By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 22nd, 2024
The independent benchmark testing dubbed the EOS platform as a cloud service built with a centralized design that suffers from serious security breaches.
‘Is the EOS network indeed a blockchain or it isn’t?’ that is the question that puzzles many minds in a wake of the survey published by an independent blockchain testing firm, Whiteblock Inc.
EOS vs Ethereum
The EOS protocol proved and underpinned by the Proof-of-Stake mechanism has been numerously opposed to the Proof-of-Work concept utilized by the most prominent dApps environment, the Ethereum platform, thus making EOS the Ethereum’s greatest competitor.
In contrast to the well-known PoW consensus mechanism, the PoS system is cheaper and more eco-friendly way of blocks validation, since the miners do not need a lot of energy to achieve distributed consensus: the creator of a new block is chosen in a deterministic way, depending on its wealth, also defined as stake.
A couple of months ago Coinspeaker reported the EOS started out as an ERC20 token but migrated to its own platform. The team behind the EOS mainet has promised the platform to have an advanced level of security along with tremendously high transaction rate.
It was a matter of time before such vigorously claims have wrought the attention of blockchain testing firm Whiteblock Inc. that decided to analyse the EOS capacity.
Partially funded by the Ethereum-backed entity ConsenSys, the research revealed a damning verdict on EOS, describing it as a “distributed homogeneous database” masquerading as a blockchain.
EOS Benchmark Testing
As a part of its testing procedure, Whiteblock created a working replica of EOS and applied real work simulations to determine its performance and access its abilities.
The test measured the performance of the EOS network in terms of its transactional throughput, its resilience to adverse network conditions, the effects of variable transactions rates and sizes on the network, its average transaction time, its fault tolerance, and its partition tolerance.
Launched in September 2018, the two-month long test saw Whiteblock Inc. observe the behavior of the EOS network under a wide variety of environments and conditions to confirm the true capabilities of the network.
All of the fuss was pursuing a single goal of ascertaining the veracity of claims made by EOS regarding it speed, scalability and transaction throughput against a backdrop of blockchain companies making unverified claims about these statistics.
Kind of Shocking Results
In the report titled “EOS: An Architectural, Performance and Economic Analysis,” Whiteblock’s research team made up of famed industry experts including Brent Xu, Zak Cole, and Nate Blakely unveiled several aspects of the EOS protocol and comes to the conclusion that it suffers from serious security breaches as well as network performance that is significantly lower than what was claimed.
Moreover, the report bluntly doubts the EOS platform is a decentralized distributed ledger as it reads the following:
“EOS is not a blockchain, rather a distributed homogeneous database management system, a clear distinction in that their transactions are not cryptographically validated.”
In addition to, and perhaps as a result of the lack of the decentralization, EOS is faced with a key security weakness. Whiteblock found EOS to be vulnerable to a Sybil attack, where fake identities can be used to subvert the system.
However, Whiteblock CTO Zak Cole say that these findings are nothing like death sentence to the EOS platform. Instead, speaking to CNN, he noted that Whiteblock aims to better the blockchain environment focusing on its key members.
According to Cole, today the EOS platform is not capable of providing throughput to the degree which has been implied and it won’t be able to anytime soon, but he hopes that one day the EOS is going to deliver on what’s being promised.