Within those people that have been following blockchain and crypto during the last years, EOS has been discussed extremely controversial. From genius to scam all opinions have been stated and discussed inside forums.

Image source: eosauthority.com

What can be concluded by now, EOS seems to “change anything” based on its complexity and many facets of the entire ecosystem. It is by far one of the most complex setups I have seen and, I personally assume that many “common” investors (if that is already a valid title for anybody investing in crypto today!), most of the features will possibly never been used.

The main part of investors is most likely focussing on HODL and trade activities on exchanges, volatility of crypto is very high, and volumes of EOS at large exchanges are big enough to perform some decent trading.

While it is great that EOS offers so many opportunities and features, some of these might even incorporate risks for the system which I also commented earlier.

Let´s take a closer look at what makes EOS attractive to many of us.

The fairy tale of massive airdrops.

Before the mainnet switch, everybody got extremely excited about the massive amount of airdrops to come just after go-live. A key argument to keep EOS in your ERC20-Wallet and register with EOS was the shire amount of expected drops.

Following social media, I had never seen so much FUD and fear to lose all EOS due to scam, false EOS registration videos and all those bad facets of crypto. Leaving your EOS on Binance turned out to be unspectacular and let you sleep like a baby.

There have been some nice airdrops since then, such as IQ, Meet.one, Horus or CET but not much more of substance yet.

As it turns out, some months after mainnet, many airdrops have not been distributed at all. Of course, there are various reasons for this. One, it turns out, was related to speculation and trading of RAM on EOS network.

The RAM-Bubble.

The introduction of RAM and CPU as a key component of EOS allows accounts to perform transactions and run applications. This has also been introduced to TRON (TRX) and serves a clear purpose. On TRON it is not possible to trade bandwidth as of today.

Soon after mainnet, a new feature was introduced to EOS, it is RAM-Trading. This feature allows you to buy and sell RAM for your accounts. Some massive profits were generated here, the price of RAM exploded and had a very bad side effect to the network. Developing applications and performing Airdrops got so expensive that developers just could not afford to perform the promised transfers. It was also commented that the development of applications would be too expensive going forward.

Imagine RAM is the fuel for your car and general speculation made it too expensive to drive!

Clearly, from my personal point of view, this feature is of no benefit to the EOS network, it will rather do harm to it. While it seemed useful to have an opportunity to add RAM to your account for development and running DAPPS this needs to be reworked.

While prices seem to normalize as of today 1 KB of RAM is still traded at 0.11 EOS coming down from heights of up to 0.40 EOS. Still too expensive from my perspective.

Delegate Stake

A new approach to the RAM and CPU issues is a delegation of a stake. This allows you to delegate some of your unused resources to an account that might require these for a while.

Airgrab vs. Airdrop

Above brought a creative solution to the minds, the concept of Airgrabs was born. While an Airdrop would be paid by developers RAM, the Airgrab took a creative approach to ask the account owner to use a fraction of its own RAM to claim the tokens.

While this solution helps to distribute the tokens it made EOS more complex once more. Now you need to perform another activity to be able to participate. A large proportion of EOS owners will most likely never use this option since they are not willing to enter the private keys in yet another application.

TRYBE also decided to go this route to be able to drop the tokens to the community. By the way, you can still claim yours but you need to hurry!

Regular Voting

Since EOS works based on DPoS (Delegate Proof of Stake) it is required to elect delegates that shall run the network and validate transactions.

The concept is not new and is also used by TRON (TRX) or ONTOLOGY (ONT) a key difference though is, that EOS votes are losing value over time. As such, voting once will not do the job. Today the vote decay is approx -5% (details can be found here: https://eosauthority.com/voting_decay).

While the idea is to keep EOS holders involved, it does not have any benefits to vote frequently, apart from assuring that the quality of the delegates stays up. It is very hard though to keep track of more than 100 delegates known today.

Time will tell if voting continues to be frequent or if some delegates suffer at some point of time.

Comparing this to TRON once more, votes will not decay. There is a different component of TRON voting through which is discussed controversially. Some TRX SR´s are paying their voters for their support. You may or may not like it, but this is fortunately not happening with EOS.

Delegate or Proxy?

While anybody can apply to be a delegate, you may also decide to act as a proxy for voting. To my knowledge this does not incorporate benefits but based on a proxy function, you can vote for delegates on behalf of others.

This is once more an advanced feature I assume not many people will use unless offering benefits. Getting known and having followers is key.

Of course this is the same for the delegates themselves. It takes a lot of effort and PR to be elected and get your stake of rewards.

My name, your name!

Selection and purchase of your specific account name is a nice feature, free of charge in other networks though. Once more trading and auctions of names is a standard feature in EOS. As during the early ages of WWW name hijacking for profits already started.

Some regulation is required from my point of view.

Conclusion!

I trust that many owners of EOS have no clue about the above features as the focus on trading and holding the tokens on exchanges.

For those that are actively participating in the community and using the features, there is surely something to do almost every day.

I personally like EOS and I am curious to see how it develops in the near future but speculation with the fuel of the network stays a key issue from my perspective.

Let me know what you think!