In an industry where customers are known for having short attention spans and cult-like behavior, trust is hard to build, let alone regain when it has been lost.

There are not many cases of projects coming back from the dead and reestablishing themselves once again as market leaders.

However, it can be done. Consider Solana, for instance.

This project has not only revived itself after being dismissed by the industry but has also flourished and reclaimed its position as a heavy hitter in the layer-1 [L1] sector.

But what if I told you there is another L1 that is well on the path of its redemption arc? Yes, today, we’ll be taking another look at EOS Network and what the chefs there have been cooking over the past few years.

Redemption arc of EOS

In our previous article, we delved into the history of EOS, how the project found itself in its current position, and the measures it undertook to set itself up for a revanchist comeback.

Today's topic is to illuminate the technical developments introduced since we last spoke and how EOS is planning to re-establish itself as the market leader in the L1 sector.

Under ENF's new leadership, the EOS network has undergone five major upgrades, which have firmly pushed it back to the industry standard in terms of speed and costs.

Yet, with the recent Spring 1.0 upgrade, which entailed a hard fork of the network, EOS reaffirms its position as the industry leader in terms of speed and cost.

The new upgrade delivers a 100x improvement over previous versions, blowing all competition out of the water and establishing new standards for what can be achieved in blockchains utilizing a block-based model.

But before we dig into the technical aspects of Savanna's consensus, here’s a breakdown of what users can expect from EOS 2.0.

Tokenomics and UX enhancements

First and foremost, we should highlight the tokenomics revamp that occurred earlier this year, which significantly reduced the network’s inflation and capped the total supply at 2.1 billion tokens.

Alongside this upgrade, the staking program was also launched, with a whopping 250 million EOS allocated to stakers. The program currently offers a lucrative 25% APY.

Then, 350 million EOS tokens were designated for market-making, buy-backs, and ensuring liquidity for RAM tokens, a tokenized memory resource that directly reflects the demand for the EOS network's state.

Thanks to the revamped tokenomics, which granted 15 million EOS tokens to the development of middleware products, the EOS network can tackle miscellaneous problems that developers or users may stumble upon. One such problem was the management of both the RAM and EOS tokens.

With the soft launch of the Unicove Portal, users can easily manage both the RAM and EOS tokens and participate in staking within a single interface, significantly reducing the barrier to entry for new participants.

In addition, the team is collaborating with Consensys to publish an EOS wallet Snap in Metamask's official directory, which will allow users to access EOS from their favorite wallet.

These and a myriad of other developments have certainly helped EOS. This last quarter, EOS has seen massive growth, with its TVL skyrocketing from around 100 million to almost 300 million.

With the recent surge of DINO coins such as XRP, XLM, and others, EOS could be the next one to capture people's attention. Only with EOS, there is actual technical development happening behind the scenes.

Savanna consensus

Savanna, short for Scalable Agreement on Validated Additions with Nimble Nonrepudiating Attestation, is a novel consensus mechanism that will now be at the core of the EOS network.

Leveraging insights from previous iterations, Savanna has been constructed from the foundation to meet the increasing demand for scalable and cost-effective networks that can replicate the speed and latency commonly associated with web2 services.

This is accomplished by incorporating aggregate BLS signatures and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), which I’ll explain the meaning of later. To better comprehend its implications, Guillaume Babin-Trembley, a key contributor to Savanna consensus, stated,

"The result is a consensus algorithm that advances the state of the art in classical BFT systems. This isn’t just a milestone for the crypto space—it’s a major advancement for computer science. It’s one small step for EOS, but a giant leap for consensus algorithms."

After a year of intense development that included multiple iterations, complex mathematical algorithms, intense and long coding sessions between different working groups, and rigorous testing, the Savanna consensus emerged from the cooker featuring one-second block finality and a cost-per-transaction amounting to a measly $0.000054.

To put that into perspective, Injective, the closest competitor in terms of price per transaction, has an average transaction cost of $0.002, making EOS almost 200% cheaper.

For block times, the closest competitors, Aptos and Arbitrum, come in at around 2 seconds, with the rest of the competition falling behind dramatically.

You might be asking yourself, one second here, one second there — why does it matter? Oh, but it does.  

In the upcoming sections, we'll discuss the people to whom speed matters and the use cases that Savanna uniquely unlocks.

Use cases enabled by Savanna consensus

As we alluded to in the previous article, blockchains are analogous to large and powerful computers that work by syncing nodes across the globe.

What makes these computers unique is their shared state, which makes them especially useful for settlement between different parties. This can happen in hours if you’re on Bitcoin, minutes if you’re on Ethereum, or a mere second if you’re transacting on EOS.

For the typical DeFi application, like a lending market or NFT marketplace, speed is not the most important factor. But there are a myriad of applications like trading, GameFi, and others, where speed is of the utmost importance.

EOS is the settlement layer for trading venues

Consider the biggest global exchanges such as NASDAQ, Shanghai Stock Exchange, or Euronext.

These venues offer traders highly competitive pricing due to the significant liquidity supplied by market makers and robust in-house servers, which can execute trades in milliseconds. As a result, they achieve very tight bid-ask spreads and unmatched order executions.

But here's the catch: these major exchanges primarily offer stocks based in their own jurisdiction.

So, if a trader in the USA wanted to seize the recent downturn in the Chinese stock market and "buy the fear," the process of moving funds between jurisdictions can be as slow as a sloth, leading to missed opportunities.

Blockchain rails have long been seen as the solution to the isolated liquidity issue. However, until now, most networks have not been able to handle the high volume of transactions needed by these venues. The speed and costs have simply not been low enough to meet the requirements of sophisticated players.

However, with a one-second finality that closely matches that of traditional exchanges and a cost per transaction of just $0.000054, EOS has the chance to make this a reality.

Imagine a future where investors can purchase TSLA stock and acquire COSCO SHIPPING shares, all while settling both trades on a single platform. This may seem like an ambitious concept, but with a fast and cost-effective blockchain like EOS, where a million transactions cost only 54 dollars, we are moving closer to this vision.

EOS's exceptional cost-efficiency and reliability clearly position it as a top choice for managing such high throughput.

Don't trust my word? Think back to early 2024 when blockchains such as Avalanche and Ton faced significant slowdowns, making them unusable because of inscriptions. At the time, EOS also saw a considerable surge in these transactions and handled it exceptionally well.

Tailoring to sophisticated players, market makers, and other big-shots is great, but crypto has always tried to bring out the fun in otherwise boring financial instruments and vice versa by adding a layer of monetization to ramp things up.

GameFi

The gaming industry has been a hot topic in crypto forever.

Commonly referred to as GameFi, this sector promises to unlock a ton of value for gamers, but surprisingly, the audience has been rather dismissive of this movement. And rightfully so.

The blockchain aspect has been a significant hurdle for many users trying to play these games.

Imagine enjoying your favorite game but needing to sign multiple transactions from your wallet each day. You might find yourself waiting for several minutes to see if each transaction goes through, with some potentially failing altogether. It's understandable why this would turn off many players.

Another key factor is cost. While for us on-chain maniacs, paying a couple of cents per transaction might seem completely justifiable, for gamers who trade, buy and sell, and claim items dozens, if not hundreds, of times per day, the cost can add up quickly.

With EOS equipped with one of the most performant consensus engines in the market, Savanna, it stands out as a prime candidate for hosting a myriad of games that can leverage the best of what blockchain can offer in terms of speed, cost, and reliability.

Consider the popular blockchain game Upland.

Since its launch, it has surpassed 2.7 million downloads and currently enjoys an active player base of 30-50,000 daily players. With each unique item represented within the game as an NFT on the blockchain, this game benefits greatly from the cost-effective and reliable infrastructure provided by EOS.

You know who else benefits from EOS? The fourth largest Bitcoin project by TVL- exSat.

ExSat: Proof of Concept

The recently launched scaling solution for Bitcoin, ExSat, leverages the new Savanna consensus and EOS's unique storage capabilities powered by RAM.

By doing so, exSat is able to process, verify, and index all of Bitcoin’s transaction data onto an EVM-compatible docking layer for Bitcoin.

This innovation promises to unlock novel DeFi capabilities, such as chain abstraction, alongside unparalleled interoperability for the whole Bitcoin L2 ecosystem, thanks to the indexing of Bitcoin’s UTXO transaction data.

Furthermore, exSat caters to the largest and wealthiest crypto community — Bitcoin miners — by providing them with an additional revenue stream without the need to sacrifice custody of their BTC.

Since its mainnet went live on October 23, miners have already collectively earned $7.2 million in revenue.

According to DeFi Llama, exSat is already firmly in fourth place in terms of TVL. This figure is expected to increase over the coming months as more infrastructure providers join the party and the XSAT staking program for retail investors like ourselves commences.

Thanks to the flexible and customizable codebase, the exSat development team was able to ship a fully operational Bitcoin scaling solution in less than a year.

Okay, but what’s in it for EOS? The answer is easier than you might think! What exSat has really demonstrated is how flexible and user-friendly it is for developers to create products using the EOS framework.

As traditional web2 companies increasingly explore blockchain, EOS stands ready to cater to their needs with its affordable and adaptable codebase.

Who knows, they might just find themselves captivated by the on-chain world, and you can bet they'll want to jump on the EOS bandwagon first!

Roadmap

Currently, EOS hasn’t reached its full potential. The team is in the midst of brainstorming future upgrades.

The implementation of state proofs and light clients, as well as the decoupling of block producers and finalizers, are at the top of the priority list.

The former will enable anyone to access and verify the state of EOS without needing a full node. This is crucial for reducing the computational load on full nodes and enhancing scalability and decentralization.

In normal human language, this means that more users will be able to participate in the network without needing extensive resources and expensive hardware.

Also, remember those big words we used at the start of the article — BLS Signatures and ZK-proofs? Well, they’re the cherry on top of EOS’s new and shiny consensus, which enables true privacy and anonymity for users.

BLS signatures let multiple people combine their signatures into one, making transactions more compact and secure while keeping individual identities private. This helps protect user privacy on the blockchain while saving space and reducing costs.

ZK-proofs, on the other hand, are useful for proving knowledge about a piece of data without revealing the data itself.

What EOS is suggesting has the potential to make Savanna not only one of, if not the fastest chain in the market, but also serve as a ledger that caters to real-world use cases where privacy is a top priority.

Concluding thoughts

I’ve gathered comical evidence that most new crypto entrants don’t care about the tech. But I beg to differ. While they may not give a flying duck how a chain operates, they certainly care about the user experience it delivers.

It’s no coincidence that Solana has become the number one consumer chain of this cycle and will continue to onboard new entrants. At the time of its launch, it delivered speed and cost-efficiency not seen before, which drew a lot of attention and users to explore what it had to offer, creating a snowball effect of liquidity and users.

EOS presents the next step in this evolution, but unlike Solana, it possesses a possible ace in the hole — EVM compatibility. With EVM still remaining the industry standard for developers and users alike, EOS considerably lowers the friction for new entrants to enjoy web2-esque speeds and cost-effectiveness on decentralized rails.

Building an industry-leading chain in terms of speed and cost is one part of the equation, and equally, if not more important, is how that technology is presented to the world. Despite the team’s best efforts, the name EOS, unfortunately, has a negative connotation.

In light of this, one of our many trusty birdies has told us that EOS is gearing up for a complete rebrand in 2025. With a new name and token, the project would finally be able to step into the light with a fresh outfit while still utilizing the rock-solid foundation that has been built over the years.

If you tag along with blocmates, you’ll be the first to learn the details. Stay tuned!