The voting rate in three days is less than 4%. Why is the EOS voting rate so low?

Authors: Yan Nan, Xin Nan

On the evening of June 10, after several twists and turns, the EOS mainnet was finally launched, but the successfully launched EOS was frustrated in the voting stage this time.

According to eosportal.io, the current EOS voting participation rate is 3.724%, which has not yet reached the 15% voting rate required for the mainnet launch, so some EOS functions cannot be unlocked. The quiet voting is in sharp contrast to the previous heated discussions about EOS. If the voting speed is maintained at this level, there may still be some way to go before the mainnet can be truly operational.

What exactly affects EOS voting? Here, we analyze four possible reasons for the low voter turnout in EOS.

Voting operation has high threshold and low security

Currently, there are four main ways to vote on EOS: command line tool "Cleos", voting website + Scatt, third-party wallet and exchange voting.

The only tool officially recommended by EOS is the command line tool "Cleos". Although this tool can guarantee high security, if users want to use this software to vote, they need to learn how to use a series of command line tools.

Although the voting website + Scatter method does not require users to learn difficult command line tools, it is vulnerable to malicious actions by the voting website during the process.

Currently, most users’ EOS are stored in exchanges, but exchanges have stopped charging and withdrawing EOS. In addition, there are only a handful of exchanges that have launched voting functions (such as Huobi).

However, Huobi Group announced on April 24 that Huobi Mining Pool officially participated in the election for EOS super nodes. As a stakeholder, the exchange has undoubtedly increased the concerns of EOS holders about the fairness of node voting. Will the EOS stored in the exchange be used by the user to vote for themselves? After all, EOS voting has the option of proxy voting.

If the exchange does not support user voting, users can only vote through their wallets.

If large investors participate, 15% of the votes will not be difficult to achieve. However, both large investors and small investors are concerned about the security of their assets.

From this perspective, the trust cost of voting is not small.

Small profit drive, large fluctuation of EOS price

First, voting itself does not bring any benefits to users.

Voting requires EOS as collateral and locks it for 3 days, which is like "locking up". If the price of EOS goes down during the "locking up" period, voters may not be able to sell EOS.

Interests should be one of the driving forces of voting. However, users are more concerned about personal interests (the rise and fall of the currency price) rather than collective interests (casting a more "wise" vote). In this way, voting can easily fall into a deadlock.

(EOS weekly currency value trend image source: CoinMarketCap)

Game and alliance between nodes

Under the DPoS consensus mechanism, super nodes will receive additional EOS tokens as rewards every year. According to the total amount of 1 billion EOS set by EOS, 1% of the dividend reward represents 10 million EOS; based on the current EOS price of $13.09, the annual income of each node is about several million US dollars.

Becoming a super node also means having the decision-making power over the EOS ecological network.

As a node candidate, you need to negotiate and cooperate with other nodes to get more votes.

Although the government has banned vote-buying, there are still many ambiguous relationships between node candidates and big players. In addition, many node candidates are also big players, which increases the implicit exchange of interests. Therefore, some big players are waiting and watching from the sidelines. They want to see how other big players vote so that they can change their decisions at any time.

Users are on the sidelines due to vulnerabilities

Last month, 360's Vulcan team discovered a series of high-risk security vulnerabilities in the blockchain platform EOS. Zheng Wenbin, 360's chief security engineer and head of the Vulcan team, said that this vulnerability will lead to the loss of user secret keys.

It has been verified that some of these vulnerabilities can remotely execute arbitrary code on EOS nodes, that is, hackers can directly control and take over all nodes running on EOS through remote attacks.

Syed Jafri, founder of EOS Cafe Calgary, said most people are waiting for vetting to confirm it is safe.

We believe that the high technical barriers to voting, low security, competing interests among all parties, and imperfect systems are all reasons for the current stagnation of the voting process. The failure of the mainnet to go online will harm the interests of all EOS holders, but now it is in a dilemma due to conflicts of interest among all parties .

In difficult situations, modifying voting rules and introducing new voting systems may advance the voting process.

Special thanks to Jin Yan, founder of scaneos.io, for providing his opinion support.