What is the role of EOS in the blockchain and crypto arenas?
EOS: Is It as Strong as It Claims to Be?
Not long ago, a roundtable was hosted by anchor Rob Nelson, who oversaw a discussion between many key industry players. EOS has often been touted as an “Ethereum killer.” In other words, it’s hyped up to be just as good as Ethereum if not better in some ways, and there are many industry analysts out there who claim it – along with other competing networks like Tron – has what it takes to rise beyond the ranks of Ethereum and cause the latter to fall into oblivion.
However, this is a difficult argument to make, especially given the popularity, size, and scope of Ethereum. ETH is considered the most popular digital currency network in the world when it comes to creating additional blockchains and assets.
While it’s true that for the longest time, Ethereum – due to its growing popularity amongst developers – was bogged down by heavy traffic and fees, the network has gone on to endure two major upgrades in Shapella (last March) and the Merge (a year ago last September) that have helped it out with these problems. Since then, it has switched from a proof of work module to proof of stake, and it’s now considered more efficient than it’s ever been in its long and arduous history.
Despite all this, EOS is still considered a major competitor. Nelson got the discussion off to the right start by mentioning EOS was always designed to stand out as an open-source platform, meaning anyone could develop using its source code. He also said that the network was initially designed to help facilitate large-scale developments. He questioned whether EOS has lived up to this and asked:
Wasn’t that sort of the promise of EOS? It was supposed to allow for open-source building for the kinds of things you’re talking about, and the dream was at a massive scale.
Chris Barnes of Helios Guardian echoed this sentiment. He criticized EOS for claiming, in the beginning, that it would one day be able to process several million transactions per second, though this hasn’t come to fruition. He stated:
WAX is the most performance and most used blockchain in terms of actual transactions… It does 25 million transactions a day and that’s the lead. Going to millions of transactions a second is sort of hyperbole in the end.
Some Noticeable Advantages
Barnes, however, also mentioned that EOS is very scalable (especially when compared to Ethereum), and that its half-second block time is a huge network advantage. He commented:
If you want to do a social media platform built on a blockchain and I want to hit the like button, that’s going to show up and be included in [a] transaction.
