The Leap For Freedom – The EOS Hard Fork, Antelope

To those inside the Web3 arena, the EOS story is well known. It’s a story about how EOS founders, Block.one raised a huge amount of funding for what was meant to be an incredible POS blockchain, with everything going for it, and then completely neglected it. Rather than investing the raised funds into the development and betterment of EOS, they allegedly decided to use the money elsewhere.

EOS was touted as a unique POS protocol

EOS was launched in 2018 following its white paper release in 2017, it was released as open-source software. The fundraising round saw the distribution of one billion tokens as ERC20 tokens, worth $4 billion. All this happened before the product was even launched and marked a milestone for the crypto arena.

Why didn’t it pan out?

However, the neglect and discontinuance of support to run and improve the protocol by the developers Block.one prompted members of the EOS community, led by Yves La Rose, to establish the ENF or EOS Network Foundation. According to La Rose, the “fight is with Block.one not EOS blockchain”.

The ENF community have been through the wringer to protect their protocol and have even decided to pursue legal action over Block.one. Now they are officially making a leap for freedom by forking off from the main EOS software, by creating Antelope, in a bid to deliver the product that EOS was meant to be. This fork is crucial because it gives Antelope the ability to manage and further the development over EOSIO and thus take away control from Block.one, who removed their support for EOS.

The hard fork of EOSIO

The hard fork of the EOSIO codebase will take place on September 21st and the Antelope Github repository has already been shared with the new project’s website. ENF, the community behind this fork, plans to develop Antelope for the better in a coordinated effort to maintain and focus on decentralization and community.

Once the split occurs, the new chain, known as Antelope, will be run by a coalition connected to the EOS Network Foundation, which will help realize the foundation’s separation from Block.one. As this is a hard fork, all nodes will need to upgrade so they can carry on running on the new chain.

What does this fork mean for the users and community?

Zack Gall, the VP of Communications from the ENF said, “The code was already forked back in February by the ENF and we’ve already added many new features and capabilities to that code, which today became known as Antelope.” He said that, “the code has been running on testnets for a while” in advance of the hard fork next month.

Antelope is used by developers and teams for DeFi, NFTs, games and even supply chain management. Antelope has already requested proposals from developers to focus on new use cases for the chain including SKDs, code improvements and more.

According to Yves La Rose, “The release of Antelope is the culmination of an historic effort undertaken by some of the most talented developers in blockchain.” He added,

“We are building upon over four years of battle-hardened code, and the cumulative knowledge of four L1 chains leveraging each other’s strengths, all united behind the Antelope protocol. At the EOS Network Foundation, we’re committed to exemplifying the best that Antelope has to offer by making EOS the most powerful and usable platform for building next-generation web3 products and services.”

This is crypto decentralization at its best, when a community comes together to develop, create and improve a protocol, taking it forward, when its original developers no longer wish to.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice