Another week, another squabble involving the beleaguered EOS blockchain. The platform that has recently sustained a round of criticism for its lack of decentralization and its underwhelming technical robustness is now going through a governance crisis. The problem partly stems, quite ironically, from the lack of the system’s mediating capacity and centralized enforcement over the pool of Block Producers - twenty-one entities elected by token holders and responsible for validating transactions under the Delegated Proof of Stake consensus mechanism.
The latest controversy unfolded as the EOS Core Arbitration Forum (ECAF), effectively the ‘judicial branch’ of the EOS ecosystem, failed to handle a series of alleged security breaches, prompting Block Producers to take unilateral action and freeze the endangered accounts. The fallout highlighted immaturity of the system’s quasi-institutional structure, at the same time exacerbating the EOS’ skeptics’ over-centralization concerns. Despite the EOS token currently standing as the fifth cryptocurrency by market cap[1], and its $4 billion ICO remaining unmatched to date[2], the developers and core community behind the project seem to be fine with large-scale experimentation with a live blockchain.
The crisis
On June 17, shortly after the EOSIO mainnet launch, a Block Producer EOS42 drew the community’s attention to the fact that the accounts compromised during the registration process could now be unlocked[3], putting some $15 million worth of EOS tokens on the spot. Block Producers turned to the ECAF for guidance, but after the arbitration body fell short of immediately delivering an unambiguous decision, the network’s stakeholders have settled the issue via a conference call[4]. By a unanimous vote, they decided to ‘freeze’ seven suspicious accounts, meaning that no transactions involving those addresses would be processed.
Unsurprisingly, all hell broke loose[5] in the crypto
