EOS Mainnet Now Two-Thirds of the Way to Activation
The EOS mainnet has still not gone live, but it’s inching closer to activation now that the block producer voting threshold has reached two-thirds of the required participation.
As CCN.com reported, blockchain development company Block.one released the first version of the EOSIO software on June 2 at the conclusion of its yearlong initial coin offering (ICO), which raised the firm $4 billion.
More than a week (and dozens of bug reports) later, block producer candidates — organizations vying to earn a spot as one of the 21 entities who will verify transactions in the EOS network — finally agreed to attempt to launch the EOS mainnet.
However, though technically launched, the mainnet cannot go live until 15 percent of the 1 billion total EOS tokens vote for the network’s initial block producers. That process has been slow, as most users have neglected to stake their tokens.
On Thursday, block producer voting passed the 10% threshold, according to data compiled by block producer candidate EOS Authority, bringing the network more than two-thirds of the way to activation.
Notably, it may be cryptocurrency exchanges that push block producer voting over the 15 percent threshold.
On Wednesday, Bitfinex — the fourth-largest EOS exchange at the time of writing — opened its own voting platform to allow traders holding EOS on the exchange to vote on whether Bitfinex should temporarily stake token balances on behalf of its users to contribute to the activation of the cryptocurrency’s mainnet. Bitfinex, like several other exchanges, is also a block producer candidate.
However, the pace of voting is not the only aspect of this process that has attracted criticism.
For one thing, some of the leading candidates have said that they plan to use third-party services such as AWS and Google Cloud to host their servers instead of building their own secure data centers. Critics say that if too many block producers rent server space from third parties, it will threaten the security of the EOS network.
Users on social media have also complained that most of the block producers currently leading in the polls are based out of northern Asia, northern Europe, and North America, which would centralize transaction verification in the same regions as those that also dominate cryptocurrency mining.
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