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Motivation

Among existing digital cryptocurrency tokens, EOS gained prominence within the crypto community and has been touted as the next-generation flagship blockchain infrastructure. Its market capitalization has recently skyrocketed and makes it 5th place with more than $6B valuation [1]. Notice that holding a certain amount of EOS tokens at this stage is not equivalent yet to having the corresponding share of native EOS tokens. In particular, before the official EOS mainnet launch in June, 2018, token holders need to register their EOS tokens through the EOSCrowdsale contract. Only after the token registration, current token holders can ‘‘own’’ their token share on the EOS mainnet right after the June launch. The ownership will further entitle token holders to vote for their favorite block producers, which currently undergo intensive competition and heated discussions.

In this blog, we take a close look at th EOS token registration progress. Our goal here is to find out how many token holders actually have completed the registration process. More specifically, considering the total supply of 1 billion EOS tokens, what is the percentage (or registration rate) that have actually completed the above registration?

Our Approach

The registration logic is part of the EOSCrowdsale contract and its main implementation is shown in the following code-snippet.

The registration logic is quite straightforward: As indicated in line 562, all you need to do is calling the register( ) function by providing your EOS public key. The registration will essentially create a mapping between your current Ethereum address and your EOS public key. And the mapping is saved the keys[ ] data structure and can thus later queried for verification. Every successful registration will also emit a LogRegister( ) event (line 568), which is also available for query or verification.

For our purpose, we have collected these registration events and further queried for the EOS token balances of registered addresses. By aggregating these balances and dividing their sum by the total supply, we can therefore calculate current registration rate.

Results

To demonstrate the registration progress, in Figure 1, we show the registration status in the last six months. Specifically, for each month, we choose the first day as the cut-off day for our calculation and the result is illustrated with four stacked bars:

  1. EOSReserved: the reserved portion (with 100 million tokens or 10% of total supply) is withheld at address 0xb1 for block.one. The withholding address has been registered right after the crowdsale starts.
  2. EOSCrowdsale: the portion of tokens kept in the contract is still undergoing crowdsale. Certainly, they are not registered because those tokens could be transferred to any buyer during
    the crowdsale period.
  3. Mapped: the portion of tokens is currently circulated and the corresponding token holders have registered
  4. Unmapped: the portion of tokens is currently circulated and the corresponding token holders have not registered.

Figure 1: EOS Token Registration Progress in the Last 6 Months

We are surprised to find out that as of 04/01/2018, two months before EOS mainnet launch, more than 76% of all tokens are still not registered!Among the unregistered, the ummapped portion contributed 62.78% and EOSCrowdsale helped 13.67%. This is alarming as the registration time window will be closed before mainnet launch, which is fast approaching with less than two months left. The mainnet launch will also freeze the EOSCrowdsale contract and thus make all these issued tokens non-transferable.

This finding naturally leads to our next question: “what are those addresses withholding EOS tokens but not registering themselves? In the following table, we show the top 10 EOS token-holding addresses as of 2018–04–01:

For the top 10 addresses, we use the same approaches described in [2] to identify and classify the addresses of cryptocurrency exchanges: Beside the two known EOS-owned addresses, there are six exchange addresses and two individual addresses, but none of them have registered yet. Ideally, an exchanges may keep the holding of a customer in an independent account and register that account with an independent EOS public key, thus boosting customer confidence to literally own the tokens. As an alternative, an exchange could at least register all its EOS-holding addresses before the EOS mainnet is launched such that EOS token balances could be successfully converted into native EOS token balances. (Later on, the exchange can transfer native EOS tokens to an user-provided EOS address when withdrawal occurs.)

As we can see from the above table, these top exchanges have not taken any of these actions yet. We notice that wallet-related mobile apps (e.g., Exodus and imToken) already made the efforts by providing convenient features for smooth token registration. It is time for these exchanges to put forth convincing plans to speed up the EOS-token registration, better sooner than later. It is also their best interests and responsibilities to protect their customers from any potential risks, especially caused by their sluggish actions. (For individual EOS-token holders, it is also your best interest to get registered as soon as possible.)

Conclusion

Despite the increased market capitalization of EOS, we may not see a fully-engaged EOS ecosystem if we continue to observe a low participation in the token registration process. The low registration may possibly imply low participation of subsequent voting activities, which are crucial for smooth EOS blockchain operations. This is certainly not a situation the EOS community wants to face.

With that, we urge the entire community, especially the following:

  1. block.one, the publisher of EOS.IO software, needs to elevate the efforts in advocating and promoting the need of token registration, which is a necessary step to better the development, operation, and maintenance of EOS blockchain;
  2. various cryptocurrency exchanges should provide token-registration instructions in a transparent and timely manner to guarantee their customers that their benefits (including later voting) will be protected;
  3. individual token holders register your own valuable EOS tokens ASAP. Based on your wallets, here is the MetaMask guide [3], MyEtherWallet guide [4], and Exodus guide [5].

About US

PeckShield Inc. is a blockchain security company which aims to elevate the security, privacy, and usability of current blockchain ecosystem by offering top-notch, industry-leading services and products (including smart contract auditing). Please contact us at Telegram, Twitter, or Email.

References

Blockchain
Eos
Ethereum

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PeckShield
PeckShield

Written by PeckShield

2K Followers
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A Blockchain Security Company (https://peckshield.com)

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