In 2020, in addition to the launch of Voice, the launch of the enterprise service product EOSIO for Business and the parent company Block.one (B1) holding more than 240,000 bitcoins worth more than 7 billion U.S. dollars, there are just a few circulated news. Almost all the news I heard was ridicule.
The deserted EOS ecological progress, even those who want to hype, have no excuses. In the three months that Bitcoin skyrocketed from US$10,000 to US$34,000, EOS’s growth rate was only 0.65%, and the full-year growth rate of 2020 was -1.2%. The volatility rate is comparable to that of the stable currency USDT. The total market value is not surprising. It fell out of the top 10, and it may even fall out of the top 20.
In the past year, EOS, which was once praised by mouth, has been abandoned. The Chinese community as an important part of it has also shrunk visibly. Investors, project parties, and developers have left the market one after another. The ecology of billions of assets is like a startup company that no longer has capital and vitality injected, only a name and logo are left.
EOS application is reduced to free delivery
“EOS is dead, and the price is like stagnant water. So long has passed, and now the value of the project is much lower than the official funds raised, there are no new changes, and the team should refund the money.”
I don’t know when it will start. Apart from the regular weekly development report, Reddit’s EOS section will occasionally have voices similar to the investors’ rights protection mentioned above, and these complaints will sometimes stir up waves and trigger comments.
Compared with the currency price, it is the community consensus that returns to zero first.
A few days ago, the EOS ecosystem portal IMEOS, which is still persisting, has formed several investment self-help groups. In addition to quotations, the group is more self-deprecating. These former EOS investors have long lost hope, similar to “holding EOS stable coins Don’t worry about the market,” and “EOS has become a chariot of doomsday” and other voices of bad news about EOS are endless.
In the first two years, the most well-known EOS spokesperson for investors was an investor with the online name “Head of Wang”. As the author of the public account “Blockchain Diary of Head of Wang”, 1152 diaries recorded him in detail. 3 The mental journey of the currency circle over the past few years. Judging from the content of the diary, although he still has an EOS position, it is clear that he is concerned about topics other than Bitcoin, as well as other popular concepts such as algorithmic stablecoins and DeFi. In some WeChat groups, occasionally we can still see screenshots of his speech on the future of EOS that year, which reminds people of the highly sought after years of EOS.
In addition to investors, some people who have participated in EOS ecological construction have moved to Polkadot, Ethereum or other public chains.
Two years ago, Myra first served as the operating director of the overseas community of the EOS Gravity Zone, and then served as the executive director of the EOS Foundation, responsible for advancing EOS’s community autonomy. As the road to EOS governance was not possible, the Chinese and Korean operations team had to follow-up funds. After failing to make a strong supplement, many negotiations with B1 failed, and the foundation was ultimately unsustainable. Today, her new identity is the founder of dboost.io, a blockchain technology operating company.
In September 2020, the EOS data service provider EOSPark announced the suspension of services, which means that there is one less browser that provides EOS services. It is hard to imagine that at the time when EOS was most prestigious, there were nearly 10 browsers on the market that provided data query services on the EOS chain, but later, these teams slowly disappeared.
The disappearance of the EOS browser is only the tip of the EOS ecology. When it comes to why they disappear, Myra believes: “These teams are all very good, but since the EOS node election, finding a monetization model has become in front of these ecological projects. The main problem.”
“As far as I know, EOSPark has sought out acquisitions, but the price was too high and ultimately failed.” Myra recalled that such projects are not unique. For example, once against the Scatter wallet of MetaMask, “the core developers have basically been poached by other teams”, and the browser blocks are still there because “all members have been acquired, so there is no need to worry about the realization of the problem.”
Myra remembers that a fellow friend once asked her if she wanted to take over an EOS ecological project created by the other party and “give it for free”. Considering the cash flow issue, she finally declined.
In addition to ordinary investors and entrepreneurial projects, EOS giants are also fleeing.
“For a while, the EOS in the addresses of large accounts including the boss in our mining pool has been significantly reduced.” Li Ran, a former employee of an EOS node, recalled that if this part of the tokens is not used for quantitative investment, it is directly cashed out. Left. As the number of coins in the hands of big players is decreasing, if you want to continue to rank in the top 21, EOS nodes can only “make a good relationship” with the trading platform.
EOS nodes run at a loss
Can’t continue.
Li Ran finally made up his mind to leave the company. It only took a few days for Li Ran to leave the company after he proposed his resignation idea to his superiors and then left the company.
In the past nearly a year, he and his colleagues have been working in a low-pressure atmosphere throughout the company. Even if the founders who got rich in the previous round of bull market still intend to continue to pay to maintain the company’s operations, they will not lose wages, but Li Ran still couldn’t hold on, “I can’t bear it anymore.” Seeing that many colleagues around him were fired from the boss like Ripple Lianchuang regularly dumped XRP, Li Ran and his colleagues endanger themselves every day.
“As long as the boss is not pleasing to the eye, even if the employee did not make any mistakes, they will be fired directly,” he added, “just like the contact lenses sold in the quarter.” The most impressive example was the company’s docking of a project at the end of last year. The colleague in charge of the development had to work overtime for too long before and was unwell, so he went to the hospital to issue a certificate and applied for normal working hours. This was originally an unusual thing, but the boss thought that the other party’s non-working overtime would affect the rest of the team, so he fired that colleague directly, because several people were laid off one after another, and the project finally failed to proceed.
EOS nodes, which are not profitable at all, were considered good business at first.
Three years ago, regular customers including Li Xiaolai and Laomao, as well as EosStore with an 8-digit EOS valued at 2 billion yuan also entered the market with high profile. Even Wenzhou Gang, mining pools, trading platforms and other entities participated in the EOS node. In the campaign, Li Ran’s company was also one of them. According to the calculations at the time, the profit of the node can reach tens of millions after being elected.
Soon everyone discovered that running EOS nodes does not make money at all, and the income cannot even cover various expenses.
“Generally speaking, the fixed expenditure of the alternative node server is about 3,000 yuan a month. The current node income is 100-400 yuan per day. It seems that there is still a floating profit, but in fact, this does not include the staff cost and the cost of ticket exchange.” Due to the bleak currency prices, many big players left the market one after another. The nodes that lost this part of important voting rights had to choose to cooperate with the “big accounts” of the ticket warehouse-the trading platform.
“In addition to the number of votes in exchange for a ratio of 1:1, you must purchase some votes. This part of the source basically comes from the trading platform. The fee is based on the proportion of the platform’s votes in the total votes of the node.” An EOS node understands People familiar with the vote gave us an estimate, “The discount 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 ticket bribery between nodes is not new in the EOS ecosystem. In order to facilitate ticket checking, some nodes have also developed corresponding ticket checking tools, “Check the data every day and check the balance. If the platform has less votes, the other party will be notified to make up.”
According to his understanding, among all EOS nodes, only the top few nodes can achieve positive returns, and most of them are maintained by posting money. If you only lose money on the node, and you can find other ways to make money, that’s not bad, but this is not the case.
In addition to making nodes at a loss, in the past two years, another EOS practitioner, Chen Guo’s company, has also tried to develop blockchain games and focused on promoting EOS wallets, but the players on these two segments are basically After nine deaths, most players cannot escape the “cannon fodder” ending.
After chain games and encrypted wallets were proved to be unworkable on EOS, Chen Guo’s boss still firmly believes that EOS has a bright future and that there is no problem in itself, but the problem is that “he is not like the founder of an encrypted wallet. It’s the same in the most front-line communities, knowing the current encryption trends and opportunities well, but immersed in the lies woven by certain employees all day long.”
It’s just that, whether it’s complacent or dying, it has nothing to do with Chen Guo, who is about to leave.
“EOS developers are the poorest”
Not only investors and nodes, but also ecological developers are disheartened with EOS.
In the past December, the crypto venture capital firm Electric Capital released a developer report, mentioning that in 2020, the developers of Ethereum, Polkadot, Filecoin and other project ecosystems have all seen growth, but EOS developers have lost significantly: average 88 active developers are lost every month.
Like Li Ran’s team, the developer Bai Hao led the team as a node. At the beginning, in order to enrich the EOS ecology and explore profitability methods, he also spent great efforts with the team to develop a non-gaming game. Due to the good graphics of the game, it also gathered a group of loyal fans, but the good news was only half a year. When the popularity of the chain game faded and the official post money was maintained for half a year, the game was also suspended.
In addition to games that are not favored by the industry, many developers also blame the B1 team’s corpse position vegetarian meal.
“Compared to public chains such as Ethereum, Polkadot, and even Tron, B1 is obviously dereliction of duty, which makes EOS developers the poorest and most difficult.” Bai Hao said that in terms of ecological project support, domestic developers have never received B1 funding. , Even the supported overseas teams are all teams that use EOSIO software development.
B1’s dominance of billions of dollars in financing that year deviated from the wishes of the community. According to most investors, the reason why B1 was able to raise $4 billion at the time was entirely due to EOS tokens, not EOSIO. A Ping, a developer who has been following the development of EOS ecology for a long time, told Rhythm BlockBeats that apparently, B1 has turned its attention to EOSIO, and currency price is not the topic of official concern. “This may be due to regulatory reasons.”
“In the past two years, the speed and extent of the improvement of EOS technology are too small. Whether it is the million TPS, EOS Storage, or cross-chain ideas set early, it can be said to be unsatisfactory.” He said that B1 is not completely Don’t fund ecological projects, “For example, I know that certain EOS ecological products have also been funded, but to be honest, 50,000 US dollars is a drop in the bucket for a serious project.”
In addition to inaction in technological development and the absence of ecological funding, B1’s neglect in operation has been criticized by the community. For example, B1 CEO Brendan Blumer (BB)’s sister Abby Blumer is the company’s CMO. In 2018, BB’s mother, Nancy Kasparek, resigned from Bank of America and turned to “help her son manage EOSVC.” It seems that B1 is more and more like a “family company”.
Even high-level officials have begun to show signs of “drawing the boundaries.” On January 4, Daniel Larimer (BM) tweeted, “BB controls B1 and all product/service releases. All he can do is give advice within the scope of BB’s pursuit. He has big plans, I like to do big things.” It shows that I have no right to speak, and BB is in charge.
Even if there is no expectation from the official, there are still developers who stick to it in the EOS community. According to EOSGo data, there are currently nearly 100 projects based on EOS development with trading volume. Especially after the rise of the DeFi boom, concepts that have been successful in the Ethereum ecosystem, such as AMM, synthetic assets, lending and NFT, have all been developed The person used EOS.
The world’s leading multi-chain wallet TokenPocket (TP) has participated in the incubation of the Organix Synthetic Assets Agreement on its own “end”. “Technically speaking, we believe that EOS is the best of all public chains at present, and it is more than Tron and other public chains. Decentralization. But the EOS currency price is not strong. It is not only a joke from the outside world, but also the most self-deprecating point in the community.” TP business manager Michael explained, but now “the capacity of each track in the EOS ecosystem is still too small. Can’t carry too many teams.” But they still have confidence in the future of EOS.
But as Aping said, at least for now, we still haven’t seen the possibility of EOS exploding. What can be confirmed is that if B1 does not act, a few Chinese nodes or communities will be able to support the market value of more than 2.5 billion US dollars. EOS is obviously a fantasy.
Nowadays, BB and BM are still active on social media every day, but few people support them. Instead, under their tweets, there will always be some lucky users who leave messages day after day: What you do can be right Is EOS beneficial? When will the marketing campaign start? The two sometimes reply: We do not affect the price.
And similar scenes have been repeated over the past two years.
At the request of the interviewee, except for Myra, all names in the text are pseudonyms.
