Whatever happened to EOS? Community shoots for unlikely comeback – Cointelegraph Magazine

Whatever happened to EOS? After the biggest ICO in history, the former top 10 token now languishes around number 53. But the community has since taken back control and is determined to restore the smart contract platform to its former glory.

If you’re a newcomer to the crypto industry, you may not even be familiar with The Biggest ICO in History, which launched EOS.

EOS began in June 2018 with great fanfare, an active community and strong tech. Led by Dan Larimer, of Steemit and Bitshares fame, there was a palpable area of excitement with the introduction of new tech, including the delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) system and EOS Worker Proposals to fund projects that grew the ecosystem.

Block.one, the company behind EOS, raised an astonishing massive $4.1 billion over 12 months.

And then… nothing much happened. The community waited and waited for the promises to be fulfilled.

“I was very disappointed when little or none of those ideas came to fruition,” Douglas Horn, CEO of Goodblock, tells Magazine. “To be honest, I would say Block.one did a deceitful ICO, whether that was planned from the beginning or not. That’s my personal assessment.”

The exact reasons EOS didn’t go anywhere are disputed, but development dried up, and the community often felt left out. Some say they volunteered to take on the development of new projects but weren’t supported — or even told to halt work by Block.one, as their efforts encroached on developments of its own. In other cases, micro-grants were given on the proviso that no other funding could be used. Typically, those micro-grants were not enough and those mini-projects also ran out of runway. 

Also read: Journeys in Blockchain — William Quigley of WAX

There are some success stories, with WAX and Alien Worlds the exceptions that prove the rule, but otherwise, it was a moribund ecosystem. In the interim, Block.one came to an agreement with the SEC to pay a fine of $24 million in order to avert any suspicion that the token was a security (an agreement that has subsequently been overturned and which may cause significant new problems for Block.one). 

Two white elephants

Despite the many promises, Block.one basically stopped developing the base tech, then termed EOSIO, and diverted its focus to two vanity projects: the $150 million Voice decentralized social media…