larimer too, but despite/ (because?) of these factors today it is set to fall out of the T30 with a market cap of $5 billion.
So what went wrong and is there any hope of redemption?!?
It is well know that Governance on EOS has been a complete mess - the Block Producer system became an oligarchy, and having 40% fewer nodes than Tron was/ is hardly a good base to be comparing-down from.
The inability of the governance model to reach consensus was illustrated back in 2019 when there was no agreement on how to distribute $167 million dollars initially mooted to attract developers - no agreement was reached on how to allocate the funds so instead that $167 was just burned, which was great for short term price gains but probably contributed to EOS' further demise.
Development on EOS seems to have ground to a standstill - the weekly code updates have fallen by over 90% since Q2 of 2020. It's now fallen to the level of other stagnant projects like Tron and Bitcoin Cash.
There have been a couple of successful forks of EOS: most noteably Telos and Wax, but these have just sucked away existing and potential dapps and devs with them. A lot of dapps have migrated from EOS to these forks and social media data shows us people are losing interest in the former, while interest in its forks is gaining.
EOS is simply prohibitively expensive for smaller developers to build on, it is simply much more expensive to run a Dapp on EOS compared to newer competitors such as Wax.
According to DappRadar the top EOS dapps have a dismal daily volume of around $4 million flowing through them compared to $2 billion on Ethereum.
To my mind nothing illustrates the failure of EOS dapps better than Voice - I had to wait for about a year to finally get my sign up email, and in that time it had changed from a general social media platform to an NFT platform for upcoming artists, moreover it still doesn't work yet!
To top the list of woes, the Power to Censor is now written into EOS' Constitution - following the freezing of users funds following a Hack in 2018: yes, the 'oligarchy of 21' can freeze your funds on EOS if they so choose!
Given all of the above it's no wonder CTO Dan Larimer resigned in January 2021, he could probably see that his third child was going nowhere, other than into obscurity.
EOS pumped pretty hard back in May with news from Block One of the launch of a new subsidiary: Bullish Global - a new exchange to be built on EOS with $10 billion funding, but....
There's still nothing but a wait list....
Upland is probably the most Visible Dapp to have been built on EOS recently, you may well have seen the Brave adverts, it's pretty well marketed.
However, although this is a functioning Dapp, there's no volume flowing through it as yet according to Dapp Radar, so I think ATW this is just a case of yet more duff-tokens.
NO!
In fact the question in my mind is when to dump what I've got.
With so many competitors for EOS (and ETH) being more actively developed and being more decentralised, some of which were successful forks of EOS which have taken Dapps with them, this kind of reminds me of Steem, a dead chain, the price being kept alive by who knows what nefarious forces.
Then of course the ETH fees have come down recently, suggesting it is possible for ETH to scale and work efficiently, and although it there's a long way to go, its head start is massive and progress is being made, slowly and steadily.
So for me, it's just about picking my out point - and the current price of almost $6 is looking tempting - I can't see EOS coming back from the doldrums, there's nothing going on over there from what I can see!
This video is worth a look:
