EOS lacks blockchain’s most fundamental aspect ‘immutability’, says ConsenSys commisioned research

A research commissioned by ConsenSys and conducted by blockchain testing company based in Los Angeles, Whiteblock, said that the world’s fifth-largest cryptocurrency, EOS, is not a blockchain, but a ‘cloud service’. The firm said:

“EOS is fundamentally the same as a centralized cloud computing architecture [client/server] without the fundamental components of a blockchain or peer-to-peer network.”

The tests that were carried in laboratory settings ran a replica of EOS and the company concluded that EOS is essentially a cloud service for computation. They came to the inference as it is built entirely on a centralized premise and that it lacks blockchain’s most basic aspect, immutability.

The tests that Whiteblock conducted started in September and lasted over a period of two months.

Whiteblock shared a paper that stated:

“Through practical testing and experiments in a controlled laboratory setting, this research provides a thorough and objective model of [EOS’] design, performance, and economics in order to present a reference for the blockchain community.”

The paper also pointed out how EOS transactions ‘are not cryptographically validated’ and that there is nothing to stop block producers from collusion, which would allow them to maintain their position. EOS differs from Bitcoin [BTC] and Ethereum [ETH] in a lot of ways, especially in deciding who validates the blocks and reaps the rewards from it.

Delegated Proof-of-Stake is a complicated voting process that is used by EOS to decide who should process transaction blocks, unlike Proof-of-Work that a lot of blockchains use to contribute to the network. During the voting process, each EOS held equated to one vote, which essentially means that the person holding more EOS has more say in the process.

The paper reported that EOS fails in consensus with no Byzantine Fault Tolerance [BFT], which would allow the network to be controlled by people who are colluding. It also confirmed that for a network to implement BFT the system shouldn’t allow colluding.

The research also revealed that EOS processes fewer transactions than what it claimed during marketing. It added that with optimal settings, the transactions never exceeded 250 per second and that the ‘current maximum throughput of EOS is around 4,000 TPS’.