A website counting down towards EOS’s mainnet launch currently states that the cryptocurrency’s mainnet has just launched. On June 9 (01:00 UTC), the EOS Mainnet Launch Group (EMLG) members unanimously decided to go ahead with the launch of the EOS blockchain.
Reportedly, the official “launch sequence” process began later that day and is scheduled to be completed within the next two days. For the EOS blockchain to go live, there were a number of steps and processes that must be satisfactorily completed.
It's time to launch the public EOS chain! Join us to be part of history. https://t.co/j9kUOZqLhn #eos #EOSLAUNCH #blockchain #crypto pic.twitter.com/yyGLxfqu4j
— EOS Go (@go_eos) June 10, 2018
One of these steps is meshing with the seed nodes. In order to facilitate the process, the EMLG was to recommend a number of trusted peers to mesh with, in addition to the related software and system requirements. The EMLG was also to determine how the validation process on the EOS network is to be performed. Based on the results of the validation process, the mainnet could go live.
Another important step that must be completed is voting to appoint the first 21 block producers. There will reportedly be official notifications posted by block producer candidates. The voting process will require 150 million tokens to be spent, and once this has been done, the chain will be officially designated as the EOS mainnet and will be accessible to the platform’s community.
Should token holders decide at this stage to unstake their tokens, they may do so while also being able to reclaim them after 72 hours. In order to vote, there are a number of tools that have been developed by community developers. These, however, have not passed any official security audit, and as such aren’t recommended. Entering private keys in a third-party tool could see holders lose all their funds.
The only voting tool that can reliably be used is one approved by Block.one, the company behind EOS, a command-line based tool called “cleos”, which is bundled with the EOSIO software.
Questionable Governance and Critical Vulnerabilities
The EOS project has received a lot of criticism and has experienced a number of setbacks in the past few weeks. Notably, the EOS mainnet launch had to be postponed, partly because critical security vulnerabilities pointed out by a Chinese cybersecurity company, but also because of what seemed to be protocol violation issues.
Block producers purportedly decided to print an extra 19,000 EOS tokens in order to resolve a Random Access Memory problem. This, however, appeared to be in violation of the EOS protocol’s constitution, which sets a cap on the number of tokens that are to be in circulation.
At press time, EOS is trading at $12.37, down from a $14.7 high the cryptocurrency reached earlier this month at the time its mainnet was supposed to go live. EOS’ market cap is of $11 billion.