In case you have been living under a rock for the last couple of months, you may have heard that there are some troubles brewing in the EOS.io camp. There are quite a few disgruntled users, developers and BP candidates that are not happy with the direction the EOS project is taking. They believe that the promises made by its mastermind, Dan Larimer, have not been kept or proposed changes are too slow to materialize.

Two main issues that have become the cornerstone of criticism are:

Lack of Decentralization

High RAM prices

LACK OF DECENTRALIZATION

Main criticism of EOS.io is lack of decentralization that was originally considered to be one of the differentiating factors of this protocol vs. Ethereum and Bitcoin. EOS counter-argument has always been that the governing body is represented by 21 independent Block Producers, as opposed to a handful of heavily centralized large mining pools controlling mining of Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Critics of EOS, however, argued that control over these 21 BPs lies in the hands of shareholders voting to elect them. The larger the share these investors hold, the more power they have for BP election. During its mainnet launch event 90% of EOS tokens were held by only 1.6% of token holders. And 10% of all the tokens were held by one party – Block.One, a management company behind EOS.io.

Telos proposes to solve this problem by airdropping Telos tokens 1-for-1 to each EOS token, but capping each distribution to 40,000 token. This ensures that the whales who own significantly larger portion of EOS tokens, and therefore, can swing the votes, are capped at a 40,000 tokens maximum and thus cannot impact the election of BPs.

RAM PRICES ARE TOO DAMN HIGH

Second argument of the EOS critics is that the RAM prices are just too damn high

During the speculative bubble, which luckily only lasted a few days, RAM prices reached almost 1 EOS/KB. During the time of this writing they have decreased to 0.166 EOS /KB, or $0.92/KB at 1 EOS = $5.56.

Numerous EOS-based projects estimated that in order to achieve their customer growth targets, it will cost them nearly $10M just to acquire accounts for those customers. In this blog post folks at Lumeos run through their estimate of costs to achieve a goal of 1M users:

“$.31(cost per kb) * 4(kb for accounts) * 1,000,000(first million users) = 1,240,000 EOS or $9,920,000”

Note that when this post was made price of RAM was 3x as cheap as it is today!

Telos plans to address RAM prices issues in several ways. First of all, they announced a grant to support creation of FREE first 1 million addresses. Second of all, RAM will be released in strategic portion and only on a as-needed basis to remove any potential speculation efforts. Finally, RAM will be sold at specific predetermined prices to serious developers only.

WEAKNESSES OF TELOS

As in any other project there are also weaknesses associated with creating a fork of an existing project with large following.

Unlike it’s older, more famous brother, EOS, Telos does not have much brand awareness. You see its name pop up in discussions here and there, but very few people still have heard of it.

Another weakness is the fact that Telos has infinitely smaller funding than EOS that raised $4B during the ICO and has claimed to allocate $1B of this to fund development of various dApps. Pool of developers working on Telos will also be significantly shallower than that of EOS.

IS THERE A FUTURE FOR TELOS?

Nevertheless, Telos seems to be gaining some traction. In its latest blog post, Telos Foundation made a few announcements, including the first “go/no go vote date” for launching the network: September 28th, 2018, publishing of an official constitution, creation of the TIP-5 standard (equivalent to a well-known ERC20 Ethereum token standard) and several other developments.

Our friends at Lynx Wallet, who we covered before here and here, already announced integration of Telos into its Lynx wallet.

Time will tell whether there is really a future for Telos, but one thing is obvious: as Plan B quite a few EOS-based projects are keeping a close eye on developments around Telos. If the EOS-pertaining issues discussed above and some others won’t be resolved any time soon, smart projects will have an opportunity to jump ship and make a seamless transition onto the sibling project, which could be Telos.

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