The Current State of EOS and Where We Go Next
As it stands, EOS has been a failure of monumental proportions on various levels. To many, and understandably so, it’s a project they would rather not associate themselves to anymore. There’s no way of sugar coating it. Whatever market lead EOS had at its genesis was squandered. Since the network launch in June 2018 we’ve seen other Gen3 blockchains emerge with their own solutions for cost, speed, and scale that simply didn’t exist when EOS was in its infancy. This isn’t to imply that EOS is dead or that it can’t turn things around: it’s an honest assessment of the current state of EOS. Coming to terms with this reality is key to moving forward so that we may focus on where we go next.
The Red Queen hypothesis in evolutionary biology explains how living organisms must constantly adapt and evolve because they live in an ever-evolving ecosystem, competing for survival against other ever-evolving organisms. Everything is competitive, and nothing is constant; it’s explicitly a zero-sum game, and stasis means extinction. This is an accurate description of what has happened to EOS as it has failed to evolve and keep pace with the competition. A quick glance at the EOS market cap and its general trend tells you everything you need to know about what the market currently thinks of EOS compared to its peers. It is not an attractive investment in its current state.
With the inception of the EOS Network Foundation (ENF), the EOS community took a major step forward in the right direction. Until now, EOS has lacked the ability to coordinate resources or to have a means to invest in itself with the EOS token holders’ best interests at the forefront of every decision. EOS now has the leadership and resources to guide it on a better trajectory. However, we must also accept that EOS’s competitors are going to continue innovating, so we need to forge ahead and adapt twice as fast if we want it to catch up. We must be highly iterative, make frequent and targeted bets, have foresight to adapt quickly to changing market situations, and make continuous and sustained investments into the developers, businesses, and individuals who are willing to innovate on EOS to push it forward at a breakneck speed. An incentivized and coordinated ecosystem should be a thriving ecosystem.
The ENF is here to support and empower the broad EOS community. Period.
Investing in the EOS Community
To take EOS where it needs to go, it is going to require an enormous amount of coordinated effort. Early on the ENF deployed capital into EdenOnEOS, whose upcoming election, on October 9, will provide the opportunity for EOS community members to pitch their ideas and proposals for creating value for EOS to the other members of the EdenOnEOS community.
⚡️#EOSFoundation just executed the transfer for a 200,000 $EOS grant to @EdenOnEOS for its upcoming election.
🗓On October 4, a second transfer will be made for 200 #EOS multiplied by Eden's total membership count at the time its MSIG is proposed.#ENF is just getting started! https://t.co/mYrWdb1A2y
— Yves La Rose (@BigBeardSamurai) September 20, 2021
Supporting this initiative will provide capital incentive to the value creators within this community, while also helping identify those value creators. I will be watching the upcoming election closely to analyze the talent pool within and I’m hopeful that there will be some new leaders who emerge alongside those who are already known.
$3.4m of EOS Recognition Grants
Nurturing new ideas and initiatives is important for expanding the EOS ecosystem, but at the same time, there are already many proven projects and businesses within the community whose work deserves to be recognized for their efforts in supporting EOS over the years despite the lack of network-wide support. When the ENF’s Board of Advisors met for the first time, all parties understood the urgent need for capital allocation within the EOS ecosystem. In lieu of a formal application process, it was decided that supporting these proven projects and businesses with Recognition Grants could serve as an early signal that the ENF is prioritizing, supporting, and empowering the EOS community.
The Board came up with an objective set of criteria that would allow them to make fast and efficient decisions on which projects were to be recognized for these initial grants. To be considered, each project or business needed to already be established and known by the majority of the board. Keep in mind that none of these projects submitted an application and there were no pitch decks, so each decision was made based on a project’s reputation and its history of building on or working with EOS. Every project or business being recognized will receive the same amount of funding regardless of their contributions.
We recognize this is little and there needs to be more, way more. We choose to iterate frequently and incrementally as we build our processes and grow our capacity. Over the next months expect larger and more targeted investments into the ecosystem.
The #EOSFoundation's 3̶3̶ 34 Recognition Grants will be for $100,000 of $EOS each! 🏆
Let this 🔥$3.4M🔥 serve as an early signal that the #ENF is here to support and empower the #EOS community. Period. 🏗️🚀 https://t.co/S5vh7bDrJZ
— Yves La Rose (@BigBeardSamurai) September 25, 2021
34 projects were ultimately selected and each of them will receive a $100,000 grant as a recognition and “thank you” for all that they’ve done and will continue to do to support the EOS ecosystem. Being awarded a Recognition Grant does not disqualify any of the recipients from applying for additional funding through Pomelo after it goes live.
There will be five rounds of Recognition Grants in total and I’m very excited to share the first round today that includes six projects in the categories of EOS Media, NFTs, and Community! The other categories that will be announced over the coming months include (in no particular order): auditors, wallets, tooling, social, gaming, defi, and interoperability.
In two weeks the ENF will announce its largest wave of 11 Recognition Grants totalling $1,100,000. More Recognition Grants will continue rolling out on a bi-weekly basis until all 34 recipients are announced over an eight week period.
EOS Media / NFTs / Community
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.
*Each of these projects will receive an EOS transfer equivalent to $100,000 after passing a KYC/AML compliance check.
Funding Opportunities via Pomelo
The allocation of capital across the EOS ecosystem in the form of grants and sponsorships is one of the pillars of the ENF as it allows the entire community to be incentivized to all work together in parallel towards its common goals. As the Recognition Grants continue to roll out, we anticipate that Pomelo will go live at some point throughout that timeframe.
Once live, Pomelo will be leveraged as the formal application process for anyone seeking funding from the EOS community and/or the ENF. The ENF plans to support grant proposals as a significant grant matching partner on Pomelo, which is a platform modelled off of Gitcoin on Ethereum. Pomelo utilizes a mechanism called Quadradic Funding (QF) for philanthropic and publicly-funded seeding that allows for optimal provisioning of funds to an ecosystem of public goods. In addition to the grant matching using QF, the ENF will also be able to fund proposals on Pomelo directly from the eosio.grants treasury on a case-by-case basis.
All new and existing community members are encouraged to begin working on their funding proposals as soon as possible so that they are ready for submission by the time Pomelo goes into production. I invite you to check out Gitcoin to give you a general sense of what to expect and even some potential ideas.
There has always been debate within the EOS ecosystem over what it has been lacking or what it needs to be more successful. The block producers have traditionally been the ones who the community believed to be responsible for filling those gaps, as they were the only ones earning revenue from the network. With Pomelo and other ENF funding opportunities in place, there will be a major paradigm shift that now allows for anyone in the EOS ecosystem to become an employee of the network itself. The block producers should no longer be looked at as the only ones who are able to contribute, because it will soon be possible for anyone to propose any kind of work and have just as good of a chance to receive funding as any block producer. Public goods such as education, marketing, and even things like history services and snapshot tools that have been traditionally been offered by block producers would all be eligible for grant funding.
Identifying Talent within the Ecosystem
There is an unlimited amount of initiatives that EOS could benefit from, but identifying the individuals/teams with the talent and skill sets to accomplish those goals is difficult. This is one of the many reasons why a tool like Pomelo will prove to be invaluable to the EOS ecosystem. It utilizes the wisdom of the crowd by allowing anyone to formally propose what they want to do/build/accomplish, how they’re going to do it, how it benefits EOS, and how they will measure their own success.
EOS should be looked at as a business moving forward and any work that can drive or generate value to that business can now be incentivized.
It’s easier to identify “what” EOS needs than it is to know “who” is qualified and willing to take on a particular action item, and “how” specifically they’re planning to accomplish it. Once this is able to take place via a public portal like Pomelo, the focus will shift towards teams and individuals executing on their proposed work that continue adding value to EOS.
Over the next 3 months the ENF will be deploying resources towards the creation of its core pillars; public goods that will provide base level support for end users whether they be developers, businesses, individual users, or investors in the network. I look forward to putting pen to paper and sharing with you in greater detail this key component of the overall vision.
The whole of EOS can be greater than the sum of all of its parts.
Scaling the Efforts of the ENF
The EOS Network Foundation is only a month old and with the EOS ecosystem playing from behind, running at least twice as fast as the competition is the only option available if we want EOS to be successful. We are showcasing this belief through our actions and willingness to deploy capital to the existing and future value creators within the EOS community. Doing so scales everyone’s collective efforts well beyond what any centralized entity could do on its own. EOS is and remains one of the largest DAOs within the blockchain ecosystem.
In addition to the ENF’s funding efforts geared towards the EOS community, the ENF has also been moving rapidly towards scaling its own efforts by augmenting its team with numerous strategic partners and contractors.
The ENF has already signed contracts with Chinese PR firms, a Western PR firm, a branding agency, a legal firm, an accounting firm, and a KYC compliance firm. These backend administrative functions are needed early on as they enable and amplify everything that comes afterwards. Each of these partners required their own due diligence processes to make sure they were the right fit, understood the vision that is being laid, the narrative shift that is occurring, and how they fit in the larger picture.
Having said this, we’ve encountered challenges as many refuse to be associated with EOS. This is not lost on us as one of our biggest challenges will be to change the perception that has taken hold. This is our current reality.
The business relationships we have entered in are with world class partners who will help take EOS to the next level with the speed, scale, and professionalism we require. For example, the branding agency’s portfolio includes companies like Microsoft and AirBnB. They will assist in defining the voice/messaging, identity, and branding for the ENF to position EOS as a global leader able to attract the attention of enterprises across multiple verticals and industries. We’ve also begun the onboarding process with multiple PR agencies who will represent EOS across media channels while leveraging their deep industry experience and networks that span multiple languages and cultures across the world.
We are genuinely thrilled for what EOS will be able to accomplish as all of the pieces continue falling into place. We will continue to work as hard and as fast as possible to bring the change and leadership EOS rightfully deserves. The past does not dictate the future and there has never been a more exciting time to be part of the EOS community!
Join us for the comeback story of a lifetime.
Evergreen Roadmap
- PR firms global launch — October 2021
- Core pillars sponsorship launches — October 2021
- Recognition grants — October / November 2021
- ENF Branding launch — November 2021
- ENF Website launch — December 2021
- Core pillars yellow paper launches — December 2021
- Audit+ launch — Winter/Spring 2022
- Wallet+ launch — Spring 2022
- Docu+ launch — Spring 2022
- API+ launch — Spring/Summer 2022
- EVM+ launch — Summer/Fall 2022
- EOSIO+ launch — TBD
*Rough timelines subject to change
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.
