EOS.IO Ushers in a New Era in Decentralized Applications

The EOS.IO platform has consistently performed among the top cryptocurrencies over the past several months. Their ambitious goals have gained them a large number of fans, and the market cap for EOS has shown that. Their current price per coin hovers around $10, with a total market cap of $6,707,321,940. EOS.IO is looking to supplant Ethereum as the blockchain of choice for decentralized applications. If they should succeed, we would see that market cap expand by a factor of 10.

Developed by the private company ‘block.one’, the EOS.IO platform has stated that they will eliminate transaction fees within their software protocol. They also intend to conduct millions of potential transactions per second. These two facts combine to make EOS.IO the product of choice for larger scale decentralized applications. They prevent the blockchain from being bogged down by size restrictions and transaction traffic jams.

The EOS.IO Ecosystem

Although they are developing the software itself, block.one has no intention of releasing their own public blockchain using the software. Instead, their EOS token is located on the Ethereum blockchain and allows users to purchase a stake in the company’s development of the EOS.IO platform. The token is unrelated to their eventual rollout of the EOS.IO software for use by other entities as a standard – they will produce their own cryptocurrencies, much as ERC-20 standard tokens are created using the Ethereum code base.

However, the value of block.one’s business model justifies the price of the EOS ERC-20 token, as it is part and parcel of the funding, marketing, and distribution of the software code base. The EOS token is a ‘virtual share’ in the success of EOS.IO as a platform for blockchain development. The recent release of the Dawn 2.0 test network has allowed development to begin on projects using the EOS.IO software – and as block.one continues to flesh out features and delivers on their promises, we will see more of these over time.

How EOS Weathered the Cryptocrash

It is particularly promising for investors that the coin survived the early 2018 crash with a stable value. While their USD value followed the market, their trading pair against Bitcoin has only gone up over the course of the past three months. That means that someone holding EOS through January and February has gained value in comparison to Bitcoin – and as Bitcoin recovers, so too does the USD value of EOS.

This speaks volumes about the confidence investors have in the EOS.IO platform. It helps that block.one recruited Daniel Larimer to their team to serve as CTO. Larimer is known for his work in building the crypto-popular social media site Steemit and the original plan for a delegated proof-of-stake system for cryptocurrency distribution.

EOS.IO’s Recent Adopters

Only a few months ago, Everipedia announced that they would be using the EOS.IO blockchain protocol to prevent censoring of their wiki-based online encyclopedia. Everipedia was created as a for-profit, unrestricted version of Wikipedia. As the criteria for posting is much lower on Everipedia, many more articles are available on subjects that are outside of the allowed scope of Wikipedia. They are hoping that the use of a decentralized blockchain as the basis for their encyclopedia will prevent the information crackdowns we have seen in some of the more harsher police states across the globe. To this end, they are working on the release of the IQ coin, using the EOS.IO blockchain software.

The CEO of Bitfinex has also announced the creation of a decentralized exchange based on the EOS.IO blockchain. This would leverage the rapid and fee-free transactions of EOS.IO to provide an exchange free of the need for trust in a third party. Trades would take place on a person-to-person basis, removing the fear of depositing cryptocurrencies into an exchange wallet. EOSfinex, as the project is called, would also have the potential to use the EOS ERC-20 token as a trading pair – something that would cause the value to skyrocket.

The Future for EOS

For the time being, the EOS token is used as a reserve of bandwidth within the EOS.IO test platform. As such, the coin is particularly valuable for those looking to develop decentralized applications within the EOS.IO platform. Dawn 2.0 introduced the basic level of all promised features within the blockchain, and Dawn 3.0 intends to introduce near-infinite scalability.

When the EOS.IO platform reaches a full release, we can expect many more projects to adopt their blockchain software as a basis for decentralized applications. Their forward-thinking approach to scaling, and the speed of transactions inherent within the network make EOS.IO a very attractive platform when compared to its predecessors. That explosion in interest and investment will likely drive the individual unit price up, and increase the market cap for EOS to something comparable to their closest use-case competitor; Ethereum.

Disclaimer: This article should not be taken as, and is not intended to provide, investment advice. Global Coin Report and/or its affiliates, employees, writers, and subcontractors are cryptocurrency investors and from time to time may or may not have holdings in some of the coins or tokens they cover. Please conduct your own thorough research before investing in any cryptocurrency.

Image courtesy of coinmarketcap.com