What is EOS? A plain-English guide to the blockchain and its token

7 min read

What is EOS? The one-paragraph answer

The quickest way to understand EOS is to compare it with Ethereum. On Ethereum, every action — sending a token, minting an NFT, making a game move — costs gas, paid by whoever clicks the button. On EOS the cost of running a transaction is real, but it is paid in rented capacity rather than a fee, and the app can pay it for you. That design is why EOS was popular with games and exchanges in its early years: users could click around without being charged a few cents every time.

A small naming note. Search engines also return Canon EOS cameras and the Volkswagen Eos. Everything on this site is about the crypto project only.

Who created EOS? Block.one, the ICO and the split

EOS began at Block.one, a company led by Brendan Blumer as CEO and Dan Larimer as CTO. Block.one published the EOS.IO technical whitepaper in 2017 and wrote the original software, called EOSIO.

To fund it, Block.one ran a token sale that lasted a full year, from June 2017 to June 2018, and sold 900 million tokens. Media reports put the total at around $4.1 billion, the largest ICO up to that time; because the sale was priced in ETH, published figures range from $4.0 to $4.2 billion. The SEC’s own wording is “several billion dollars”.

The mainnet went live in June 2018; the first block is timestamped 8 June. In September 2019 Block.one settled with the SEC, paying a $24 million civil penalty for conducting an unregistered securities offering, without admitting or denying the findings.

The relationship between Block.one and the community soured over the following years. Critics argued that very little of the ICO money flowed back into the ecosystem. Larimer left at the end of 2020, the EOS Network Foundation (ENF) was formed in August 2021, and in December 2021 block producers voted to stop Block.one’s remaining token vesting. The full timeline is on our EOS history and roadmap page.

How EOS works under the hood

Delegated Proof of Stake

Bitcoin is secured by miners, Ethereum by hundreds of thousands of validators. EOS uses Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS): anyone holding staked tokens can vote for up to 30 block producers, and the 21 with the most stake-weighted votes produce blocks. Each producer gets a turn of 12 consecutive blocks — six seconds — so a full round of all 21 takes 126 seconds. If a producer misbehaves or goes offline, voters can move their support elsewhere. Our DPoS and block producers guide covers voting, vote decay and producer pay.

Savanna and one-second finality

In September 2024 the network switched to new node software, Spring 1.0, and a new consensus algorithm called Savanna. The top 21 producers now also act as “finalizers” that sign every block with compact BLS signatures; once 15 of 21 agree, the block is final. The release notes describe the result as cutting time to finality from about three minutes to about one second under typical conditions.

The resource model: CPU, NET and RAM

This is the part that confuses newcomers most, and the part that makes EOS different. There is no gas. Instead, every transaction consumes three resources:

To put real numbers on it: a plain token transfer typically uses around 130 microseconds of CPU and about 150 bytes of NET. Renting that much capacity costs less than the smallest unit of the token, 0.0001 A. RAM is the only resource with a meaningful price, because it holds permanent data such as your balance; a new account needs about 3 KB. Apps can also co-sign as the “resource payer”, so the user never sees a cost at all. You can play with these numbers in our RAM, CPU and NET calculator.

Readable account names

EOS accounts are not hex strings. They are names of up to 12 characters, using a–z, 1–5 and dots — something like coffeeshop12. Every account has two built-in permission levels, owner and active, and multisig is part of the protocol rather than a separate smart contract. That makes it easy to, say, require two of three keys for large transfers. Creating an account is covered in our EOS account guide.

What is EOS coin used for?

The token — EOS historically, A today — has a handful of jobs inside the network:

1. Paying for resources. Renting CPU and NET through PowerUp and buying RAM.
2. Staking. Locking tokens in REX to earn a share of a fixed 250 million token reward reserve. Unstaking takes 21 days. See our EOS staking guide.
3. Governance. Staked tokens give you votes for up to 30 block producers.
4. Payments in dApps. Swapping on DEXs such as Alcor or Defibox, buying NFTs, playing on-chain games.
5. Creating accounts. Someone has to pay for a new account’s RAM, and that is paid in the token.

Under the Vaulta brand, the network also pitches itself as infrastructure for “Web3 banking”: Bitcoin yield through exSat, consumer payments, tokenized real-world assets and insurance. Some of that is live, some is a plan. We treat it as a roadmap, not a done deal.

From EOSIO to Antelope to Vaulta

Three names describe three layers of the same project, and they get mixed up constantly:

• EOSIO was Block.one’s original open-source software.
• Antelope is the community fork of EOSIO, activated on EOS on 21 September 2022 with the Leap 3.1 node software. Today’s node software is Spring, maintained under AntelopeIO on GitHub. Other chains such as Telos and WAX use Antelope too.
• Vaulta is the 2025 brand of the EOS network itself, with the token renamed to A.

So the accurate sentence is: “Vaulta, formerly EOS, runs on Antelope software, which was forked from EOSIO.” The Antelope and EOSIO page goes deeper, and the business side of the rename is on the EOS rebrand to Vaulta page.

EOS strengths and weaknesses

On speed, honesty matters. The chain’s limits allow roughly 4,000 simple transactions per second in theory, while day-to-day load is in the low tens. Claims of “millions of TPS” were marketing, never reality. Our EOS vs Ethereum vs Bitcoin comparison has a speedometer with real figures.

How many EOS tokens are there?

EOS launched with 1 billion tokens and an inflationary model with a theoretical ceiling of 10 billion. In 2024 producers approved, with the required 15-of-21 majority, a hard cap of 2.1 billion, cancelling most planned future issuance. Both EOS and A now show supply equal to max supply on-chain; future rewards are paid out of reserves at an annual rate of about 3.6%, which halves every four years, starting 1 June 2028. Roughly 1.68 billion A count as circulating on CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap. For the full breakdown see EOS tokenomics, and for live market data the EOS price page.

Is EOS still worth paying attention to?

That depends on what you want from it. As a piece of technology, EOS works: it has run since 2018, finality is among the fastest of any major chain, and users don’t pay gas. As a market, the picture is rough — Coinbase delisted EOS, the token hit new lows in 2026, and the ecosystem is far smaller than in its peak years. Read our is EOS safe page before putting money in.

Where to go next

Frequently asked questions

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