Study: EOS is not a blockchain, but a cloud service

A study commissioned by ConsenSys from WhiteBlock claims that the fifth largest crypto currency by market capitalization, EOS, is not a blockchain, but a cloud service. The results probably also revealed a lower transaction throughput than EOS itself claims.

The provider of blockchain test solutions, Whiteblock, has announced a successful and independent test of the EOS platform. The resources required for the test were provided by several companies including the Ethereum Community Fund, Maker DAO, Google, Duke, USC, MIT, Microsoft and ConsenSys to name a few of the 23 participants. The results could make a big difference if you consider that EOS markets itself as an “ethereal killer”. The report published on 1 November 2018, entitled ‘EOS: An Architectural, Performance and Economic Analysis’, concludes that EOS is not a blockchain, but merely a ‘distributed homogenous database’.

The study does not, however, only remain with this one accusation, but cites three further EOS deficiencies. The conclusions of the study, which were published in a medium post, sound quite hard:

• The EOS throughput is significantly lower than originally claimed in marketing materials such as the EOSIO Dawn 3.0 release.
• EOS is not a blockchain, but a distributed homogeneous database management system, a clear difference is that EOS transactions are not cryptographically validated.
• The EOS token and RAM market is essentially a cloud computing service where the network provides computing resources in a black box that users can access via credits. There is no mechanism for accountability because there is a lack of transparency about what block producers can do in terms of accountability.
• EOS suffers from consensus errors and has no Byzantine fault tolerance.

The study showed that EOS never exceeded 250 transactions per second (TPS) with optimal settings and that the ‘current maximum EOS throughput is around 4,000 TPS’.

The biggest accusation is that EOS is not a blockchain. As TheNextWeb reports, WhiteBlock concluded that EOS is essentially a cloud computing service, with the EOS network effectively having no accountability for how much computing power block producers can create. The study also concluded that the EOS architecture effectively promotes centralization and the most important aspect of a blockchain, the immutability is not ensured by the design.

EOS was already criticized a few months ago because there were agreements between the block producers. The Huobi crypto currency exchange, which is one of 21 block producers (BP), was suspected at the end of September 2018 of having bought and sold votes from other BPs. While Huobi denied the accusations in , Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin twittered that the controversy was predictable. The study could thus be another blow to the credibility of the EOS network.