Today, EOS has rebranded to Vaulta.

The ancient public blockchain that made a splashy debut 7 years ago with a year-long fundraise, touted as an early "Ethereum killer," has finally abandoned its dream of achieving a million TPS and announced a shift towards Web3 banking. The grandiosity of its once $4.2 billion fundraising, the excitement of the 21 super node elections, and the utopian declaration of a million TPS—all these fragments have pieced together the most expensive idealistic experiment in blockchain history.

7 years later, aside from the long-term hodlers, no one mentions this now 97th-ranked "ancient public blockchain." In the days to come, EOS will no longer be a high-performance public blockchain but will instead undergo a transformation, attempting to pivot towards Web3 banking—it has forsaken its once dreams, even forsaking its name.

We will still use this article to document the wildest product of the ICO era, burning so much money and leaving behind a sigh-inducing story.

A Tower of Babel Built with Code and Dollars

In 2017, the blockchain industry was experiencing its most frenzied growth period. Bitcoin had surpassed $1,000 in early 2017, only to skyrocket to $20,000 by the end of the year. Ethereum's smart contracts had fundamentally transformed the crypto world, and ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) had become the hottest fundraising method, with hundreds of projects flooding the market, vying to build a "decentralized future."

Amidst this capital frenzy, EOS emerged with the banner of "Blockchain 3.0," raising the flag to "replace Ethereum." Its whitepaper outlined an ideal nation: a million TPS (transactions per second), solving the scalability issues of Bitcoin and Ethereum; zero transaction fees, allowing regular users to avoid paying expensive Gas fees, making on-chain transactions as seamless as cloud applications; ultra-fast block times, with 21 super nodes responsible for transaction packaging, no longer hindered by miner competition; a blockchain supercomputer, making decentralized applications (DApps) a tangible reality.

Founder BM (Dan Larimer) was the biggest face of EOS. To tech enthusiasts, he was a genius—just a year after Bitcoin's inception, he had suggested to Satoshi Nakamoto to change the consensus mechanism, arguing that PoW (Proof of Work) was not efficient. Later, he founded BitShares and Steemit, becoming one of the most famous engineers in the crypto world. But BM was not just a tech geek; he also had utopian idealism. He believed that blockchain could change everything, and EOS would be the ultimate solution to human social structures.

A brilliant CTO, coupled with a top-tier marketing team, had already laid out the ambition of this story. On June 26, 2017, EOS began its crowdfunding, planned to last a year (in contrast, most ICOs raised funds for only a few weeks to a few months).

Global investors flocked in, raising $185 million within 24 hours. In the end, EOS successfully raised $4.2 billion, becoming the largest financing in the history of the cryptocurrency world, far surpassing all projects at the time, including Ethereum's $18.5 million.

Top 10 ICO Projects of 2018

With $4.2 billion, EOS leaped to become the super capital of the cryptocurrency world.

In April 2018, EOS's price surged from $5 to $23, a monthly increase of 360%, ranking among the global top five by market capitalization, second only to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and Bitcoin Cash. The media hyped up headlines like "EOS to Become the First Trillion-Dollar Market Cap Cryptocurrency" and "BM Is the Next Satoshi Nakamoto." Ethereum developers also began to feel anxious, fearing that EOS's rise would lead to Ethereum's decline.

During that year, before the mainnet launch, EOS had already become the hottest star in the cryptocurrency world. Driven by FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), EOS was seen as the "next-generation Ethereum," with some even predicting it would reach $1,000.

The super node election became a global hotspot, with figures like Li Xiaolai and Lao Mao, "godfather-level" individuals, making high-profile entrances, and exchanges, mining pools, Wenzhou capital, and even traditional funds pouring in—this election was called the "Wall Street IPO of Blockchain." Nodes from China, the U.S., and South Korea engaged in a "cryptocurrency national war," with the Korean community chanting, "If you don't vote, you are not Korean." Li Xiaolai's Coin Capital held four node votes, and the Wenzhou group entered the scene with EOS in the eight digits.

With a $4.2 billion fundraising, a star project, a dark horse public chain, garnering attention from all sides, BM traveling to Hong Kong to be met at the airport gate by the project team in a luxury car. Everything seemed so perfect, yet beneath the grandeur, everything was built on a Tower of Babel constructed from code and dollars.

EOS's Peak Was Only the Beginning

Amidst fervor, the problems had quietly surfaced:

EOS's voting system was criticized for being easily controlled by whales, and the decentralization of super nodes was questioned; after the mainnet launch, multiple technical issues arose, with developers beginning to doubt EOS's stability; exchanges and capital giants' deep involvement made super node elections no longer fair, leading to differing voices in the community; after the mainnet launch, BM began frequent governance mechanism changes, causing community chaos.

However, at that time, the market was still immersed in euphoria, and all doubts were overshadowed by the slogan "EOS is about to change the world." In that golden age, everyone believed that EOS would become the future overlord, even the ultimate form of the blockchain industry. However, reality is often harsher than dreams, and no one foresaw that this once highly anticipated project would fall from grace in just a few years.

Tech Disillusionment: From "Million TPS" to "Distributed Database"

At that time, the biggest issue facing blockchain was scalability, how to process more transactions per second. The Bitcoin network could handle 5 or 6 transactions per second, and Ethereum was a bit better, processing around 20 transactions per second. However, these figures were far from meeting the requirements for blockchain use.

In such a scenario, EOS's million TPS made everyone go crazy. It's important to note that during the peak of Alibaba's Singles' Day event, transaction volume would reach hundreds of thousands per second.

However, after EOS's mainnet had been running for 4 months, the highest TPS achieved was only 3996, a far cry from the million TPS that was initially touted.

While EOS fell far short of expectations, Ethereum, on the other hand, gradually improved its performance through Layer 2 scaling solutions. Competitors like the BNB Chain, Solana, and others quickly rose to prominence, erasing EOS's "performance advantage" entirely.

People realized that the so-called "million TPS" was actually a carefully crafted word magic—BM quietly added a premise to this number: it must rely on an infinitely scalable sidechain ecosystem. In his vision, if one chain could process 4000 transactions, having 100 parallel sidechains could achieve 400,000 TPS. However, in reality, by 2023, the EOS ecosystem only had 3 sidechains launched, with two of them becoming "ghost chains" due to developer exodus. BM's response to this was to suddenly announce on Twitter that he was "researching anti-inflation algorithms," while EOS had already fallen out of the top 20 in market capitalization.

Usability was EOS's most fundamental issue.

Initially, EOS hit a user pain point by offering free transactions. However, users quickly realized that although EOS transactions were feeless, they needed to stake tokens to exchange for CPU resources. During network congestion, to transfer 10 EOS, users needed to stake the equivalent of 5 EOS in CPU resources—essentially locking up users' funds. During a DApp traffic peak in 2020, 2000 EOS could only exchange for 1.3 seconds of CPU time, requiring ordinary users to repeat the process more than ten times to complete a transaction.

Furthermore, BM also set a RAM supply limit, which led to RAM speculation in the market, causing RAM prices to skyrocket by 100 times. Developers had to spend a high cost to purchase storage resources. In 2018, some speculators began hoarding RAM, and within a few months, the RAM price surged from 0.01 EOS/KB to 0.9 EOS/KB, severely impacting DApp development, with many new projects directly giving up on EOS.

Ultimately, this resource management model made EOS's user experience even worse than Ethereum's: on Ethereum, users can directly pay Gas fees to complete transactions; but on EOS, users must first learn a complex resource staking mechanism and even have to spend a significant amount of money to buy CPU and RAM, hindering the development of the DApp ecosystem.

Looking back from today's perspective, it is actually challenging to understand how, with such a poor user experience, EOS had a period of eruption in late 2018 and early 2019: DApps primarily focused on gambling were very popular on EOS.

Data from December 24, 2018, showed that over the past week, a comprehensive comparison of the DApp ecosystems of the three major public chains—ETH, EOS, TRON—revealed: Total user count (people): EOS (75,346) > TRON (45,777) > ETH (33,495); Total transaction count (transactions): EOS (23,878,369) > TRON (13,803,322) > ETH (413,019); Total transaction volume (USD): EOS ($345,489,773) > TRON ($135,201,171) > ETH ($44,272,856);

It is evident that at that time, the EOS community truly had high hopes, and the ecosystem's prosperity surpassed that of ETH and TRON. Perhaps it was also because of this "one dream in Nanke" that the veterans of the crypto world now nostalgically remember EOS.

Governance Failure: Vote Buying, Centralization, and Community Division

Of course, when we talk about governance now, we can only smile, but at that time, EOS's governance was highly anticipated. BM firmly believed that, under his careful design, the 21 nodes would make this network far superior to Ethereum.

He believed that this network would have 2/3 good actors, everyone's behavior would be benevolent, and malicious nodes would be voted out by the users, creating a perfect utopia. The reality proved him too naive.

Three months after the EOS mainnet went live, node collusion has become an unwritten rule. In order to receive EOS block rewards, no one can stop the mutual voting between whales and nodes. But that's not even the most outrageous part—the absurdity lies in the nodes' own misconduct.

EOS's mechanism involves 21 super nodes taking turns to produce blocks. At one point, a user's funds were stolen by a hacker. The solution was for the 21 nodes to blacklist the hacker's address to prevent further transfers. This should have been a routine and simple operation, but one node failed to blacklist the address. As a result, the hacker was able to transfer the funds during the time that node was producing blocks, as if nothing had happened.

Brendan Blumer (BM) once tried to use an EOS Constitution to constrain such behavior, only to quickly realize that the constitution was toothless: since the super nodes themselves benefited from collusion, they had no incentive to enforce the rules laid out in the constitution. The arbitration mechanism was completely ineffective, lacking any real binding power.

In 2019, BM completely abandoned constitutional governance, declaring that the EOS community should evolve freely without interference in the super node election process. By 2020, EOS's super nodes had devolved into a battleground for exchanges, mining pools, and capital consortiums, rendering the voting power of ordinary token holders meaningless. What was supposed to be a model of decentralized governance through Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) had morphed into a crypto version of oligarchic politics.

In terms of governance, EOS also faced a significant challenge: prior to the EOS mainnet launch, BM proposed an innovative "EOS Constitution" aimed at using code and rules to govern behavior on the network. However, within a few short months, the constitution underwent multiple revisions, leaving the community increasingly dissatisfied. In June 2018, the original EOS constitution allowed super nodes to arbitrate transactions, but due to power abuse, BM decided to amend the constitution weeks later to prohibit nodes from intervening in transactions. In 2019, BM suddenly advocated for abolishing the constitution in favor of "user contract governance," plunging the community into confusion regarding the future governance of EOS. This ever-changing governance model eroded developers' and investors' trust in EOS.

During this crisis, BM and Block.one (EOS's parent company) gradually shifted their focus from the EOS mainnet to the EOSIO software. BM believed that "the future of blockchain lies in enterprise applications," leading to the promotion of EOSIO to enable enterprises to build their private chains, rather than focusing on optimizing the EOS public chain. Core updates to the EOS mainnet nearly came to a standstill, with critical upgrades such as cross-chain functionality and storage scalability languishing.

The result was a rapid decline in EOS's developer ecosystem: while the Ethereum community thrived with vibrant DeFi, NFT, and other applications, the number of DApp developers on EOS gradually dwindled. By 2022, EOS was losing nearly 100 developers per month, and some EOS explorer and wallet projects even shut down directly.

External Strangulation: Miner Massacre, Bear Market, and Block.one's Silence

At the end of 2019, the price of EOS dropped below $5, reaching a low of $1.8 the following year, plummeting over 90% from its all-time high of $23. As super nodes faced a survival crisis, developers fled, and market liquidity dried up, the EOS ecosystem was in desperate need of a rescue from its parent company, Block.one.

As we all know, Block.one raised $4.2 billion in the early days, making it the largest financing event in crypto history. In theory, this funding could support the long-term development of EOS, assist developers, drive technological innovation, and ensure ecosystem growth. When EOS ecosystem developers begged for help, Block.one cut a $50,000 check—a sum insufficient to pay a Silicon Valley programmer's salary for two months.

"Where did the $4.2 billion go?" the community asked.

In an email from BM to Block.one shareholders on March 19, 2019, part of the answer was revealed: as of February 2019, Block.one's assets (including cash and invested funds) totaled $3 billion.

Of this $3 billion, about $2.2 billion was invested in US government bonds, referred to in the email as "liquid fiat assets."

Some information about the invested funds can be found publicly: gaming company Forte, NFT platform Immutable, and a vacation hotel in Puerto Rico, among others. Overall, the companies invested in shared a common feature: little connection to EOS.

Before Bullish became a core business, Block.one still held an ace up its sleeve: the social product Voice deployed based on EOSIO smart contracts, the only product with a business relationship to EOS. To build Voice, Block.one invested $150 million, with the largest expense being $30 million to acquire a domain name, sold by the publicly traded company with the most Bitcoin, MicroStrategy, as mentioned earlier.

However, as if cursed by fate, Voice's first launch event lasted half an hour, fell short of expectations, garnered much disappointment, and caused a sharp drop in the EOS price. Half a year later, on the day the Voice iOS version was launched on the Apple Store, various malfunctions and Bdangsug appeared again. The Voice website displayed "Error 1020" and claimed the site was "using a security service to protect itself from online attacks." EOS holders were completely disappointed, and Voice finally announced in September 2023 that it would gradually shut down.

Project Launched by Block.one

The thunder is loud but the rain is small. It seems to be Block.one's consistent style in investment projects. Since then, Block.one has not made any major investment moves and has completely switched to a low-key approach. Today, Block.one is sitting on 164,000 Bitcoins, meaning its net worth has grown from $3 billion in 2019 to $16 billion now, a fivefold increase, making it a liquidity management master.

Without any concrete DeFi, NFT, or DApp ecosystem support plans, in stark contrast, the Ethereum Foundation and Solana Foundation continue to subsidize developers and drive technological innovation, while Block.one has done almost nothing.

An early EOS investor angrily questioned on Reddit: "When we invested in EOS, it was because it promised to disrupt blockchain, not for Block.one to take this money and play the Bitcoin market!"

Currently, although Block.one is the second-largest holder of Bitcoin after MicroStrategy, with a total of 160,000 BTC worth $16 billion, EOS, which has not received any support from these raised funds, continues to decline.

The governance chaos at Block.one is even more astonishing. Block.one is increasingly resembling a "family business" centered around CEO BB, with BM not part of this family.

Sister as CMO: CEO Brendan Blumer's sister, Abby, was parachuted in as Chief Marketing Officer, with her only visible "accomplishment" being to change the EOS brand color from tech blue to a "softer Morandi gray."

Mother as Venture Capitalist: Blumer's mother, Nancy, heads the EOSVC venture capital fund, and the social app Voice that she led has been online for a year with less than 10,000 users, yet it has consumed $150 million.

BM's Puppet Show: Founder BM revealed on Twitter that he has "no decision-making power" and can only helplessly watch the team pour resources into the enterprise-level toolkit EOSIO—a project tailored for giants like Walmart, completely unrelated to the EOS mainnet.

In 2021, the community initiated the "Forking Rebellion" in an attempt to sever Block.one's control. As a representative of the community, the EOS Foundation stepped forward to negotiate with Block.one. However, over the course of a month, the two sides discussed multiple scenarios but failed to reach an agreement. In the end, the EOS Foundation, together with 17 nodes, revoked Block.one's power and ousted it from the EOS leadership. Without its parent company, EOS began to resemble more and more like a DAO.

After the split between EOS and Block.one, the EOS community engaged in a years-long legal battle over the ownership of the funds raised initially, but to this day, Block.one still retains ownership and usage rights.

Even more ludicrously, since 2024, BM's Twitter content has hardly touched on blockchain anymore. The only technical discussion was sporadically about database optimization. In contrast, his focus has completely shifted to theological evangelism, with content heavily concentrated on interpreting the "Bible," world-ending prophecies of geopolitical conflicts, and criticisms of mainstream Christianity...

BM's Twitter Content

Looking back at this seven-year-long crypto epic, the collapse of EOS had long been a cautionary tale: no matter how high the TPS, how sophisticated the resource model, or how complex the user experience to the point of deterring ordinary people, everything becomes meaningless. The once self-proclaimed "Ethereum Killer" ultimately succumbed to its own economic model, governance chaos, and technological stagnation quagmire.

Seven years ago, EOS raised a staggering $4.2 billion in its ICO, once hailed as the most brilliant fundraising miracle in blockchain history; seven years later, its story has become the biggest "joke" in the crypto world.

In the end, EOS didn't kill Ethereum; it killed itself first.

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