eos

Is EOS a toothless token?

When altcoin charts are showing more spikes than a porcupine and the crypto groups on social media making uncannily high numbers of comments about the moon there comes a time to sort the wheat from the chaff. There are over a 1365 digital assets now listed on Coinmarketcap.com and more arriving every day, not all of them actually do something.

Savvy traders will be picking the ones that have real world functionality, be it in the present or at some stage in the future, which in crypto terms is probably next year. There are a number of altcoins out there with seriously good concepts such as Iota, Substratum, Power Ledger, OmiseGO, Stellar and Factom. Others are just garden variety digital currencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin and their various forked versions, then you have a couple of anonymous ones such as Monero and Zcoin. Some are actual development platforms such as Ethereum, NEO, Waves and Cardano.

So why would anyone invest in anything other than coins and tokens like these? Well, according to the WSJ, investors are pouring millions into a company called Block.one for a token called EOS which by the company’s own admission ‘has no purpose’. Over $700 million has been raised to fund the ICO which auctions 2 million tokens every day for a year. There are a billion EOS in total and the current market capacity is over $5 billion.

In what could well be a bucket load of FOMO traders are clamoring to load up on EOS which is now the 14th most popular crypto coin by market cap. Block.one has a pretty standard affair for its website with the usual ‘we have a decentralized blockchain’ message and a few team members. The core code is published and open source and the company will be releasing the full version next year, but nothing else. It will be up to third party developers to use and build dApps for it – should they choose it above the hundreds of other blockchain companies out there.

A purchase agreement which investors must sign states the tokens “do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features.” The company admits that once the platform is released EOS tokens will not really have any relationship to it. It has become a prime example of crypto mania in the current age when people are still willing to pour funds into a concept which may or may not exist in a few months’ time.

EOS is currently trading at $10.62, up over 400% on the previous month.