EOS is in pieces, another Chinese drama

History always repeats itself. Although it has only been nine years since the birth of cryptocurrency , the “airdrop”, “split”, and “smart contract loopholes” that once happened to Bitcoin and Ethereum and once triggered hot topics have been repeated on EOS in just a few months.

1. Airdrop + Hard Fork: A familiar money-making scheme

Since BM announced the plan to launch the EOS mainnet and run for supernode, there have been continuous projects that have started airdropping based on EOS. According to the data provided by the eosdrops website, there are 17 projects that have airdropped based on EOS so far. Among them, the most widely accepted EOSDAC automatically airdropped 1:1 to users with more than 100 EOS tokens on April 15th, Beijing time. Now its price has risen from the initial $0.036 to $0.146.

(Image source: eosdrops)

In addition, after EOS was exposed by 360 for security vulnerabilities, a team called EON said that it had fixed the vulnerabilities and would airdrop candies to EOS users; what's more, in February this year, it was scheduled to hard fork EOS in July. The team that wants to hard fork EOS is called EOZ.ONE. They plan to launch a total of 50 billion forked coins EOZ within three weeks after the main network is launched, and give them all for free to promoters and registrants. This is equivalent to airdropping tokens to users who support it for free after hard forking EOS.

“Airdrop”, “hard fork”, “airdrop + hard fork”, does this “money-making” routine seem familiar?

2. Survival rules in the cryptocurrency world: Your users are my users

From the perspective of development concept, the principles of airdrops and hard forks are basically the same. They are both free candies. By anchoring a certain cryptocurrency and using its original user base to simplify the process of building a community, they can be listed on an exchange without any effort and reap the benefits through secondary market transactions.

This method of "making money" has already been practiced on Bitcoin.

In the cryptocurrency world, since ICO became popular, two names have become well-known. One is Li Xiaolai, a former teacher at New Oriental, and the other is Guo Hongcai, a former beef seller in Pingyao, Shanxi. These two unrelated people created two new eras for Bitcoin in November last year - Bitcoin's IFO (first hard fork offering) and Bitcoin's IHO (first hybrid offering).

At that time, Bitcoin was in the most stalemate period of competition with BCH, with computing power swinging back and forth between the two chains and price fluctuations being similar. At the same time, in order to weaken Bitmain's monopoly in the mining machine market, Liao Xiang, the founder of Lightning Intelligence, a mining hardware manufacturer that wanted a share of the Bitcoin market, also launched a forked coin "Bitcoin Gold" based on CPU and GPU mining.

These two hard forks, based on replay protection and the celebrity effect of Wu Jihan, Liao Xiang and others, attracted a lot of fans before they were listed. Therefore, BCH has firmly occupied the throne of the second largest cryptocurrency with a market value of 7 billion as soon as it was opened for trading, and Bitcoin Gold has a high price of nearly 500 US dollars before it was officially split. When ICO was banned, speculators in the Chinese cryptocurrency community tried to find the next opportunity to get rich overnight, and hard fork Bitcoin became their first choice . On November 15, 2017, SBTC, with Li Xiaolai as the chairman of the foundation (later changed to a member of the foundation), announced that they would also implement a hard fork on Bitcoin.

(Image source: Bitmex)

Since then, Bitcoin has started the IFO craze of hard forks, and to date, there are as many as 69 Bitcoin forks. However, the pre-mining mechanism of forked coins has been questioned by all parties. Skeptics believe that the project party obtained a part of the tokens through the pre-mining mechanism in the early stage of the split coin, and then traded the pre-mined tokens through the secondary market after the forked coin went online, and the money-making routine was completed in one go.

Therefore, the founder of BitAngel, Bao Erye (Guo Hongcai), brought his Bitcoin God incarnation "Justice" and announced that the total number of 21 million GOD coins will not be pre-mined and will be distributed to Bitcoin and Bytom users. What does it mean? It means that GOD coins will not be pre-mined and then traded in the secondary market. It seems that there is no conflict of interest, but through market performance, you will find that this fork + airdrop model can not only expand the number of basic users, but also directly push up the price of anchored tokens.

On the day the news was announced, the price of Bitcoin was raised by 40%.

In the recent cryptocurrency market, EOS, which has attracted much attention through node elections, has seen the number of coin holding addresses increase from 170,580 at the beginning of the year to 330,690 today. Judging from the number of users and attention, EOS has naturally become the best object to be anchored.

Interestingly, in the EOS node election, the number of nodes related to Li Xiaolai accounted for more than 10, among which the co-founder of Eos Singapore is Shi Weisong, the chief scientist of SBTC. On June 6, the official of the airdrop coin EON also announced that it had obtained investment from Li Xiaolai Coin Capital ; in addition, Bao Erye himself also announced on April 20 that he would participate in the EOS super node election.

However, unlike Bitcoin, EOS has not yet launched its mainnet.

Therefore, under the influence of “your users are my users” inherited from the Bitcoin market, and under the prerequisite that block.one gave up on launching a mainnet, both for supernode candidates and for R&D teams dedicated to blockchain technology, targeting the current EOS user group and launching an EOS mainchain has become a piece of “fat meat” that everyone is scrambling to grab.

Gu Shi (Shi Jingyao), founder of EOS Force Community, said in an interview with Hashipie: “We started preparing to launch the EOS mainnet half a year ago, with the goal of standing on the shoulders of the EOS giant to launch our own public chain platform.”

Well, that sounds much better.

3. The battle between multiple mainnets: the fork happened before the chain was formed

After the heat of the super node election has passed, EOS urgently needs the next topic to attract attention.

On June 2, block.one officially released the EOSIO.1.0 version of the software. At the same time, in order to avoid legal risks and prevent EOS from being classified as a security by regulators , its officials announced that they would neither launch nor run any initial public blockchain based on the EOSIO software; this means that the EOS mainnet launch program will be completed spontaneously by community participants.

So, we have the following situation:

• On May 24, the helloEOS community issued a statement saying that it will launch the mainnet at an appropriate time;

• On May 25, the EOS Mainnet Launch Team (EMLG) initiated by helloEOS and Li Xiaolai and others reached a consensus and promised to launch and recognize only one EOS mainnet;

• In early June, the EOS Force team announced the launch of the EOS main chain public beta, and it is expected that the main network will be officially launched within two weeks to one month;

• Starting at 5:00 pm on June 4, the mainnet launched by the Canadian node campaign team EOSCanada has begun accepting blocks from the community;

• On the morning of June 5, IMEOS announced that the cooperation between the Eastern and Western communities has produced a candidate main chain, and nodes such as EOSBixin and EOSbeijing have joined

······

Based on this, we can find that so far there are at least three parties working on the launch of the EOS mainnet.

1. EMLG, led by super nodes such as helloEOS, fights for power and interests

As the first community to run EOS software, the "super nodes" that are always accompanied by power and interests naturally hold the initiative to launch the main network. However, since anyone who meets the requirements can act as a block producer, super nodes are highly replaceable, so the earlier they gain a place in the main network, the greater their advantage will be.

On May 24, HelloEOS, together with node candidates such as EOS Gravity, EOS Asia, EOS.COCOS, EOS.BIXIN, EOS Store, EOS Beijing, GEOS and Bitpie, announced that they would launch the mainnet at an appropriate time. Later, Li Xiaolai said in his WeChat Moments that the Chinese and English communities had reached an agreement and all forces would be united to launch only one EOS mainchain without forks. On May 25, the mainnet launch team EMLG, which consisted of more than 30 candidate nodes including HelloEOS, EOS LaoMao and EOS Asia, reached a consensus and promised to only recognize one mainnet named EOS.

(Image source: Internet)

It is understood that the process of EMLG Alliance launching the main network includes several stages: snapshot verification, startup, inspection and voting. As of the afternoon of June 3, at least 5 teams have completed the snapshot verification work.

2. The EOS Force Technology Development Team hopes to stand on the shoulders of giants and release a public chain

Although super nodes hold the initiative to launch the mainnet, as block.one retreats behind the scenes, the security of the mainnet has become the biggest concern. A Twitter user named Jon Bottarini said on June 4 that he found 8 vulnerabilities in one day. Bitcoin investor Zhao Dong also said on Weibo: "Delaying the launch of the mainnet will be good for EOS and even digital currencies."

At this time, EOS Force, which had been preparing for the mainnet launch for half a year, launched the EOS mainnet global public beta under the banner of ensuring the security of the mainnet. In an interview, Gu Shi said that there are still many vulnerabilities in the current block.one version of the code. If it is launched rashly, EOS will face the problem of continuous rollbacks in the future. Therefore, they decided to complete the public beta first and ensure the security and stability of the mainnet before officially launching it.

(Image source: Internet)

In addition, EOS Force has also modified some of block.one's election mechanisms, changing the one vote for thirty votes to one vote for one vote to prevent node alliances; increasing the number of super nodes to 23 to avoid the situation where the number of nodes is exactly equal to two-thirds when voting; and accepting more participation from other node candidates. It is reported that 11 nodes have publicly expressed their support for EOS Force so far.

When asked if he minded being called an EOS fork chain, Gu Shi said: “Who is the real EOS still depends on strength.”

3. Other participants eager to catch the EOS express ship

According to the Hashpie investigation, in addition to the mainstream EMLG Alliance and EOS Force, teams including EOSCanada, EOSAsia and EOSGO are also actively participating in the launch of the EOS mainnet.

The pattern of EOS forking before it becomes a chain has basically been formed.

4. Will EOS repeat the mistakes of ETH or follow the old path of BTC?

Having said that, let’s discuss whether EOS will follow the same path as BTC?

I don't think so.

First of all, EOS still does not have a real main chain. In addition, most of those who are currently anchored to EOS are super node candidates or development teams. They are more looking forward to leveraging the influence of EOS to launch a public chain platform of their own to ensure their own interests and voice .

Will EOS repeat the mistakes of ETH?

Probably not.

Before the EOS mainnet was launched, the EOS community was already divided . Regardless of whether smart contract vulnerabilities will appear in the future or whether transaction records will be rolled back, EOS is bound to fall apart.

block.one also seems to be prepared for the birth of multiple forked chains in the community. They have replaced all the EOS token names in the code with SYS, which developers can modify by themselves. EOS founder BM himself also made it clear in the community: " Everyone can voluntarily choose which chain to join based on consensus; we have no reason to force everyone to agree with a point of view. Only through competition in our own market can we find more effective methods ."

Therefore, rather than saying that EOS is following the path of BTC or ETH, it is better to say that EOS is taking a unique path. The curtain of its mainnet competition has been opened. Whether it is EOS Force, which "stands on the shoulders of giants" to launch a public chain, or EMLG, which fights for rights and interests, or more and more teams that hope to catch the EOS express ship, it does not seem to be that important who will be the winner in this war without gunpowder. Those who have gained enough attention, accumulated users, and harvested benefits by relying on EOS may be the real winners.

Is this the decentralized democracy of EOS conceived by BM? In my opinion, EOS is a representative work of the true public chain 3.0 that absorbs the essence of thousands of routines in the currency circle!