June 13, 2018
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Now is our chance to show the world that EOS is a governed blockchain
Background
With the mainnet launched, community attention has now moved towards the ongoing token voting for Block Producer candidates such as ourselves, EOS42, as we work to reach the 15% level that will activate the chain.
The Problem
It was Liam Wu, our Head of Community for China/South America at EOS42, who took it upon himself in the last 48hrs to start addressing the flood of reports coming in from across the world from people discovering they were unable to vote, and indeed that their private key was invalid and did not match their assigned address.
The Community Responds
This lead to Liam setting up a Telegram group, EOS 911 to bring together those from across the world effected by this problem.
Before long hundreds had joined this group including Block.one mighty moderator Sandwich, who invented the snapshot back up solution. What has been so amazing about the EOS community over the last two months is watching it collectively respond, and it did not disappoint again with many Block Producers including EOS Nation, EOS Dublin, EOS Cafe, eosDAC, EOS Rio, EOSYS and EOSNodeone stepping in to immediately give input to start discussing and working on a solution to save funds.
What Are We Doing To Secure Token Holder Funds?
Michael Yeates of eosDAC proposed that we code an Ethereum contract up that would enable token holders to prove they held the public and private keys to the associated Etheruem EOS ERC-20 tokens, and all those proven could then be frozen. This solution was being worked upon and discussed in the daily Block Producer early mainnet calls when we had some help and complexity.
Bitfinex and Huobi Step In
First Bitfinex and then Huobi came up with a proposal to speed up this period of slow climb in the mainnet token votes to the 15% mark, by consulting their customers and if approved temporarily staking the entire top 30 block producers to enable the chain to activate.
That immediately set off alarm bells within EOS42 as we began to consider the effective fast track of the chain activation and thieves making off with thousands of tokens. Today we called an emergency meeting, with Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino immediately attending along with other Block Producers to talk through concerns and solutions:
Bitfinex were very concerned about any negative impact to token holders and offered their full support to prioritise working through a solution to protect the community. We're still waiting for a response from Huobi.
What Is Happening Next
An EOS42 developer has coded out the Ethereum contract, and with the help of EOS Rio are now busy testing it. Meanwhile Block Producers globally, in particular EOS Cannon in China, are continuing to pull together as many reported cases of registration fraud as possible. EOS Rio are going to assist this process further by fast building out a website to help the registration process.
The BP group discussed ways of freezing affected accounts immediately upon chain activation, and this will be the solution once these are registered in the coming hours with proof of Ethereum account ownership.
Was This An EOSIO Issue?
Not at all, unfortunately scammers setting up fake token registration portals have created this issue. However it is clear that some token holders were not cautious enough - including the owner of 550,000 EOS in a wallet impacted. This was unfortunately a natural risk and consequence from the need to register, now it is time for the community to rally around and prevent the thieves from getting away with it!
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EOS42 is an EOS Block Producer Candidate based in London, UK