Email Scams, Patched Loopholes, and Backroom Politicking: EOS Mainnet's Road to Launch

Although the long-anticipated EOS blockchain technically took off on June 10, it was not operational, and its tokens were 'frozen' for almost five days.

In order to kick off, the EOS community had to elect 21 entities responsible for the blockchain's operations by a similarly designed vote, and it didn't go smoothly.

Delegated proof of stake: a not-so-decentralized mechanics of EOS. EOS is heralded by its creators as a platform for the deployment of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and Corporations on an industrial scale.

Its main selling point is meant to be the capacity to handle many more transactions per unit of time than the Ethereum blockchain, which EOS seeks to supersede.

The EOS mainnet relies on 21 groups called Block Producers, or supernodes, who are elected by the votes of token holders, cast in proportion to their token holdings.

Ultimately, the pool of 21 elected Block Producers now looks like this, topped by EOS Cannon, Liquid EOS and EOS Beijing.

The arduous election was far from the only speed bump on the way to the EOS mainnet launch.

Just a few days prior to that, a Chinese cybersecurity firm found a series of massive flaws in the EOS system, pointing to loopholes that could allow attackers to take full control over any network node.

Messy the path to the EOS launch has been, it finally happened on June 14, seeing the token price recover from recent blows.

Just two days after the launch, the EOS mainnet underwent a 'freeze' and effectively stopped processing transactions.