EOS main features and drivers of value

Introduction

Many of us have been closely watching every news about EOS, trying to figure out how disruptive it will be and, on a personal view, whether we should donate ETH in exchange for its tokens. EOS aims to be the mainstream blockchain for building commercial scale decentralized applications that looks the same for average customers as centralized alternatives. It means non tech-savvy people will be able to live their everyday lives and use decentralized applications just like they do with nowadays centralized alternatives.

First of all, it is important to understand its proposed ICO auction system. For the first days, a total amount of 200 million tokens will be auctioned, out of a total 1 billion supply. So the price of each token should be multiplied by 1 billion in order to have an idea of the expected total market capitalization. In the last hour, if you believe the price (obtained by the division of total ETH invested by 200 million tokens) is going to be lower than your expectation on the total market cap, you should invest some amount. Otherwise, you should not invest and should wait for the price to go down and buy later, if your expectation is right, you will be able to buy for a lower price.

Value

The current disclosed information show some good value proposition. Among many features, scalability (horizontally scaled blockchain infrastructure) and free of cost transactions are probably two of the most valuable. The user will not have to pay for use (for instance, an Ethereum platform user needs to have and spend ETH in order to execute anything, which is not user-friendly at all).

Requirements for Blockchain Applications:

• Support Millions of Users
• Free Usage
• Low Latency
• Easy Upgrades and Bug Recovery
• Sequential Performance
• Parallel Performance

Consensus Algorithm (DPOS):

• Transaction Confirmation (15/21)
• Transaction as Proof of Stake (TaPoS) - The EOS.IO software is going to require every transaction to include the hash of a recent block header
  Accounts

Role Based Permission Management:

• Named Permission Levels
• Named Message Handler Groups
• Permission Mapping
• Evaluating Permissions: Default Permission Groups and Parallel Evaluation of Permissions

Messages with Mandatory Delay

Recovery from Stolen Keys

Deterministic Parallel Execution of Applications:

• Minimizing Communication Latency
• Read-Only Message Handlers
• Atomic Transactions with Multiple Accounts
• Partial Evaluation of Blockchain State
• Subjective Best Effort Scheduling

Token Model and Resource Usage

• Objective and Subjective Measurements
• Receiver Pays (this is in line with mainstream use)> The EOS.IO software does not require its users to pay directly to the blockchain for its use and therefore does not constrain or prevent a business from determining its own monetization strategy for its products.
• Delegating Capacity
• Separating Transaction costs from Token Value
• State Storage Costs
• Block Rewards
• Community Benefit Applications

Governance:

• Freezing Accounts
• Changing Account Code
• Constitution
• Upgrading the Protocol & Constitution, including Emergency Changes

Scripts & Virtual Machines

Inter Blockchain Communication

It is still too early to come with an accurate and thorough analysis about the concept. As we can see, there are important drivers of value in this project that strongly distinguish it from Ethereum and other alternatives. Considering their presentation at Consensus 2017 in May, the team seems to be on the right way. On the following days, more in-depth information shall be disclosed and analyzed. Please, feel free to comment below and improve everyone's awareness about EOS main features.