The price of EOS RAM has increased 600 percent, creating fears that hoarding may hinder Dapp production and endanger the future of EOS itself.
On July 1, RAM in the EOS network cost about 0.11 EOS per kilobyte, a price around which the resource had long hovered. Then, over the course of two days, the price shot up in a nine-fold increase. After peaking at 0.9 EOS per kilobyte earlier today, the price briefly dropped to 0.55 EOS then rebounded again reaching a price above 0.7 EOS.
The RAM available on the network is intended to be used for Dapp development. Users have to purchase a minimum of four kilobytes to open an account, essentially staking out a portion of the network's processing power for their own projects.
The price jump was striking since EOS still has no applications running on it. Why would a share of the network's processing power suddenly become so valuable when no one is actually using it? And why is 86 percent[1] of the total RAM already locked up?
Most have concluded that RAM is being bought up as a speculative scheme, a trend that threatens the success of EOS itself. If instead of being bought for its utility, RAM has become a commodity that is bought and sold for profit, it potentially won't be available as a resource to actually develop Dapps. Additionally, the price could be driven so high that EOS simply becomes too expensive to use.
Hoarding and speculation in RAM are not entirely unexpected developments. EOS creator Dan Larimer foresaw the possibility. Under an earlier version of the EOSIO, users could only sell RAM at the price they paid for it. However, this system was changed in the later version.
"The goal was to disincentivize hoarding and
