EOS Blockchain plans second round before April’s EVM launch
A blockchain that raised $4 billion in its initial coin offering (ICO) with little to show for it in its early years is aiming for crypto glory again – years on is almost written off by skeptics.
EOS, whose native eos (EOS) tokens once reached a market cap of $14 billion at a lifetime peak, is preparing for a complete resurgence in network activity and growth with extensive support planned for application developers.
That’s thanks to the efforts of the EOS Network Foundation, whose CEO Yves La Rose is leading plans for a consensus mechanism upgrade, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) solution and an overall renewed growth strategy, per the crypto research firm Messari.
The EVM network is slated for an April 14 release, with updates and improvements planned in the weeks and months that follow.
“By combining the performance of EOS with the familiarity of Ethereum, Solidity developers are in for a treat,” Rose tweeted last week. “At 800+ exchanges per second, the $EOS EVM will be BY FAR the fastest EVM, benchmarked 3x faster than Solana + BNB and 25x faster than Avax”
EVMs refer to the environment where all Ethereum accounts and smart contracts live, and act as a virtual computer used by developers to create decentralized applications (dApps). When deployed on other blockchains, EVMs can allow developers to build dApps and DeFi applications similar to how they would on Ethereum.
EVMs are a big part of EOS’s future plans.
“Many of the developers who have left EOS have not done so because they want to, but because Ethereum, for all its shortcomings, is where the action is,” the foundation said in a post in January.
“EVM compatibility is critical to the potential of EOS, not only technically, but also from a business perspective. Ultimately, it is important that we welcome more Solidity developers and users to EOS, and an EVM on EOS is an excellent bridge to do just that,” it added at the time.
A grant program will fund developers working on such applications from $10,000 to over $50,000 based on criteria such as the size and scope of the initiative. Grants can be given to builders of completely new products, or to finance maintenance and upgrades of existing tools.
Network upgrades, grant programs, and interoperability with other blockchains could eventually bolster eos token prices and $125 million in total locked value (TVL) of EOS-based DeFi applications.
Tokens traded at just over $1.20 in Asian morning hours on Monday, down ten cents from Friday. Price chart analysis suggests resistance at $1.80 if tokens bounce in the coming weeks, with another major resistance at $2.90.
As such, TVL has already raised $50 million since the start of this year ahead of April’s EVM launch. Applications such as EOS REX and Vigor, both lending protocols, have added more than 8% in lock value in the last week alone.
Per Messari, the network has an average of 1.3 million daily transactions and 38,000 daily active addresses on an annual basis and an average of 1,785 new addresses per day.
