EOS Finally Passes Voting Threshold, The Network is Now Live

EOS finally reached the 15% voting threshold to activate the chain around 1PM London time on June 14th 2018.

The chain is now live and fully functional, with transactions flowing a year after the initial EOS coin offering that raised some $4 billion worth of eth.

The voting process took four days, with around half of the tokens voting on the last day. On or around June 14th, it appears a number of big holders voted for at least one Block Producing (BP) supernode. Pushing the total vote above the threshold.

There are suggestions an exchange in China called Big.one voted on the 14th for the then number 1 BP candidate EOSCanada. Nearly 10% of the threshold vote was by just one account:

EOS top voters for the first supernodes.

We’ve just about managed to fit above the biggest voters. That screenshot, however, was taken today with currently 21% having voted.

Yet you can click on each and see the date they voted, with the top 1 being on the 14th. They stakes some 11 million EOS tokens, currently worth $110 million, to vote for Huobi.

We can not see above any big holder voting only for EOSCanada, so that might be disinformation. Both Huobi and Bitfinex, however, made it to the top 21 supernodes:

Bitfinex held a vote on the 13th of June on whether they should vote for supernodes. Huobi apparently did too. Despite chatter suggesting token holders were against exchanges being supernodes, they both made it.

Only around 10% of tokens are held by 162,000 EOS addresses. The remaining 90% is held by the top 1,000 addresses.

That considerable concentration raised concerns that voting would be easily gamed, with analysis suggesting only four addresses account for most of Bitfinex’s votes:

Just one address seems to account for some 30% of all of Bitfinex’s votes, placing the exchange in seventh position where they can now take a significant amount of new EOS supply for just running a node.

The rest have to stake their eos for the privilege of having access to the network, and if the token is not used for three years, it is seized.

In return for staking their own coins, normal users receive a proportional amount of transacting capacity based on how many EOS they stake.

Someone has already started testing it with the stated aim of DDoSing the network, but appears to near the allocated “resources.”

The above looks complex, but effectively it is a blocksize limit of sorts where rather than all having equal access, access is limited based on the amounts of tokens staked.

Above we can see that around 10 EOS give you 0.50 transactions a second. That applies to a smart contract too, so a dapp might need a significant amount staked for it to function.

All of these staking functions inbuilt in the entire network have the effect of temporarily reducing supply, with that reduced supply then suddenly flooding the market.

Yet how all this will work remains to be seen with the most interesting part now over as the biggest and longest ICO finally moves on towards trying to deliver on considerable promises.