EOS is a cryptocurrency focused on two main features: scalability and ease of use.
And while the project has made some progress on the ease of use side – implementing fee-free transactions that allow people without tokens to use DApp and human readable addresses – scalability is where EOS shines more.
What is worth noting is that not only has EOS reached 2351 transactions per second, but it also supports inter-chain communication. This means that many blockchains could work in parallel as a single system to reach millions of transactions per second.
Today EOSNewYork – a producer of EOS blocks – has published a celebrative tweet according to which the foundaiton has recently reached almost 2,000 transactions per second, but it seems that by now that goal has already been surpassed.
A new day, a new high. Nearly 2,000 transactions per second on @EOS_io. #eos $eos pic.twitter.com/EwdDBx7xiL
— EOS New York (@eosnewyork) July 17, 2018
An important milestone
The community immediately noticed the new record and reacted by pointing out that the limit of the alleged 1,000 transactions per second was broken.
This is an important goal because previously the fastest blockchain (among the projects with a high market capitalization) was that of Ripple, capable of carrying out 1,500 transactions per second.
This makes EOS the main and fastest cryptocurrency out there.
The cost of scalability
EOS is often criticized for the amount of infrastructural decentralization that sacrifices to scale better.
EOS is based on the DPoS consent protocol (Delegated Proof of Stake). DPoS takes advantage of the power of the stakeholder agreement to resolve consensus issues in a fair and democratic manner.
The DPoS was developed by Daniel Larimer to allow coin holders to vote for “delegates”, who are then responsible for validating transactions and maintaining the blockchain.
In this case, there may only be 21 active block producers at any time and may be voted on entry or exit at any time.
This should, in theory, ensure that block makers maintain the user experience as their top priority. This means that instead of having 16,601 nodes like Ethereum – according to ethernodes – EOS has only 21 block producers.
It certainly makes the network less resilient, but resilience is not the main goal of EOS’s blockchain and this is what needs to be kept in mind when examining the project.
The main objective of this project is to be able to manage DAPP on an industrial scale and to be scaled mainstream.
For this purpose the project actually seems to be well designed. But at the same time, the EOS community has often criticized the community of Ethereum and Bitcoin by saying that their hashrate is actually even more centralized.
More decentralized than BTC and ETH?
According to a recent peer review research, EOS – with its 21 block producers – is actually more decentralized than Ethereum and Bitcoin.
The reasoning behind these claims is that the first three mining pools control well over 50% of the total hashrate of the network.
