As the year closes it is a great time to reflect on what has been achieved and what plans and goals could be set for the next year. We at eosDublin have had an amazing year, and have met and worked with some of the smartest most dedicated teams on the planet, building “new”.
If 2018 was the year of EOS , 2019 was certainly the year of EOSIO. We have joined and are running class-leading infrastructure on many of the new EOSIO chains and are actively supporting anyone and everyone looking to build something great, regardless of what token they believe in.
We believe 2020 will be the year when the layer 1 blockchain-type stuff will become invisible to our customers.
We have always said that “we are not competing with other DLT stacks, we are competing with AWS”. And until we have a user experience which is as good for deploying and scaling applications, we still have work to do.
So here is our honest assessment of the public projects which we have worked on in 2019.
EOS Public Chain — What a year EOS has had. From the removal of the Interim Constitution to the CPU crunch and EIDOS mining frenzy, The optimistic outlook and hope many of us had for EOS eroded and the price and market cap followed.
EOS failed to back and support it’s own community, casting aside proposals like the Community Development Fund (Trial WPS) and cold-shouldered almost a thousand early EOS early-adopters, who had issues and filed claims with ECAF. In an environment where the only asset a project really has is its users and the network effects that they create; we believe it was a drastic mistake, and sent the network into a tailspin cheered on mainly by those more heavily invested in other projects.
The good news is that EOS operated regardless, we managed to navigate a major upgrade, and ensured that no dApp would be left behind.
But then soon after, when the network faced capacity issues, those same dApps were told there is nothing could be done. Given the deaf ear and our users were told they were “too poor” to use this network.
In 2019, EOS never passed up an opportunity to disappoint.
The real issue stems from the lack of re-investment from the network into itself. Block Producers shifted from “Value creators” to “Value extractors” and many in the community followed suit. Like pension planners hunting for extra scraps of APR on their “investments”, we saw proxy after proxy set up to optimise for return now, rather than support-building for the future. (Anyone who gets excited by staking or voting rewards is investing in the wrong asset class.)
Just think where we would be if the intellect needed for proxy-optimisation was directed towards building new ideas for our community.
EOS may be “working as designed” but that design isn’t fit for the world we currently are in or the markets we need to penetrate. Projects need to fight for attention and deliver more for their customers than ever before.
Telos — Against all odds Telos is ending the year on a high. We were one of the first “non-telos” BPs to join the project and were the second BP (after the amazing EOS Barcelona) to produce a full round on the network.
Telos took many of the ideas in the original EOS whitepaper and rather than complaining ad nauseam about why they couldn’t be implemented, quietly set about building and implementing them.
The result: many original EOS supporters migrated into the Telos groups and since have been building, supporting and cheering on every project and community-member who contributed.
“The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.”
I think 2020 will be the year when you can’t ignore them.
Many are building with the Telos Community as their first target customers, We know for certain because, we are one of them! More UPdates on that soon...
Worbli — We were one of the first BPs to announce we would be supporting the Worbli project, the vision that blockchain & fintech compliance would be important resonated with us, it still does.
This year Worbli made a decision to cut short their Sharedrop and later to trim the number of block producers they had on the network, it was a brave move, not from a technical standpoint (EOSIO can run really well with less nodes) but because they had Ambassadors globally routing for the project.
The vision seems intact for Worbli, 2020 will be a key year to see if they can deliver against the vision.
Meet.One — Meet.One started with a wallet, built a user base and then decided they needed their own blockchain. When they reached out to us to be a Block Producer, it was an immediate YES. (As a general rule, if you are building something and need our help, we try say YES, without any conditions) We were proud to be invited to speak at the a Meet.One event in Hangzhou in April 2019 , it was our first but hopefully not last time in China, that trip has changed our perspective on what we need to achieve and how ambitious we need to be to make our dint in the universe.
This is my favourite photo of the year (by far) taken at an EOS dinner at a typical Chinese family restaurant in Hangzhou after the event..
This girl first came up to say Hi, I then gave her an eosDublin badge, She returned a few minutes later with some cake and then we took a #selfie.
WAX — We bought some WAX before we knew anything about EOS. A real project , with a real company behind it in this space is a RARE thing!
EOSIO — WAX launched in the second half of the year, and we are excited to be producing on the network and have big plans for 2020 and beyond. Gaming and Digital Assets are going to be HUGE and WAX is running the best blockchain software operated by some of the best EOSIO teams around.
Oh, and William Quigley was our first guest on our Blockchain Business Podcast! (which has over 50 episodes now, thanks to our Crypto Queen @JillianGodsil ). I think we should get him back on in 2020…
Lynx — The first time someone showed me the EOS Lynx wallet was in London at a BP summit in October 2018 , everyone was like “holy fuck, this is awesome” , at that time time Scatter was “early” and since I have personally told hundreds of people to download and use it.
Earlier this year, it was obvious that the lack of free accounts and the lack of change on EOS Mainnet was going to be an issue for anyone looking to “cross the chasm”.
EOS Lynx obviously frustrated with the lack of change and improvements of EOS Mainnet decided to launch a new chain with the customer user experience as the main focus. We have been producing on Lynx since first test net, and are really excited for Mainnet release in January 2020.
Europechain — This year we have been proud to work with the top European blockchain teams to launch and grow a platform to support businesses around the world to operate at scale in compliance at the highest levels. This project is excitingly early, but without giving too much away, every month we raise the bar and exceed. Europechain has a fanatical obsession on enabling new business models, delivered with an efficient, enterprise demanding level of service. We know we are biased, but we are bullish on this one.
If you have read this far, thank you.
Please comment below and share your thoughts, opinions on what 2019 delivered and as a community where we need to improve and what we need to focus on for 2020.
#GOEosIO
