The EOS community has started a massive experiment to discover the possibility of combining the best crypto contract attributes, people agreements and dispute solution. EOS became the first blockchain based on the Constitution. New blockchain birth along with the decentralized management system may seem pretty difficult for common people. Even in the EOS system someone wants to copy all the existing legal frameworks, while others want to preserve “The Code is a Law” conception. Today with the Crypto Lions team help we’ll try to understand what is EOS and to whom it may be necessary.

So tell us, please, how did you get involved in it? Why were you interested in crypto currencies and crypto community?

I studied the Bitcoin technology at an early stage, since I was writing articles for the libertarian journal. After the first article they asked me if I preferred to receive $20 or a Bitcoin? I answered that a Bitcoin looked interesting but I would take $20. For the second article and further ones they paid me only in Bitcoins and that is why I had an opportunity to learn how it works. I received 7-8 Bitcoins instead of $20. I sold them long ago. I didn’t even wait for higher price. But it was enough for me to be interested in this field. Me and my colleague Bohdan have been building crypto projects since 2013. We created Bitcoin Block Explorer and a game. And then we got interested in EOS and looked for a chance to dive in this ecosystem. We decided to become block producers. We worked a lot, almost nonstop, and reached the TOP-21, then the TOP-10 of block producers, then we were knocked out but we are still in business.

For the people who don’t know about block producers, can you explain how it works and why they all are hardly trying to become a block producers in the EOS community?

Blockchain is a decentralized system, that is why in every new blockchain there is the problem: “Who will build blocks”? In Bitcoin you have to solve mathematical problem every ten minutes. Who does it – has a right to place next block to the blockchain. Powerful miners have huge areas with farms solving crypto arithmetic tasks to build these blocks every ten minutes. EOS was built on a different system which was called DPoS (Delegated proof-of-stake). Here the people who possess the EOS tokens can vote for those who will produce blocks. Now there are more than 200 candidates and every two minutes the vote recounting starts again. Only TOP-21 has the right to add blocks. The process is very fast. They say that it’s the decentralization compromise but I don’t think so. In my opinion, EOS is better decentralized than Bitcoin. There is a certain order and every one builds blocks in turn. It’s much more effective for the bandwidth capability and you can build real programs on EOS.

How to become a block producer and what is necessary for that?

You can download specific API and create a special command to the EOS blockchain that you want to become a block producer. If you want to know more, you can visit our Jungle Testnet. I think that about a half of the block producers studied through this system.

Do I need to have some token balance to become a block producer?

No, you don’t. You need only votes. We can see powerful technical teams bonded to a large exchanges (such as Bitfinex). There are block producers giving a lot of information on their activity. In community, they appreciate the possibility to become localized in any part of the world. And everyone thinks: “What can I do for the community to get more votes?”

The EOS Constitution prohibits the buying of votes. Who can control it and how the block producer will respond if this happens?

This is a very timely issue, because this topic is actively discussed. Block producers have the right to “throw” others, but only if more than 2/3 (15 block producers) agree. But they don’t want to do it, because it is not their job and is beyond their competence. They are talking about the centralization and about a lot of control for some people. I mean there is such a possibility, but the block producers don`t do that. There is a very specific evidence that some producers are buying votes and they even advertise it on their site. There is weak evidence that others are doing it as well. People see it, but the question remains open: “How hard will we block it”?

The blockchain formation marked the human retreat from technology. Why those two factors were combined back in EOS?

We have a bright examples in Ethereum when because of 1 mistake people lost 300 million tokens. There also was a situation when the fork happened and Ethereum divided. Vitaliy Buterin wanted to “backout” the system and start it again from the certain block, which is completely contrary to decentralization. We have examples of mistakes in the code itself. EOS can build the human level above the code to eliminate mistakes like this. It’s very important topic, because the EOS founder Dan Larimer suggested to significantly decrease the human control level. People will only check the Code. But the others want a well-developed management system, they hold meetings every week. In September-October all the EOS-community will vote if they want a limited Constitution, or the one with more rights in the human control system. I don’t know what will happen, but no doubt it is interesting and important. But if the people’s opinions differ, the EOS 2 will appear.

Tell us more about the community. Where are the EOS ideas most supported?

The majority of the EOS community is Telegram users. Although the majority of Chinese people use WeChat. We try to combine these two platforms, all of them will be able to communicate. There is a Russian-speaking part of the community, but about half of the community is English-speaking. There are Chinese-speaking and Korean-speaking people as well.

What about the situation in Ukraine? Do the developers propose their help or try to join the EOS community?

We meet new people all the time. We found awesome guys who found a bug and “ruined” our Jungle Testnet test network. It is great that they immediately contacted with us and we passed this info to the main developers.

What exactly Crypto Lions do as a separate company?

Our main task is to be block producers. We even held the 2nd place in TOP-21, for a long time we were on the 8th, but then we slipped on the 30 place. We are the technical team. There is no “giant whale” with lots of tokens behind us. We are known mostly for our Jungle Testnet test network. It was important before the mainchain launching. Everyone trained on it, we found a lot of important bugs. Also, we built the http://eosnetworkmonitor.io/ monitor which shows the chain status at certain moment of time. We have the smaller project ZEOS where people can buy an EOS account using Bitcoin. Another one has just started to grow, but many people are already interested in it and we will work on it with our partners. It helps to ensure a promise with EOS tokens. If you want to promise something to a community, or a man, or a woman, you can freeze EOS under this promise. And when the day will come the tokens will return or disappear according to the result of the promise fulfillment. It is very important because, as we have mentioned above, the block producers work on the edge of law. One can say: “I am going to work fair” and “here, I froze several thousands of dollars”. The EOS community will evaluate this effort and vote for him. It’s about the level of trust. For example, when EOS shops will be opened, people will see who promise to do something and who can be trusted.

What is Jungle Testnet?

You`d better ask my colleague Bohdan. I will say that this is the EOS-chain developed by us. When Dapp developers want to test their program, they create an account on Jungle and we give them tokens, so they could test everything. If someone wants to learn to be a block producer, they connect to Jungle and create blocks there. It started in April. We worked really hard on it about 2-3 months before the mainchain launching. There were such adventures, when everything collapsed, but we gathered back. There are articles about our adventures with Jungle Testnet. One article you can find on our site https://cryptolions.io/ It’s really funny. Even the EOS founder Dan Larimer came and asked to test something.

What are you planning next?

We are developing eosnetworkmonitor. Also, we really want to translate our sites. We take part in different meetings to expand the EOS community and help the developers. We have already translated about 100 articles in Ukrainian and Russian with a voice-over to build a bridge for the no English-speaking community, because there are many wonderful developers, but not all of them can understand the EOS functioning.

Recently you have visited Korea. You made a great speech and stayed there for several days. Was it interesting? What did they ask about? In what they were mostly interested? Does their community differ a lot from us?

There was a lot of people. It was exciting to meet those, with whom you had been communicating online for about 4 months, but newer in real life. In my opinion, the most important was just to sit and talk, to share some thoughts. It was just super! It is hard to explain the difference between the communities. They differ a lot. Chinese and Korean block producers build product as we do, others deal with communication. Those, closely bounded to stock exchange, differ greatly.

As far as I know, they have a difficult situation with state regulation there. In your opinion, does the state have to interfere with the work of the crypto community?

We barely talked about it. We had a general feeling that everything would be resolved soon. It seems this is the beginning of the new economics. The developing countries (like Ukraine) should make comfortable conditions for crypto entrepreneurs. We really wanted to register as a Ukrainian company, because our team is here. But due to the imperfect legislation (not all activities are defined), we will be a German company.

But if the law system changes, will you change your jurisdiction?

Yes! Or we will open a branch. Many businessmen work very uncertainly now, because the crypto industry is neither restricted, nor legalized. I think that Bitcoin miners feel comfortable here, they`ve got used to the situation. But as block producers, we are public speaking, we are open and trying to be super transparent, and if we are not sure about something, then we do not do this. We are trying to do everything clearly, legally and therefore we decided to register in Germany, where all the rules on cryptocurrencies are very clearly defined. These are additional work for us, because they also have their own limitations, but we decided to be super transparent and legal.

And the last question, a little provocative, probably. You have had an ІСО open during the year. You have collected enough funds but in May you started to dump Ethereum. The crypto community worried about dumping of the big massive, because the price is falling accordingly. How can you comment this situation and what is your opinion on the current situation on the market?

I am not sure that it was BlockOne (the company which developed EOS), who was selling. After the ІСО, the substantial amount of gathered fund of Ethereum belonged to them. The value was $4 billions for that period and it was a lot, but we`ve lost one third for now. Despite everything even 1 billion is great. I am not sure if EOS was involved in it, because the whole market fell down. But this is the new thing and nobody knows its price. Historically, all the new world changing technologies looked like bobbles. When the railroads were developing, everyone was buying shares of the companies somehow connected to the railroad. When Internet appeared, there were many bubble companies. We`ve also seen such moments in crypto. Now we can say that cryptocurrencies can change the world, they will have significant influence. I can’t even predict the value EOS will have soon. Will it be 1 billion, or 4 billion, or 100 million? Starting from 80th, the Software programs only had been manipulating with information, but they changed the world this way. Only now they start to manipulate with prices.

Hello, nice to meet you. I am glad you have time to talk. How did you get acquainted with the cryptocurrencies and cryptomarket and how did you learn about it?

I work in IT almost all my life… Probably I started at 7. I was lucky, my parents worked in this field and I mastered computer fast. I joined the cruptocurrency world in 2013 when I met Roman. He introduced the Bitcoin technology to me and offered me to develop Block Explorer and one simple game. That was the start. I am a developer. I started to write code, learned how everything worked and I liked it.

Why did you decide to build a team, to become Crypto Lions?

We all had our startups. Some of them were successful, some of them failed. In late February we spoke with Roman and he said: “There is a project, EOS, we can apply as block producers”. I agreed. By the way, it was really funny, because at first I signed up alone, but then Roman suggested me to sign up as a team to look more serious. So we organized Crypto Lions together, because we understood that it was responsible and serious job. Everything is written using blockchain. You can see that at first I signed alone and then as Crypto Lions.

As a developer can you explain me better who is the target user of EOS? Who may be interested in it?

Anyone! Anyone who is interested in fast calculations. In Bitcoin, when you do a transaction, you must wait 10 minutes for it to go, and then at least 20 minutes for three confirmations. At least half an hour. If you want to pay for coffee will you wait 30 minutes for confirmation? EOS provides the fast transaction process, because the block comes every half a second. So we have great flexibility and speed. Another great plus is a free-of-charge basis of transactions. You create account, pay once for the random-access memory you use, after that all the transactions will be free-of-charge. You can make large transactions, small transactions and microtransactions.

Tell us in detail how does the blockchain work? As far as I understand, there was a relation to ERC 20 tokens. How does it work? How do you call this consensus algorithm?

The relation to the ERC 20 existed only at the beginning, because it was ІСО EOS and they sold a certain amount of tokens to Ethereum. When the EOS-chain started in June, 1, the EOS contract on Ethereum was frozen and it was impossible to transfer tokens between those addresses. We made the extract about all the transactions and wallets and transferred it to the blockchain EOS. Everyone, who had invested on the ІСО stage, received a separate account and the same amount of tokens, but on a separate blockchain. This is how we moved from ERC 20 to the current EOS-token.

And what about blockchain? I`ve read that it has some interesting name… Delegated Proof-of-Stake.

The main concept is that everyone can become a block producer. You have to sign certain papers and provide your data to meet the community requirements. Moreover, you need to have the properly configured equipment that would provide the production of blocks. Then one has to collect a certain amount of votes to become a block producer. Token holders vote in blockchain; they execute a specific command to vote. The vote power is defined by the amount of the “frozen” tokens on your account. You can define it with certain parameters. When someone votes, he doesn’t spend any assets, only a certain amount of his vote for the block producers by placing the check mark in checkboxes. Block producers have their votes added. The TOP-21 start to produce blocks. They get in a schedule and everyone has a slot to produce 12 blocks. Every producer has 6 seconds to produce these blocks. All the processes are totally automated. Producers-loosers are changed automatically. The vote is counted immediately. If some producer will receive more votes, he will replace another one. To produce the blocks in TOP-21 you have to possess special equipment and certain amount of resources.

How do you measure resources?

You need a lot of random-access memory (RAM). This is the greatest need. You also need powerful processors because they handle transactions. There are great amounts of transactions. The newest record is 3700-3900 per second.

Can a block producer use simple PC?

Yes, but you need a server computer which has many RAM-cards and powerful processors. For example, we have 7 servers to provide the work. They have subdivided traffic and load balance to provide the access to our nodes and give the information from the EOS blockchain to lager amount of people.

The EOS blockchain is totally decentralized, isn`t it? What do you think?

I think it is. The fact that the small Ukrainian team hits the TOP can be one of the marks of decentralization. In my opinion the initial token distribution was performed fairly. It had been lasting all the year round and anyone could take part and try.

Tell us about Jungle Testnet. What is it and how can we use it?

Jungle Testnet is our baby. It all started when we met with It was at the end of February/beginning of March. To master EOS we had to try it in action. There were the early versions of EOS. They developed from Dawn 1, 2, 3, 4 and then were released. We started from Dawn 2. We created empty blocks because we couldn’t create any transactions. We decided to create the real environment to master EOS. The environment had to work not only with the local computer. It was possible to build a network, which could copy the released blockchain. We wanted to make it totally decentralized and we did it. Almost all block producers, who started at the same time, joined us and learned from us. We obtained the possibility to deal with the code and check it ourselves. We wrote different scripts. Some of them were used to start the main blockchain. When Dawn 3 was released, we tried to launch smart contracts. The start of Dawn 2 was easy, but the start of Dawn 3 was almost impossible. And Crypto Lions were the first ones who started the test network on Dawn 3. This way we mastered Jungle and helped others to learn.

By the way, about the smart contracts. I`ve read that even if the smart contract is completed, in case of raised problem, people… Can block producers solve the problem?

Not exactly. There is the EOS Core Arbitration Forum (ECAF) service. We had already passed the situations when block producers blocked certain accounts of people who committed a violation, stole money or something else. When certain evidence was provided, this service has issued a blocking document and block-producers have blocked this account. There are 16-18 frozen accounts and we can’t do anything with them. Now we are testing another step for Sudo block producers, which will give more rights. These rights will allow to reverse transactions and change keys to other accounts. But people have different opinions. Some of them think that hereby block producers will receive too much power. We want to test it to understand that it will do more good than harm. It was one of the functions that we announced in the whitepaper, and I think that it will be implemented asap.

By the way, speaking about whitepaper. Many projects write down immediately the rejections of obligations, from the fact that they offer to buy some assets and do not necessarily have to present something. The EOS has a constitution on the contrary, which dictates certain rules and obligations. What do you think, will future projects have the similar constitutions? Is it possible?

I think, yes. One of the features of the EOS is Ricardian Contracts – a contract written in human language, not a code. Accordingly, every smart contract has this RC. If someone uses smart contract, he has to agree with its terms. All the block producers signed the Ricardian Contract system.

So will ІСО support mutual limitation system in future?

Yes, I think so. For example, EOS allows us to build a human approach, to insure your holdings and feel more comfortable.

What is the future of EOS and Crypto Lions?

We will continue to develop all we started. Like Jungle Testnet. This is the main platform for today. We are testing all the new updates from EOS in our system. We are the shield, which takes all the hits before passing the updates to the mainnet. The second project is the eosnetworkmonitor, which is used to monitor the network state and help the others to check their nodes state, their place, number of gathered votes, their producing state, answer`s rate and other technical data. Also, we have another project – Truth Bonds – the guarantee of truth. Besides, we have a lot of ideas, but we need more time to implement them and to tell about them.