When announcing my plans to launch the EOS Network Foundation (ENF) in August, I made a commitment to bring a level of organization and coordination to EOS that simply didn’t exist before to position the EOS ecosystem towards the future, essentially rebuilding a vision that has largely been lost over the last couple of years. I also made commitments to become the voice of the EOS network as its representative leader to the wider blockchain ecosystem and to drive EOS towards a unified vision under the stewardship of the ENF.

In just three months since making my first formal announcement, I believe that we have entered a new genesis for EOS. We still have a long way to go, but the progress we’ve already made has been inspiring. We will continue to work together as a community, in parallel, as we work towards achieving our collective goals. The future for EOS has never been brighter.

EOS Network Foundation Virtual Event for Chinese Media and KOLs

On November 3, the ENF organized its first formal meeting with the EOS community since the Foundation launched. It was hosted as an invite-only event exclusive to the Chinese media and key opinion leaders. At this event we introduced the ENF, discussed the current state of EOS, our long term vision for EOS and roadmap for achieving it, core EOSIO development, and more.

Rather than recapping the event in this blog update, I encourage you all to watch it in its entirety to capture the full perspective of everything that was presented and discussed.

Based on the feedback received and the overall success from this virtual event, we anticipate that we will host more events like this in the future that will be open to the entire EOS community and wider blockchain ecosystem.

External Media Coverage

For the first time in a long time, the media was covering and actively discussing EOS in a mostly positive way. It received coverage from major publications such as Yahoo Finance, CoinTelegraph, CoinDesk, and more. Over 40 different articles and videos were published covering EOS following the ENF virtual event. Although some of the coverage may have been less-than-favorable or missed a little bit of context over what has been transpiring within EOS, two things were well understood and made crystal clear to the wider blockchain community:

  1. EOS is most certainly not dead.
  2. EOS is not Block.one.

EOS is an ever evolving ecosystem that for the very first time in its history has leadership, coordination, organization, and pooled resources to fund its ecosystem growth. We’re moving in a positive direction and the wins keep on adding up.

$1.3m ENF Recognition Grants for Wave 3 & 4

While on the topic of winning, I’d like to congratulate the thirteen projects that were selected for $100k ENF recognition grants for the third and fourth waves. Since late September, the ENF has been awarding dozens of projects with recognition grants for supporting EOS throughout some of the more difficult times over the years. Earlier this week, the ENF distributed its third wave of grants covering the projects that are laying the foundations for play-to-earn, social, and gaming on EOS.

Today, I am excited to announce the fourth wave of grant recipients, which cover projects and business in the categories of developer tooling and auditors. EOS would not be where it is today without these dedicated teams who have added an immeasurable amount of value to the network over the years. Formal recognition for their work is way past due and I’d like to personally thank and congratulate each and every one of them.

Wave Three: Gaming + Social

  • ChallengeDAC — Social application launched at EOS genesis for social and geo challenges to be created and completed that allow users to earn cryptocurrencies.
  • Emanate — Audio Exchange Protocol designed to facilitate instant value exchange and agreements between musicians, listeners and other actors in the music industry.
  • Crypto Dynasty — Play-to-Earn RPG and PvP trading game on EOS and Ethereum.
  • Liquiid — Development company specializing in EOSIO game development. The creators of libraries and SDKs including Anchor for Unity3D, Atomic Assets API Client, a .NET and Unity3D-compatible API client for Hyperion History APIs, and a dfuse enabled WebIDE.
  • BountyBlok — Blockchain powered gamification engine powering third-party applications to create challenges and tasks that utilize gaming mechanics to motivate and promote user engagement for their userbases.
  • Prospectors — The first MMO play-to-earn game on EOS offering real-time economic strategy with a fully user-generated economy.

Wave Four: Developer Tooling + Auditors

  • Sentnl — Blockchain auditing firm specializing in penetration testing, wallet security audits, and smart contract audits for EOSIO blockchains.
  • Slowmist — Blockchain security company offering solutions that include security audit, threat intelligence (BTI), bug bounty, defense deployment, security consultancy, and other services for EOSIO projects.
  • Aloha EOS Tools — Developers of useful tooling for visualizing on-chain data such as block producer performance and reliability metrics.
  • Jungle Testnet — Initiated by CryptoLions, Jungle has served as a sandbox for many development teams and EOS Block Producers since the birth of EOSIO.
  • EOS Powerup — EOS Powerup offers a frontend, Discord and Telegram bots for making it simple to manage user resources under the new resource model.
  • EOS Authority Dashboard — One of the most robust and comprehensive explorers for the EOS ecosystem that offers unique features such as account alert notifications and in-depth on-chain analysis tools.
  • EOS Studio — Graphic IDE for developing decentralized applications (dApps) on the EOSIO blockchain.

Previous Recognition Grant Recipients

Wave One: Media + Community + NFT

  • EOS Go — Launched in 2017, EOS Go has served as the most consistent news source for the EOS community with all of its content being published in both English and Chinese.
  • ByWire News — A publishing platform and new aggregator whose content is stored in IPFS and hashed to the EOS public blockchain. It’s user account system leverages full EOS accounts that provide gamification, rewards, boosting, and eventually democratic oversight.
  • Atomic Assets — The EOSIO standard for Non Fungible Tokens. Atomic Assets makes it easy for anyone on EOS to generate NFTs which can be bought and sold in the Atomic Hub marketplace.
  • Finney.World — Finney is a cryptocurrency mascot for a multi-chain community-driven NFT collection originally launched on EOS that serves as an incentive layer for community content creation and engagement.
  • Koreos — An early DAO and one of the first South Korean EOS communities. Koreos consistently provides value to its community by serving as a communication bridge to the West by providing translations of EOS content written or spoken in English.
  • EOS Microloan — An EOS powered socioeconomic system where unbanked participants are building a new economy, based on the creation of liquidity and opportunities for businesses and customers.

Wave Two: DeFi + Interoperability

  • PIZZA Finance — PIZZA is a decentralized financial network on EOS with multi DeFi-related products including USDE stable-coin, Swap Aggregator, DEX, leveraged tokens, and their core decentralized lending product.
  • DefiBox — Professional one-stop DeFi application platform on EOS with $120m of TVL. Currently offers swap, USN stablecoin generation, lending, borrowing, and DAO governance.
  • Vigor — Vigor is a decentralized borrowing and lending protocol built by the Vigor DAC.
  • Equilibrium — Built EOS’s first dollar-pegged currency that leverages underlying EOS and BTC collateral. One of the earliest DeFi products to utilize voter rewards to offset interest rates.
  • Defis Network — An open-source series of DeFi protocolsAMM Swaps, Algorithmic Stablecoin, Synthetics, Cross-Chain Pegs (ETH), Mining Pool
  • SOVDEX — An algorithmic DEX with trading, mining, and CPU atomic swaps. The SOV team also developed the first variable rate self-deflationary token on EOS.
  • eCurve — eCurve is an exchange liquidity pool on EOS modeled after Curve on Ethereum. It is designed for extremely efficient stablecoin trading and low risk, supplemental fee income for liquidity providers.
  • Newdex — One of the original and most popular DEX on EOS. Features a hybrid order book that aggregates limit order matching with AMM swap pools to maximize liquidity depth.
  • DAPP Network — The DAPP Network is a universal bridging framework and suite of middleware services to help scale decentralized applications and enable blockchain interoperability between EOSIO and EVM-based blockchains.
  • pNetwork — Creators of the pTokens, which are 1:1 pegged to assets on 10+ blockchains including EOS. The pToken bridge enables assets such as pETH and pBTC to be transferred from their native chains to EOS where it can be used in DeFi.
  • Organix — Synthetic assets issuance and trading protocol on EOS.

7th Board Member Selected for the ENF Board of Advisors

The ENF Board of Advisors (BoA) are responsible for providing the Foundation with critical feedback and advice on its overall direction. The BoA have exceptionally strong business acumen, incomparable data access, and have a very strong overall understanding of EOS which is required when providing advice to the ENF core. The Board is also responsible for reviewing grant and sponsorship proposals and providing critical feedback and overall direction to the ENF.

Since launching the Foundation with 6 genesis board members, I had been actively seeking out and interviewing potential candidates to fill the 7th advisory board seat. After surveying the EOS community and the larger blockchain ecosystem, I am pleased to report back that I have found the right candidate to fill the final vacant seat on the board. The ENF and its board have recently offered Damian Byeon, founder of WYNG, former CCO of ITAM Games, and founder of AcroEOS, to fill this role and he has accepted. Damian has already provided very valuable strategic advice and support since joining the ENF board.

ENF Board of Advisors

  • Damian Byeon, founder of WYNG, former CCO of ITAM Games, and founder of AcroEOS
  • Aaron Cox, founder of Greymass
  • Dafeng Guo, founder of EOS Asia and Strikingly
  • Fu Pan, founder and CEO of TockenPocket
  • Peter Watt, Newdex Project Leader
  • Van Kai, iconic founder and leader of the EOS Cannon community
  • Wen Huaqiang, veteran developer and initiator of CryptoKylin

Pomelo is Now Open for Grant Proposals and Contributions

Pomelo recently announced that they would be launching Season 1 on November 7 with $500,000 in the matching pool donated by the EOS Network Foundation. This past Sunday, the first season officially began and we’ve already seen 50+ proposals submitted by community members and teams pitching their ideas for public goods to the wider EOS ecosystem.

I believe that Pomelo will be a very powerful tool for pushing EOS forward by funding and empowering hundreds and eventually thousands of individuals to be incentivized to work within the EOS ecosystem. Now anyone in the EOS community is able to request funding for any kind of public goods including marketing, open source code, community building, education, hosting events, hackathons, and other value adds for EOS. Pomelo is a core pillar of the ENF and will play a vital role in the EOS ecosystem moving forward. To learn more about what this means for the EOS community, please see my post on Creating Positive Sum Games for Public Goods on EOS.

https://pomelo.io/grants/

ENF Officially Migrates Community to EOS Discord

The EOS community Discord server went live recently and has already reached 1400+ members with continued growth each day. Providing a great user and top of funnel experience for new community members is paramount to EOS’s success as a growing ecosystem. By providing community members with access to organized discussion channels by topic, advanced bot integrations, threaded conversations, VoIP chats, EOS customer support and user resources all under one roof, Discord has many clear advantages over Telegram.

Join the EOS Discord Channel

The EOS community has largely been gathering in Telegram for as long as I’ve been part of it, but over the last year or two, we’ve seen a shift in how and where cryptocurrency communities gather as Discord has taken on a more and more prominent role in shaping those communities. This doesn’t come as a surprise as the closest world to crypto is probably that of online gaming, a world that Discord is designed to serve by neatly bridging the divide between real life communication and the virtual worlds of online gaming.

As of November 1, the ENF has made its decision to migrate its community officially to Discord by converting our existing Telegram group into a read-only channel where we will continue to post important news and announcements. We encourage everyone to join us on the EOS Discord server where the ENF will continue to make ourselves available to engage with the EOS community. Please join us to make this transition as successful as possible!

What’s Next?

For EOS to be successful, the ENF cannot take on every issue or attempt to solve every problem by ourselves. Fortunately, we’ve spent years within the EOS ecosystem and understand many of its needs and have already identified much of the top talent who are able to assist us in our efforts. There are many amazing talents within the EOS ecosystem who have essentially been on a three year job interview and we will be leaning on them heavily in our efforts moving forward.

The ENF has made an initial investment of over a million dollars to assemble sponsored working groups consisting of the upper echelons of leadership within the EOS ecosystem within their areas of expertise. Each of these working groups are being tasked with defining roadmaps to solve many of the biggest and most impactful challenges that EOS currently faces as we continue to deliver on our mission forward to enable developers, businesses, and individuals to build on EOS.

In next week’s blog update, I will dive deeper into who is taking part in these working groups, what they mean for the EOS ecosystem and its future development as well as the deliverables that the community can expect as a result of the collective efforts from these working groups.

Stay tuned to learn more about the Wallet+, API+, Audit+, and Docu+ initiatives!

EOS Network

The EOS Network is a 3rd generation blockchain platform powered by the EOS VM, a low-latency, highly performant, and extensible WebAssembly engine for deterministic execution of near feeless transactions; purpose-built for enabling optimal web3 user and developer experiences. EOS is the flagship blockchain and financial center of the EOSIO protocol, serving as the driving force behind multi-chain collaboration and public goods funding for tools and infrastructure through the EOS Network Foundation (ENF).

EOS Network Foundation

The EOS Network Foundation (ENF) is a not-for-profit organization that coordinates financial and non-financial support to encourage the growth and development of the EOS Network. The ENF is the hub of the EOS Network, harnessing the power of decentralization as a force for positive global change to chart a coordinated future for EOS.