Bitcoin stands as the first blockchain, the first digital currency and still the most influential. A slew of competition appeared since that first product, with Ethereum leading the pack for use cases. Ethereum’s ERC20 token made the blockchain the cryptocurrency of choice for decentralized applications, or dApps. This is a direct result of their smart contract integration. However, Ethereum did begin to suffer scalability issues due to this overuse of their blockchain.
Enter block.one and their EOS.IO software platform. While Ethereum intended for smart contracts to have some degree of decentralized application capacity, the platform itself was not inherently designed for it. EOS.IO’s intent is to provide unlimited scalability and a frictionless environment for these dApps. They have partially accomplished this plan through their use of asynchronous communication and parallel processing – a method by which transactions can run simultaneously instead of sequentially. This vastly increases the speed of transactions, critical for running dApps.
Block.one and EOS.IO as a Product
Block.one is the company behind the EOS.IO platform, and is made up of several high profile blockchain developers from other projects. Their goal is to create an ecosystem in which decentralized autonomous communities can form and support their own blockchain projects. This is very similar to how Ethereum supports their various token standards, albeit with a completely different framework. In fact, the current EOS token is ERC20, and block.one has no intention of releasing their own EOS.IO token to replace it.
EOS gained some greater public notoriety recently through a segment on the popular late-night show Last Week Tonight, which is hosted by John Oliver. The show featured an entire episode revolving around the concept of cryptocurrency. The episode was well received and considered to be surprisingly neutral by most in the crypto-sphere. However, there was a certain negative focus on the EOS project that was mostly undeserved. Oliver himself does comment that EOS might very well be the next Google – although he doubts it. His reservations mostly leaned on adviser Brock Pierce, who has since left the company.
Designed for Decentralized Applications
Blockchain projects thrive on their ability to remain decentralized and relatively anonymous. Satoshi’s original vision was a digital currency uncoupled from world governments. To this end, the concept of a decentralized application is understandably attractive to the average crypto enthusiast. The first iteration of applications was, of course, programs that ran on the user’s own terminal. After this, we saw large numbers of web apps that ran from a centralized server through the Internet. Decentralized apps take this process a step further, removing the centralized servers in favor of operating directly on the blockchain.
Recently, controversy struck centralized web applications. The data harvesting tendencies of social media sites have the average consumer reeling from distrust. Decentralized applications are the perfect solution for this exact problem, providing similar functionality without a central authority to abuse the system. Although the dApp industry is still nascent, the future looks bright for this new technology.
Article By: Adam Stone
