According to the blockchain testing company Whiteblock, the cryptocurrency and blockchain EOS might not be a Blockchain after all, but rather a cloud service for computation.

What is EOS?

EOS is software that introduces a blockchain architecture designed to enable vertical and horizontal scaling of decentralised applications. This is achieved through an operating system-like construct upon which applications can be built.

The resulting technology is a blockchain architecture that has the potential to scale to millions of transactions per second, eliminates user fees and allows for quick and easy deployment of decentralised applications. It started as an ERC20 token but migrated to its platform in June 2018. EOS is set out to solve the same issues at Ethereum but uses a proof-of-stake system to decide how blocks are validated.

What did the blockchain testing results show?

However, recent findings argue that EOS is not a blockchain after all. Whiteblock, the benchmarking firm, made a replica of EOS and applied real work simulations to determine its performance. Whiteblock launched the test project in September 2018, and after two months of testing the EOS network under a variety of environments, the group have shared the raw data for the research groups to evaluate and interpret conclusions about the state of the network.

Based on the results, the investigation leads to several conclusions about the EOS software. First and foremost and maybe the most surprising news is that EOS might not be a blockchain. Whiteblock calls it a distributed homogeneous database management system, which means that their transactions are not cryptographically validated.

The tests also show EOS not to be a decentralised technology. “EOS block producers are highly centralised, and users can only access the network using block producers as intermediaries. Block producers are a single point of failure for the entire system.”

In addition to, and perhaps as a result of the lack of the decentralisation, EOS is faced with a key security weakness. Whiteblock found EOS to be vulnerable to a Sybil attack, where fake identities can be used to subvert the system.

According to EOS whitepaper, the cryptocurrency can perform thousands of transactions per second. However, the test result shows that this is not true at all. The actual performance dropped below 50 transactions per second.

“During tests with real-world conditions of 50 [milliseconds] of round-trip latency and 0.01 percent packet loss, performance dropped below 50 TPS, putting the system near the performance that exists in Ethereum,” Whiteblock claims.

Whiteblock will live stream the EOS benchmark tests in November, and you can register for the upcoming event here.

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