EOS block producers and DPoS, explained

6 min read

What is DPoS?

Think of it as a representative democracy for a blockchain. Bitcoin is closer to an open competition: anyone with hardware can mine. Ethereum’s Proof of Stake lets anyone who stakes enough ETH run a validator. EOS chose a third path: elect a handful of professional operators and let them take turns on a strict schedule. That makes blocks fast and predictable, at the cost of a smaller set of decision-makers.

EOS cannot be mined. There is no Proof of Work anywhere in the protocol. If you have seen "EOS mining" apps, read the explanation in our EOS staking guide.

How block production works

The 21 active producers follow a schedule set by the vote ranking. Each producer gets a turn of 12 consecutive blocks. With a block every 0.5 seconds, that is 6 seconds per producer. A full round through all 21 takes 252 blocks, or 126 seconds, and then the schedule starts again.

Each block can hold up to 200,000 microseconds of CPU and 1 MiB of data. Those limits set the network’s theoretical ceiling at roughly 4,000 simple transactions per second. Real-world load is much lower, as our EOS vs Ethereum and Bitcoin comparison shows.

Savanna: producers become finalizers

On September 25, 2024, the network hard-forked to Spring 1.0 and switched on the Savanna consensus algorithm. Producers registered BLS finalizer keys, held a go/no-go vote and executed the switchtosvnn action via multisig.

Under Savanna, the top 21 producers also serve as finalizers. They vote on every block using BLS signatures, which can be aggregated cheaply. Once 15 of 21 agree, the block is final. Each finalizer stores its voting history in a safety file so it cannot be tricked into signing conflicting blocks.

The result: time to finality fell from about 3 minutes to about 1 second under typical conditions. When we checked, the last irreversible block was just two blocks behind the head of the chain. The technical history of this upgrade is covered on our Antelope and EOSIO page.

How EOS voting works

Who can vote

Any account with staked tokens can vote. Your voting power equals the amount you have staked. Tokens sitting liquid in your account, or on an exchange, do not vote. Note that since REX 2.0 in July 2024, voting is no longer required to stake, so many stakers simply do not vote.

Up to 30 producers per account

You can vote for up to 30 producers at once, and each one receives your full stake weight. That is a deliberate design: you are approving a slate rather than picking a single favorite.

Vote decay

EOS vote weight is calculated as your stake multiplied by a factor that doubles every 52 weeks. A brand-new vote is therefore worth about twice as much as one cast a year earlier. In practice, old votes lose half their relative weight each year unless you recast them. This keeps the ranking responsive to current opinion and penalizes set-and-forget voting.

Voting by proxy

If you do not want to research producers yourself, you can delegate your vote to a proxy, an account that votes on behalf of everyone who chose it. Some proxies, such as the one run by EOS Nation, publish their voting criteria and share rewards. Terms are set by each proxy and can change.

1. Stake A

   Only staked tokens count. Follow our staking guide; remember the 21-day unstake.

2. Research producers

   Check uptime, location, infrastructure and community work. Explorers like Unicove and EOS Authority list current rankings.

3. Vote for up to 30, or pick a proxy

   Use Unicove with Anchor or your wallet’s voting feature and sign the transaction.

4. Recast occasionally

   Because of vote decay, re-vote from time to time so your stake keeps its full weight.

Who are the current EOS block producers?

The ranking changes continuously, so treat any list as a snapshot. When we pulled the producer table directly from the chain, the top 21 by vote weight included:

• eosphereiobp
• big.one
• eostitanprod
• newdex.bp
• binancestake
• eossupportbp
• starteosiobp
• ivote4eosusa
• alohaeosprod
• bp.defi
• eosriobrazil
• eosiosg11111
• eosiodetroit
• cryptolions1
• bp.1dex
• eoseyes.com
• eosasia11111
• metahubeosbp
• eosaiagentbp
• eoswuhan42bp
• vawallet

Some well-known names were on the standby list at that moment, including EOS Nation (#23), Genereos (#22), SlowMist (#25) and EOS Authority (#29). Two exchange-run producers, Binance (binancestake) and BigONE (big.one), were in the top 21. Check a live explorer for today’s ranking; our EOS explorer guide shows where.

How block producers get paid

Producers are paid from the network’s continuous emission, which currently runs at about 3.617% a year and halves every four years, with the next step on June 1, 2028. Based on the system contract’s on-chain parameters:

This reading follows the standard system contract semantics; we found no confirmation of later changes after the Vaulta rebrand, and some third-party pages quote different splits. Since the rebrand, producer rewards are paid in A. How the remainder feeds staking is covered in our EOS tokenomics breakdown.

Governance: what 15 of 21 can do

Producers are not just block factories. Protocol upgrades and system changes require a 15-of-21 multisig through the eosio.prods account. Lower thresholds exist for smaller matters: prod.major needs a simple majority and prod.minor one third plus one.

That supermajority approved the most consequential decisions in EOS history:

• December 2021: halting the remaining token vesting to Block.one.
• September 2022: activating Leap 3.1, the Antelope fork that ended Block.one’s technical control.
• 2024: capping supply at 2.1 billion and launching the staking reserve.
• September 2024: the switch to Savanna consensus.
• May 2025: executing the scheduled multisig that launched the EOS→A swap. See our Vaulta rebrand page.

Criticism: is EOS too centralized?

Critics often cite the 2021 vesting halt as proof that producers can act against a specific party when a supermajority agrees. Supporters see it as the community correcting a failed relationship with Block.one. Both readings are on the record; our "Is EOS safe?" analysis weighs this alongside other risks.

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