Sleeping Giant EOS is Quietly Returning to Prominence

Most people in crypto are familiar with the EOS story, though some could be forgiven for thinking the network had gone quietly into the good night. Instead, the project at the centre of the biggest ICO in history is making quiet strides to return to the front line of O.G. protocols.

Since its messy divorce from developer Block.One, EOS has, according to Network Foundation Founder Yves La Rose, been reclaimed by the community – and is all the better for it. 

Tether Comes to EOS

Last month, La Rose announced the launch of a $100 million EOS Ecosystem Fund to empower entrepreneurship on the network. The fund will be managed by an independent venture capital firm dedicated to identifying and bootstrapping promising web3 businesses building on the platform. EOS Network validators, meanwhile, will be tasked with providing oversight of the independently-operated EOS Network Ventures (ENV).

Time will tell whether this sizeable war chest will cause a flurry of building activity to take place on EOS, a smart contract platform that supports major programming languages (Solidity, Python, Rust) and is notable for its near feeless transactions and high throughput of 4,000+ transactions per second (tps). But the Ecosystem Fund isn't the only positive development that has EOS advocates excited.

This week, the news broke that Binance had completed integration of Tether (USDT) on the EOS Network, opening deposits and withdrawals for the stablecoin on EOS for the first time. By making the world's most-used and trusted stablecoin available on the industry's dominant exchange, the foundations have been laid to expose EOS to an enormous amount of economic activity that hasn't previously been available.

While several blockchains feature wrapped versions of popular assets (USDT, BTC, ETH, etc) on their networks, there aren't too many offering the real thing – let alone with a direct integration to a trading powerhouse like Binance. Changpeng Zhao's exchange has really consolidated its power in the market following the spectacular collapse of rival FTX.

The arrival of USDT on EOS was likely seen as an essential milestone for EOS, one that sets the scene for a new dawn of dApps, particularly those related to DeFi, NFTs, play-to-earn, eSports and metaverse. Tether has long been the preferred stablecoin for users interacting with DeFi protocols on Ethereum and elsewhere, and its ready availability on EOS would be deemed a non-negotiable for many dApp developers considering building on the network.

Two Critical New Initiatives

As well as introducing an independently-managed Ecosystem Fund, the EOS Network Foundation has been constructing pillars for further development on the network in the form of Yield+ and Recover+. 

The former initiative is an incentives programme intended to nurture economic activity via incentivizing DeFi dApps that increase TVL and generate yield; Recover+ is essentially an insurance layer, a cyber-security portal and incident response program that safeguards EOS DeFi projects and their users from hacks that have been known to blight the DeFi space.

La Rose has been a stable presence at the center of EOS since the beginning, and he recently took to Twitter to highlight the growth of the network amid such sweeping changes. Posting on December 7, La Rose noted that "the TVL on #EOS recently increased by 10% while other L1s saw TVL drop," adding that results show "that Yield+ is working: there's more liquidity, token holders have more ways to earn yield, and projects from other ecosystems are coming to build on EOS."

The aim of La Rose and the rest of the EOS community, of course, is to turn the network into a veritable web3 powerhouse, one that finally makes good on its promise to challenge Ethereum. With a major ecosystem fund, fresh new initiatives, and now native Tether support, it's becoming clear that blockchain's sleeping giant has truly awoken.