EOS insider: I want to leave

In 2020, apart from a few pieces of news that were circulated, such as the launch of Voice, the introduction of the enterprise service product EOSIO for Business, and the fact that its parent company Block.one (B1) holds more than 240,000 bitcoins worth more than US$7 billion, almost all the other news you heard was ridicule.

The sluggish progress of the EOS ecosystem has left no excuse for those who want to speculate. In the three months when Bitcoin soared from $10,000 to $34,000, EOS's increase was only 0.65%, and its increase in 2020 was -1.2%. Its volatility is comparable to that of the stablecoin USDT. Not surprisingly, its total market value fell out of the top 10, and there is even a possibility of falling out of the top 20.

Over the past year, the once highly praised EOS has been abandoned. The Chinese community, as an important component, has also visibly shrunk. Investors, project owners, and developers have left one after another. An ecosystem with billions of assets has become like a startup that has no more funds and vitality, with only a name and logo left.

EOS applications are now free

“EOS is dead, and the price is stagnant. So much time has passed, and now the value of the project is far lower than the official funds raised. There are no new changes, and the team should return the money.”

I don’t know when it started, but in addition to the routine weekly development reports, the EOS section of Reddit would occasionally have voices similar to those of investors defending their rights as mentioned above, and these complaints would sometimes stir up waves and trigger comments from everyone.

Compared with the currency price, the community consensus will return to zero first.

A few days ago, IMEOS, the EOS ecological portal that is still holding on, formed several investment self-help groups. In addition to quotations, there is more self-mockery in the groups. These former EOS investors have long lost hope. There are constant voices that sing the pessimism of EOS, such as "Don't worry about the market if you hold EOS stablecoins" and "EOS has become a doomsday chariot".

In the past two years, the most well-known EOS spokesperson among investors was an investor with the online name "Captain Wang". As the author of the public account "Captain Wang's Blockchain Diary", 1,152 diaries detailed his mental journey in the cryptocurrency circle over the past three years. Judging from the content of the diary, although he still has EOS positions, it is clear that in addition to Bitcoin, he is also concerned about other hot concepts such as algorithmic stablecoins and DeFi. In some WeChat groups, we can occasionally see screenshots of his speeches on his views on the future of EOS, which reminds people of the years when EOS was highly sought after.

In addition to investors, some people who once participated in the construction of the EOS ecosystem have switched to Polkadot, Ethereum or other public chains.

Two years ago, Myra first served as the director of overseas community operations of EOS Gravity Zone, and then served as the executive director of EOS Foundation, responsible for promoting the community autonomy of EOS. As the EOS governance path was blocked and the follow-up funds of the Chinese and Korean operation teams could not be effectively supplemented, after many unsuccessful negotiations with B1, the foundation eventually failed to continue. Today, her new identity is the founder of blockchain technology operation company dboost.io.

In September 2020, EOS data service provider EOSPark announced the suspension of service, which means there is one less browser providing EOS services. It is hard to imagine that when EOS was at its most famous, there were nearly 10 browsers on the market providing EOS on-chain data query services, but later, these teams gradually disappeared.

The disappearance of EOS browsers is just the tip of the iceberg of the EOS ecosystem. When asked why they disappeared, Myra said: “These teams are very good, but since the end of the EOS node election, finding a monetization model has become the most important problem facing these ecosystem projects.”

“As far as I know, EOSPark once sought an acquisition, but the offer was too high and it ultimately failed.” Myra recalled that this was not the only project like this. For example, the Scatter wallet, which once competed with MetaMask, “the core developers have basically been poached by other teams”, while the reason why the browser blocks is still there is because “all the staff have been acquired, so there is no need to worry about monetization.”

Myra remembers that a friend in the same industry once asked her if she wanted to take over an EOS ecosystem project founded by the other party for free. Considering the cash flow problem, she finally declined.

In addition to ordinary investors and startup projects, EOS big players are also fleeing.

"For a while, the EOS in the addresses of big investors, including our boss, in our mining pool decreased significantly." Li Ran, a former EOS node employee, recalled that if these tokens were not used for quantitative investment, they were directly cashed out. As the number of coins in the hands of big investors decreases, in order to continue to rank in the top 21, EOS nodes can only "build good relationships" with trading platforms.

EOS nodes are losing money

This can't go on any longer.

Li Ran finally made up his mind to leave the company. From telling his superiors about his resignation to handing over his work and leaving the company, the entire process only took a few days.

Over the past year, he and his colleagues have been working in a low-pressure atmosphere throughout the company. Even though the founder, who became rich in the previous bull market, plans to continue to contribute money to keep the company running so as to pay salaries, Li Ran couldn't hold on any longer. "I really can't stand it anymore." Seeing many of his colleagues being fired by the boss like Ripple's co-founder who regularly sells XRP, Li Ran and his colleagues feel insecure every day.

"As long as the boss doesn't like the employee, he will be fired even if he has done nothing wrong," he added, "just like quarterly contact lenses." The most memorable example was when the company was working on a project at the end of last year. The colleague in charge of development was unwell because he had worked too much overtime before, so he went to the hospital to get a certificate and applied for normal working hours. This was originally a common thing, but the boss thought that the other party's failure to work overtime would affect other people in the team, so he fired the colleague directly. Because several people were laid off one after another, the project was ultimately unable to proceed.

EOS nodes, which are not profitable at all, were once considered a good business.

Three years ago, Li Xiaolai, Lao Mao and other frequent cryptocurrency traders, as well as EosStore, which brought 8-digit EOS and was worth 2 billion RMB, also entered the market in a high-profile manner. Even the Wenzhou Gang, mining pools, trading platforms and other entities participated in the EOS node election, and Li Ran’s company was one of them. According to calculations at the time, the profit after the node was elected could reach tens of millions.

Soon everyone discovered that running an EOS node was not profitable at all, and the income could not even cover all expenses.

"Generally speaking, the fixed monthly expenditure for an alternative node server is about 3,000 yuan. Currently, the node earns 100-400 yuan a day, which seems to be a floating profit, but in fact, this has not yet taken into account employee costs and ticket exchange costs." Due to the bleak price of coins, many big players have sold their coins and left the market one after another. The nodes that have lost this important part of the voting rights have to choose to reach a ticket purchase cooperation with the "big players" of the ticket warehouse - the trading platform.

“In addition to the votes exchanged at a 1:1 ratio, you must also purchase some tickets. This part basically comes from the trading platform. The fee is based on the proportion of the platform’s votes to the total number of votes for the node.” An insider who is familiar with EOS node votes gave us an estimate, “How big the discount is depends on the negotiation results of both parties”, “Sometimes the size of the discount determines whether the node is profitable.”

Of course, this phenomenon of vote-buying between nodes is not new in the EOS ecosystem. To facilitate ticket checking, some nodes have developed corresponding ticket checking tools. "Check the data every day to see if the account is balanced. If the platform has invested less, it will notify the other party to make up for it."

According to his understanding, among all EOS nodes, only a very small number of the top-ranked nodes can achieve positive returns, and most nodes are maintaining at a loss. If you only lose money on the nodes and can find other ways to make profits, it’s not bad, but this situation is rare.

Former EOS nodes are already trying to switch to Polkadot

In addition to operating a node at a loss, in the past two years, the company of another EOS practitioner, Chen Guo, has also tried to develop blockchain games and focused on promoting EOS wallets. However, the players in these two segments are basically in danger of death, and most of them cannot escape the fate of being "cannon fodder".

After blockchain games and crypto wallets were proven to be unworkable on EOS, Chen Guo’s boss still firmly believed that EOS had a bright future and that there was nothing wrong with it. But the problem was that “he was not like a certain crypto wallet founder who was deeply involved in the frontline community and was fully aware of the current crypto trends and opportunities. Instead, he was immersed in the lies woven by some employees all day long.”

However, whether it is complacent or struggling to survive, it has nothing to do with Chen Guo who is about to resign.

“EOS developers are the poorest”

Not only investors and nodes are disappointed with EOS, but also ecosystem developers.

In December just past, the crypto venture capital firm Electric Capital released a developer report, mentioning that in 2020, the number of developers in the ecosystems of projects such as Ethereum, Polkadot, and Filecoin increased, but there was a significant loss of developers in EOS: an average of 88 active developers were lost every month.

Like Li Ran’s team, developer Bai Hao led the team to build nodes. In order to enrich the EOS ecosystem and explore ways to make profits, he and his team spent a lot of effort to develop a non-slot machine game. Due to the good graphics of the game, it also gathered a group of loyal fans, but the good times lasted only half a year. When the popularity of blockchain games faded, the official paid for the maintenance of the game for half a year, and then the game was shut down.

In addition to the fact that the game was not favored by the industry, many developers also attributed the reason to the B1 team's idleness.

“Compared to public chains such as Ethereum, Polkadot, and even Tron, B1 has clearly failed in its duties, causing EOS developers to be the poorest and have the hardest time.” Bai Hao said that in terms of supporting ecological projects, domestic developers have never received B1 funding, and even the overseas teams that have received support are all teams that use EOSIO software development.

B1’s management of the billions of dollars in financing that year was contrary to the community’s wishes. According to most investors, the reason why B1 was able to raise $4 billion was entirely because of EOS tokens, not EOSIO. A Ping, a developer who has been paying attention to the development of the EOS ecosystem for a long time, told BlockBeats that it is obvious that B1 has turned its attention to EOSIO, and the price of the currency is not the most concerned topic for the official, "This may be due to regulatory reasons."

“In the past two years, the speed and magnitude of EOS technology improvements have been too slow. Whether it is the one million TPS, EOS Storage, or cross-chain ideas set in the early days, it can be said that they are not satisfactory.” He introduced that B1 is not completely unwilling to fund ecological projects. “For example, I know that some EOS ecological products have also received funding, but to be honest, 50,000 US dollars is a drop in the bucket for a serious project.”

In addition to the lack of technical development and ecological funding, B1's neglect of operations has been criticized by the community. For example, B1 CEO Brendan Blumer (BB)'s sister Abby Blumer is the company's CMO. In addition, BB's mother Nancy Kasparek left Bank of America in 2018 and turned to "help her son manage EOSVC." It seems that B1 is becoming more and more like a "family company."

Even the top management began to show signs of "drawing a line". On January 4, Daniel Larimer (BM) tweeted, "BB controls B1 and all product/service releases, and all he can do is give advice within the scope of BB's pursuit. He has big plans and likes to do big things." He showed that he had no say and that BB was in charge.

Screenshot source: Twitter

Even if there is no expectation from the official, there are still developers who stick to the EOS community. According to data from EOSGo, there are nearly 100 projects developed based on EOS with transaction volume. Especially after the rise of the DeFi craze, concepts that have been successful in the Ethereum ecosystem, such as AMM, synthetic assets, lending and NFT, have been applied to EOS by developers.

TokenPocket (TP), the world's leading multi-chain wallet, has participated in the incubation of the Organix synthetic asset protocol. "Technically, we believe that EOS is the best of all public chains currently available, and is more decentralized than public chains such as Tron. However, the EOS coin price is not strong, which is not only a joke to the outside world, but also the most self-deprecating point within the community." Michael, the head of TP's business, explained that it is just that "the capacity of each track in the EOS ecosystem is still too small to support too many teams." But they still have confidence in the future of EOS.

But as Aping said, at least for now, we still don’t see the possibility of EOS breaking out. What can be confirmed is that if B1 does nothing, it is obviously a fantasy to expect a few Chinese nodes or communities to support EOS, which has a market value of more than 2.5 billion US dollars.

Today, BB and BM are still active on social media every day, but few people support them. Instead, there are always some users who are optimistic and leave messages under their tweets day after day: Can what you do be beneficial to EOS? When will the marketing activities start? The two sometimes reply: We do not affect the price.

Similar scenes have been repeated over the past two years.

At the request of the interviewees, all names except Myra are pseudonyms.