There was a lot of excitement this week as Dan Larimer dropped into the EOS Telegram channel to answer some questions and drop some hints about what Block.one has been working on. There’s currently more than 50,000 people in that channel, so it can get extremely noisy. Someone in the community made a helpful bot that aggregates Dan’s messages from various EOSIO related Telegram channels, so I’d recommend subscribing to that if you want to follow along in an easier way. As usual, Dan didn’t give any concrete details, but he strongly indicated that B1 would be doing a major project announcement in June to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the EOS main net. All signs seem to point towards the much-anticipated B1 social network (sometimes referred to as Steem 2.0 but likely to be called MEOS). Like many others, I’m hoping that B1’s relative silence on the product front has been a result of them looking to make a really big splash when they finally do go live, but we’re still in anticipation mode.

In other news, EOS New York put the EUA (their new and greatly improved version of the EOS constitution) to a multi-sig BP vote. You can see as BPs vote approval or disapproval here. We strongly support the EUA and believe it to be a big improvement over the existing constitution, especially around issues of arbitration. We’re very happy to see this proposal moving forward in such a concrete way. But it also brings up an interesting point about EOS governance– should decisions be made directly by token holders via referendum, or should BPs act as elected representatives and make decisions on behalf of the token holders. While purists may prefer the former, the truth is that the latter is far more realistic and far more effective.

Referendum is a signaling tool that BPs can use to inform their decision making. But in the early days, with participation as low as it has been, it has limited utility. BPs need to be proactive in making decisions in order to move the network forward (as they’ve done in the past with initiatives like changing the CPU ceiling). And the 15/21 BP multi-sig is the best way to do that. All decisions are public and recorded on-chain, and users can vote out BPs who make decisions they disagree with. If you want to learn more about this decision-making process, I discuss it at length with Ryan Bethem from EOS42 in this podcast and will be writing more on the subject soon. If the EUA is adopted (which seems highly likely at the moment), then it marks another major positive step forward for EOS governance.

Myles Snider, CEO