EOS

In the summer of 2017, a project called EOS began what would become a year-long initial coin offering, eventually hoovering up more than four billion dollars from investors who believed they were funding the future of computing. No white paper before or since has commanded quite that sum. It was a staggering vote of confidence, or perhaps a staggering demonstration of what crypto markets could be persuaded to believe in a single euphoric season — and the distinction between the two has never been entirely settled.

What EOS promised was simple to say and fiendishly hard to deliver: a blockchain fast enough, cheap enough and flexible enough to host the next generation of decentralised applications, free of the congestion that already plagued its rivals. Users would pay no transaction fees. Governance would be democratic, even elegant. It was, its architects argued, Ethereum done properly.

Years on, EOS still exists, still processes transactions, and still has a community that shows up. Whether it became what it promised, or simply became another entry in the long ledger of crypto’s unfulfilled ambitions, is the question that continues to hover over every conversation about the token.

The story so far

EOS was the creation of Dan Larimer, a prolific and restless figure in blockchain circles who had already built Bitshares and Steem before turning his attention to what he considered the industry’s next problem: scalability. Working through his company Block.one, alongside chief executive Brendan Blumer, Larimer proposed a delegated proof-of-stake system in which token holders would vote for a small number of block producers responsible for validating transactions, trading some of the decentralisation purists demanded for a considerable gain in speed.

The token sale that funded this vision ran from June 2017 to June 2018, an unusually long window that allowed Block.one to raise its extraordinary war chest gradually, without the single frantic day that characterised most ICOs of the era. The mainnet finally launched in June 2018 amid genuine drama — early block producer votes were contentious, a freeze of certain accounts sparked governance disputes, and critics began asking pointed questions about how decentralised a system with only twenty-one active validators could really claim to be.

Block.one’s relationship with its own creation grew stranger as time passed. The company sat on billions of dollars raised from the sale yet invested comparatively little in EOS ecosystem development, instead pursuing other ventures including a social media platform and, eventually, a private cryptocurrency exchange. In 2019 the firm settled with the American Securities and Exchange Commission over the unregistered securities offering, paying a penalty of 24 million dollars without admitting wrongdoing — a modest sum set against the scale of the original raise, but a symbolically important moment nonetheless.

Larimer himself departed Block.one in 2020 and later stepped back from the crypto industry altogether, a quiet exit for someone who had once been among its loudest visionaries. The EOS community, feeling abandoned by its corporate parent, eventually took governance into its own hands, and in 2023 the EOS Network Foundation assumed stewardship of the protocol’s development, later steering a rebrand of associated infrastructure under the Vaulta name as part of an attempt to chart a more independent course.

The case for EOS

Believers point first to the engineering. Delegated proof-of-stake genuinely does what it says on the tin, delivering transaction throughput and confirmation times that many older blockchains cannot match, with fees that remain negligible for ordinary use. For developers building applications that need speed and predictability more than maximal censorship resistance, that trade-off can look entirely sensible rather than heretical.

There is also a case to be made for resilience. Having survived the departure of its founder, the indifference of its original corporate backer, and years of being treated as a cautionary tale, the network still functions, still has active block producers, and now has a foundation explicitly tasked with community-led development rather than answering to distant venture interests. With a circulating supply of just over 1.09 billion tokens against a hard cap of 2.1 billion, the eventual supply picture is at least known in advance, which some investors find reassuring amid a sector not short of tokens with elastic or opaque emission schedules.

Finally, there is the argument from cheapness of narrative: EOS is no longer trying to be everything to everyone, and the more modest ambitions pursued under its newer stewardship — interoperability, targeted developer tooling, incremental technical upgrades — are, to its remaining supporters, a healthier foundation than the messianic promises of 2017 ever were.

The case against EOS

The sceptics’ case begins, understandably, with the gap between four billion dollars raised and what has actually been built. Few projects have ever had so much capital and so little to obviously show for it in terms of thriving applications or sustained developer activity, and the token’s long decline from its all-time high above 22.89 dollars remains, for critics, the most eloquent verdict available.

Governance concerns have never fully dissipated either. A system reliant on a small rotating cast of block producers invites the perennial question of how meaningfully decentralised it is in practice, particularly when voting power can concentrate among large holders or exchanges with their own interests. The SEC settlement, while financially modest, confirmed in official terms what many had suspected: that the original offering ran afoul of securities law, a fact that colours institutional appetite even years later.

Competition has not been kind, either. A field once thought to belong to EOS on throughput grounds is now crowded with newer layer-one chains boasting comparable or superior performance and considerably more developer mindshare, leaving EOS to fight for relevance in a market that has largely moved its attention elsewhere.

The bottom line

EOS occupies an unusual place in crypto’s memory: neither an outright failure nor a vindicated triumph, but a cautionary case study in the distance between capital raised and value delivered, now being quietly rewritten by a community trying to salvage something durable from an audacious start. Whether that patient, lower-key rebuilding proves more lasting than the spectacle that preceded it is a question only time, and the choices of its remaining stewards, will answer. This is journalism, not financial advice.