EOS is the project which carried much hype from the very beginning. Some media channels immediately labeled it “The Ethereum Killer” as many promised features looked like the new revolution is looming on the horizon.
Ambitious projects bring many challenges and Block.one, the team behind EOS, had more than a fair number of those in front of them.
After the prolonged ICO phase, the time came to show the accomplishments to the investors, and so EOS scheduled the launch of the mainnet for June 2nd.
Block.one decided not to test their product. The Bug Bounty campaign was envisioned to solve all the possible coding errors, with rewards up to $10,000 for network’s critical error report. The program almost instantly revealed many shortcomings of the platform as Guido Vranken, a Dutch ethical hacker, earned $120,000 for finding various flaws in the system. One possibility started to trouble the investors – what if another hacker found a critical error on the network and decided to keep it for himself?
The other massive revelation was made by the Chinese internet security company, Qihoo 360, which found a series of high-vulnerability points on EOS network which could easily be exploited by malicious attackers just days before the official launch date.
The official announcement about the nature of bugs or how they were dealt with hasn’t been released, but Mr. Vranken offered a few words of comfort to the investors saying “The EOS people are very appreciative of my efforts. Reported bugs were quickly analyzed and fixed in their public repository. At first, the process was very ad-hoc because [EOS CTO] Daniel Larimer and I were sending files back and forth on Telegram, but they’ve since started to run a bug bounty program on HackerOne which I think is in the best interest of both bug finders and the EOS team.”
The launch of the mainnet was followed by the Block Producers voting process which carried the story of its own. It was intended to go much faster than it did. When the voting process got stuck at 9% from 15% needed for the successful launch, Bitfinex, whose users held 10.67% of total EOS tokens, came to rescue as they held a poll if their users will lend them their tokens for voting. The suggestion passed and the magic barrier of 15% was broken. EOS could finally go live despite many token holders disapproval of such Bitfinex involvement.
Weiss Ratings also got involved in all the fuss about Bitfinex when they declared on Twitter that Bitfinex is using their client’s tokens to vote for themselves as the number 1 Block Producer.
Next in the line of controversies was the infamous EOS Constitution which, contrary to the principles of the decentralization, gave much power to the elected miners (block producers), as they are empowered to change the laws of the platform when/if needed. Many examples of frozen accounts have been reported since, which further deepened the suspicion in the community.
These are all serious but understandable troubles of the young startup, but the last one has been more than worrying.
It seems that one of the elected Block Producers indolently failed to update the blacklist on one account which resulted in the loss of all the funds from it. When questioned about the issue, the Block Producer firstly excused himself that he didn’t receive the latest updated. Confronted with the fact that everybody received it, one of the exclusive keepers of the EOS network system, who is earning $10,000 per day stated: “I didn’t attend the meeting these two days because I have something else to do.”
“I have some private affairs, sorry for that. Very sorry,” was the only explanation given for failing to secure the funds of the mentioned account.
The very person who should be looking after the security of the most anticipated project this year has – something else to do. Strangely enough, this Block Producer was voted for by – Bitfinex.
EOS is currently sitting in 5th place on CoinMarketCap.com and with the loss of 5.36% in 24 hours is the worst performing cryptocurrency among the top 10. This decline can be initiated by the diminishing investors’ trust or is just the result of the overall bearish sentiment across the market. Be that as it may, EOS may have a long way to go to actually “kill Ethereum”.