EOS Mainnet to Launch With Support From Billionaire Investor, Finalized Plans

EOS, the $4 billion initial coin offering (ICO) that has been heavily criticized by skeptics throughout 2018 for its lack of commercial products, has at last finalized its mainnet launch with the support from Mike Novogratz, former Goldman Sachs and Fortress trader and billionaire investor.

The 12-month long token sale of EOS has allowed the blockchain project to garner more than $4 billion worth of bitcoin and Ether, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum protocol, from both private and public investors. To date, Filecoin remains as the second biggest ICO behind EOS, which raised less than 7 percent of the funds raised by EOS, at $257 million.

The token sale of EOS officially began 11 months ago, in May 2017. Throughout the past 12 months, the price of the EOS blockchain network’s token surged from $1 to $14.62, by more than 14-fold within one year. EOS outperformed both bitcoin and Ether, which both increased by about three-fold since July, 2018.

EOS Mainnet: Phases

Due its decentralized nature and its compatibility with the Ethereum blockchain protocol, the mainnet launch of EOS involves a complex set of events to materialize. EOS New York, one of the major block producers of the EOS network, noted that the mainnet launch of EOS requires four phases:

1. Verify snapchat and boot: Snapshot taken and verified by EOS Mainnet Launch Group (EMLG)
2. Testing: EMLG and third parties verify the successful settlement of snapshot files and stability in the software of EOS
3. Enable: Block Producer community of EOS begins to vote on whether to launch the EOS mainnet or delay
4. Activation: Declare the EOS mainnet active

This week, on June 9, EOS block producers, which are equivalent to miners in the Bitcoin ecosystem, unanimously agreed to launch the EOS mainnet after a voting process. The mainnet of EOS is expected to fully launch in the next 24 hours, as a set of block producers work with each other to initialize the EOS mainnet.

Already, the EOS community and block.one, the company that is responsible for the development of the EOS blockchain protocol, have started to moderate hackathons to assist blockchain developers in launching scalable and high performance decentralized applications on the EOS network.

The latest hackathon in Hong Kong, which begins today on June 9, has been equipped with a $1.5 million grand prize and an opportunity to collaborate with EOS Venture Capital to potentially secure additional funding. The aggressive approach of EOS in facilitating the entrance of developers into the EOS community will trigger an emergence of EOS-based decentralized applications in the short to mid-term, justifying the massive market valuation of the EOS network.

Strong Backing

EOS has gained strong support from large-scale retailer investors in both the US and Asia, especially in Hong Kong. Apart from billionaire investors like Mike Novogratz, angel investors such as Dafeng Guo, a 30-year-old investor based in Shanghai, have invested in EOS due to their confidence in Daniel Larimer, the chief technical officer of EOS, who had built Bitshares and Steemit prior to building EOS.

“I believe the (block.one) team has the technical capability of carrying this project out,” Guo told WSJ in an interview.