Introduction to EOS (EOS)

EOS is a decentralized blockchain system that uses the block.one code, and has Daniel Larimer as CTO. The goal of EOS is to allow the development of commercial dApps, like Ethereum does, but trying to solve the issues Ethereum is facing for those dApps to be real competition to their centralized counterparts, and support millions of users, namely scalability and fees.

Ethereum can only process 20 transactions per second, which is not suitable for a dApp with thousands or millions of users. If we compare Ethereum with VISA, we realize VISA can process over 56.000 transactions per second, satisfying their users’ needs. For Ethereum to be competitive blockchain payments in a commercial context need to be made in seconds.

Ethereum also has the issue of the transaction fees due to the Proof of Work protocol, generating gas costs to miners that validate the transaction, and limits due to the computational power needed to run the code.

EOS has a solution for both these problems. In terms of scalability EOS uses Horizontal Scaling, something that allows thousands of transactions per second. The high demands of a commercial network require vertical scaling – the increase of processing power from one server; or horizontal scaling, linking the main server to other servers.

The use of horizontal scaling offers more transactions and it supported by Graphene, the same technology used by Steem and Bitshares that has the capacity to make over 10.000 transactions per second. The EOS fees are also much reduced because of the use of the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS).

DPoS doesn’t use miners to validate the transactions, so less resources are consumed. Validation is given by the token holders, ensuring the decentralization of the system. Also, the amount of EOS owned by a certain business will determine the amount of computing power they have allocated, so if a certain business needs more transaction capacity, they can solve this question by buying more EOS, gaining a bigger scale.

This is exactly the EOS philosophy, give dApps the possibilities of growing without scaling issues and fees. Additionally, EOS uses C++ on their smart contracts, which is more used by coders, being therefore more accessible than Solidity, the language used by Ethereum.

In terms of commercial usage EOS still offers other safety tools for companies, like account recovery in case the private keys disappear, and a freezing feature to fix the app, as an alternative to hard forks because of hacks, like happened with the DAO with Ethereum.

The purpose of EOS is to allow dApps to make real competition to the existing applications, and even if it’s still very far from achieving that, it’s a truly interesting concept that has earned EOS the nickname of Ethereum killer. Let’s see if EOS grows up to that name.

This is a brief introduction to EOS, but if you want to know more about the coin, what people are saying about it, technical details, jump right in any of the links we present below. They are well worth reading before investing!