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For many, block one (b1) leaving the EOSIO community and ceasing to maintain the code and push new features is widely believed to be a bad thing.
I don’t disagree that it was bad, but I do disagree that it will be bad forever.
Block one leaving allows a lot of positives to occur, but first let’s talk about the negatives.
- EOS’s branding is almost the worst in blockchain. It has been a helpless punching bag for years. This is bad for both investors and entrepreneurs alike and it will take time to convince people otherwise.
- Many quality teams and founders such as Dfuse, Yup.io, and Equilibrium and others left due to the lack of user / dev adoption.
- Block one stopped maintaining EOSIO’s code base, so features have stagnated.
- The price, which we’ll bring up in a minute.
Glad we made it through that. There’s many more, but this in my opinion is the crux of the conversation. Now onto why b1 leaving was actually a good thing.
Block One grew up too fast
Google in its early days had to make a policy that clothes were required in the office environment. This gives you an idea of what Eric Schmidt was dealing with when he was tasked with bringing leadership and structure to that project. But it was the early days, the freedom of thought, and possibility of failure that allowed Google to blossom into the beautiful company that it is today.
The point is, block one being on the receiving end of $4,000,000,000 forced them to practically skip the startup phase and move straight to the gray suits and office cubicles phase.
Had the company been able to start with something like how Ethereum did with $14m and a dream, the outcome may have been different. From the time of that investment, the limit of liability was set to a minute scope.
The sister chains are working together
Sisters often fight and in the early days of EOSIO, they were vicious and the mindset was a 0 sum game.
The sisters working together never would have happened if block one had not created the vacuum requiring the chains to work together. For the chains, the options were broadly to either work together or risk stagnating the technology as a whole.
Now for the most part they’re cooperating with one another to increase the value add of the technology, taking the most experienced dev teams in the space and combining their talents to pump out some incredible features.
EOS Network Foundation
The ENF’s structure was attempted before in different forms. Initially there was set to be a 4% inflation to fund working groups to build on the technology, the “Worker Proposal System”. Some say it was a honey pot destined to fail, others that it would have provided more benefit to the chain than b1 could. We’ll never know how that could’ve played out.
Around the same time there was ECAF (EOS Core Arbitration Forum), aka the self elected council of dictators that controlled on chain suppression. Then there was the EOS Alliance, then the EOS DAO, then Block.one’s Public Blockchain Engagement and multiple failed Worker Proposal Systems.
There is also Eden on EOS, a governance group with a decentralized voting system, which is still gaining traction, slightly less so since Dan diverted to Fractally but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Then out of desperation, Yves was finally able to get the buy-in from the necessary parties to create this non profit entity in large part because the stakeholders realized that the chain would die.
To help fund initiatives like the ENF, Yves asked “the Block Producers to show support for the Foundation by increasing the inflation of the network by 2% for its use. At onset, the Foundation [requested] the legacy name and ram fees be placed under its stewardship, and on a periodical basis [has and] will request transfers from the inflation savings account for ongoing operations” (source).
And they did.
Working Groups
Block one was very centralized and its product development was very slow and over regulated.
The ENF working groups do not share this same burden and the workflow is more akin to a decentralized startup where everyone now has the added benefit of 4 years of experiencing what works and what doesn’t with things like Defi and NFT summer in hindsight.
Had EOS tried to wander around what did/did not work in Defi instead of letting ETH do a lot of the heavy lifting it would most likely have led to disaster only fueling the FUD even further and potentially opening up b1 to more liability.
$1 EOS
Some may view the current EOS price as a sign of its failure, but this price allows new teams like ZEOS and TrustSwap as well as marketers like Trimbot to gamble on the potential upside of getting involved with the protocol at such a high risk reward ratio.
Sure the price could drop further and never recover, but if it does go up, it has a lot longer to go getting back to all time highs in the $20 range.
This is something that will likely attract many other value speculators, builders, and marketers who realize the risk/reward of getting behind this ecosystem.
Block One / Bullish developers leaving
Many at block one, as can be referenced on their glassdoor page (and Bullish’s), did not like the bureaucracy. I can’t say for sure if this is the reason as to why many left, but I can say that it probably didn’t help.
As a result the ENF team is stacked with solid protocol devs that have the necessary experience and skill set to continue the development of EOSIO at a top tier level.
The Marketing is Coming
Token 2049 Singapore is coming up in September and the ENF has secured a Title level sponsorship for the event. https://www.asia.token2049.com/partners
Everyone who goes to that event is going to do a double take and ask 2 things.
- Who is the EOS Network Foundation
- What happened to block one
And there will be a very interesting story of a blockchain taking over its corporate overlords that if told correctly could lead to some very good marketing traction.
The EOS Network foundation is not limited in theory by the same legal constraints as block one claimed to be. So the marketing should be intense when the time comes. No more broken promises of imaginary marketing budgets.
Yves La Rose
Brendan Blumer is viewed by many to not have been an effective leader of EOS and block one did not do a good job of communicating to new projects. For a solid year if not longer, Brendan and Dan stopped almost all communication entirely.
Some of the good things they did was opening a stack exchange and putting Sandwich and Todd in the EOSIO dev telegram. They also had Kevin on some paid OCI training courses and the Google Developer series, but for smaller projects, very bad.
If you were a small project trying to get in touch with block one to do any kind of co-marketing it was pretty much a lost cause.
Yves being the prior CEO of EOS Nation before the SX Vault hack (technical recap) gives him all of the connections needed to everyone in the community. Yves is also a master communicator with an intense focus on the Eastern side of the world. Ensuring to communicate everything possible into both Chinese and Korean.
Dan Larimer
Dan, the past CTO of b1, recently created two governance systems, Eden on EOS and Fractally. He has now essentially refocused his attention on the latter and has proposed setting up a separate chain to have a better alignment between the block producers and the governance system.
Since EOS opted not fund that work, I am funding it for a new chain on which to run fractally. The benefit being that we can build and deploy it faster than EOS could because we don’t have to maintain backward compatibility not work with countless parties to get a political consensus on the tech. This reduces costs and gets a better product to market faster. This new chain can leverage fractal governance for block producer selection. (source)
He also released his book More Equal Animals which is a must read for those interested in decentralized governance.
I personally believe this is an excellent move and will strengthen the EOSIO ecosystem providing a governance sandbox where he and his team can move fast and break things. Who knows maybe in the near future he will want to transition from Fractally and move to a new system and it will be totally ok. Again going back to the Google analogy.
Conclusion
While it is still to be determined whether or not the ENF and the EOSIO ecosystem as a whole can pull itself out of this mess, it can be said that it is taking all of the right steps to do so.
Onward and upward we go.
