Blockchains 101: EOS

2 min readDec 20, 2020

Built for scalability of DApps

Introduction

EOS is the cryptocurrency powering the blockchain protocol EOS.io, a smart contract platform based on a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus, theoretically allowing million transactions by second at very low fees.

EOS conducted an ICO between June 2017 and June 2018 and raised $4.2B in the largest ICO ever recorded at date.

Description

Block.one, the private company registered in the Cayman Island and operating the EOS.io protocol first released a whitepaper in 2017 followed by the open source software in June 2018.

EOS blockchain is special as it has the characteristics of an operating system and acts as a virtual machine (VM) with CPU usage, bandwidth and RAM.

EOS network operates with 21 Supernodes as validators (block producers), elected by the coin holders who allocate them their vote to obtain staking rewards in exchange of network resources for performing specific actions such as free transactions, based on the amount delegated.

DPoS is more energy efficient and scalable than POW or classic POS consensus mechanisms. However, the voting power being in the hands of a limited number of participants (supernodes), the network is more centralized, leaving some room for censorship.

EOS has a transaction/confirmation (block) time of 0.5s, making relatively fast to process transactions compared to some other public chains.

Smart contracts

On EOS, smart contract is a software that runs on the EOSIS nodes synchronized with the blockchain and can perform actions if the necessary resources (RAM, CPU, and Bandwidth) allocated are sufficient.

Smart contracts can be given permissions to interact with each others.

dApps

EOS is currently one of the most successful blockchain regarding dApps deployment due to the flexibility of the EOS.io protocol and by being developer-friendly.