EOS is one of the newer blockchains that was highly anticipated and emerged in 2018. Just almost 2 years later after the mainnet launch, it's sitting in the top 10 ranked coins by market cap.

Rise to Fame

Block.One is the company behind the EOS blockchain and while there is no official origin story of the name, some speculate on what EOS stands for things like "Everyone's Operating System". But looking back at greek mythology, EOS was a Titan goddess. She was the daughter of Hyperion and Theia and the goddess of Dawn as the fork updates for EOS is appropriately named "Dawn".

To understand EOS's rise into the top 10 we have to look back at its creator, none other than Bock.One's CTO, Dan Larimer.

Larimer is a skilled computer scientist and programmer that invented the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanisms that have been widely adopted on other blockchains. This was during his time working on BitShares and got a little scolding from the infamous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, back when he was still on the BitcoinTalk forum. Larimer is known as bytemaster.

See the snack machine thread, I outline how a payment processor could verify payments well enough, actually really well (much lower fraud rate than credit cards), in something like 10 seconds or less. If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry. -Satoshi Nakamoto on BitcoinTalk

This helped drive the early iterations of DPoS blockchains that Larimer started, Bitshares and then later Steem. Bitshares was built as a Decentralized Exchange (DEX) and Steem as a social media platform.

If you happen to have been on the Steemit platform during 2017, you might have seen a bit of an internal "Civil War" scenario between Larimer and Steemit, inc. While lots of controversies swirled over Larimer's sudden resignation from Steemit, inc. both parties officially stated they parted on good terms.

However, there were public posts that were later deleted of Larimer having a discrepancy and little squabbles back and forth with his former team. One of the key features of Steem's blockchain is that it's an immutable public ledger, so we are able to see what the original post that Larimer deleted.

Since Larimer's departure from Steemit, inc. he began his focus on building a new blockchain that is today known as EOS.

EOS had a record Initial Coin Offering (ICO) raising over $4 Billion USD over the course of a year. That's without even having a live product. While the launch of EOS had it's growing pains with a crash that happened just 48hrs after the mainnet went live, just like many blockchain projects EOS has gone through issues of centralization, network resources, and scalability. Today we now have EOSIO 2.

Here he is back in June 2019 announcing EOSIO 2.

Watch the full keynote event here.

As more development continues through 2020, Block.One also announced in their keynote on launching their own blockchain-based social media platform running on EOS called Voice.

Social Media

In December 2019, the Voice team announced they are aiming for a beta launch on Valentine's Day February 14, 2020.

CEO Brendan Blumer, and CTO Dan Larimer, say their reason for Voice is the current state of social media:

Social media is broken. Designed to use us, our data and attention is harvested into trillion dollar profits for large corps, big tech, banks, and Wall Street interests, while we struggle to protect ourselves against the consequences of having our attention auctioned to anonymous parties, and our personal information traded on the open market. This misalignment of interest between us and the platforms we once trusted continues to increasingly expose us to data profiling, identity theft, cyberbullying, and persuasive misinformation. It’s never been more difficult to know what is real amongst the growing sea of manufactured propaganda intended to manipulate our thoughts and control our behavior.

Could this be a form of redemption for Dan Larimer for his work with Steemit, inc.?

It seems in 2020, for blockchains to survive they are going to have to have a social media type platform built using a native coin to compete with the growing list of platforms that are up and running.

While EOS is currently the #7 coin by market cap, It's impressive to see a coin that was launched in 2018 join the top 10 and still hold its rankings.

How far will the EOS goddess rise? We will have to see in the dawning of a new decade.