EOS market overview: EOS/USD drops amidst growing centralization concerns

• EOS finished on top of the CCID rankings again, but its Weiss grade dropped from B to C- due to centralization concerns.
• The community is extremely excited about the launch of EOS Voice, which has been pegged as a game-changer.

EOS/USD has had an interesting December so far, to say the least. While its price has moved pretty sluggishly, there are a lot of pieces moving in the background. Let’s take a closer look at all these moving parts and see how the price is acting in different time frames. 

EOS finishes on top of the CCID rankings

EOS has continued to utterly dominate the CCID rankings. This was the 11th update of the crypto project ranking report as conducted by The Center for Information and Industry Development (CCID), under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. EOS has consistently finished at the very top of the rankings. The projects are marked based on the following categories - Basic Tech, Applicability and Creativity. In the latest iteration, EOS finished 13.4 points above the second-placed Ethereum. It ranked first in Basic Tech while finishing 11th and 3rd in Applicability and Creativity, respectively.

Centralization concerns

EOS has long faced criticism from the crypto community because of its apparent centralization. A decentralized system like EOS maintains order and consensus within its network via consensus protocols. Bitcoin and Ethereum use the proof-of-work (POW) consensus algorithm, which seeks to gain majority from the entire network. While this method is relatively decentralized, it’s a very slow process. Since EOS wanted to emphasize speed, it used the delegated proof-of-stake (DPOS) consensus algorithm. In a DPOS system, 21 block producers are chosen from the entire network and these 21 are responsible for the upkeep of the whole system. While this method is definitely faster, it has attracted negative criticism due to centralization concerns. 

To make matters worse, towards the end of November, Cointelegraph reported that Block.One (the company behind EOS) had to take part in the block producer elections after it was discovered that just a single entity managed six of EOS’s Block Producers. Weiss Ratings then subsequently downgraded EOS to “C-” due to its lack of effort in mitigating centralization concerns.

Marshall Islands national digital currency inspired by EOS

The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) revealed almost a year back that they are working on a Sovereign (SOV), its national digital currency. SOV will help tackle the various issues RMI faces like high costs of remittances. Cointelegraph reached out to Jim Wagner, co-founder and CTO of SFB Technologies, the company behind the development of SOV’s blockchain infrastructure after it noticed that SOV has certain similarities with EOS, like the DPOS mechanism. Wagner confirmed the similarities saying that they were immensely inspired by the work done by Block.One.

SOV has been criticized by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who warned RMI that adopting the cryptocurrency will risk their financial integrity as well as relationships with foreign banks.

EOS Voice

Earlier this year, EOS announced the launch of Voice, a blockchain-social media platform. Traditional social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have faced an onslaught of criticism due to their user data mismanagement and censorship. CEO Brendan Blumer and CTO Dan Larimer have both pointed out that the current state of social media is broken.

Social media is broken. Designed to use us, our data and attention is harvested into trillion dollar profits for large corps, big tech, banks, and Wall Street interests, while we struggle to protect ourselves against the consequences of having our attention auctioned to anonymous parties, and our personal information traded on the open market. This misalignment of interest between us and the platforms we once trusted continues to increasingly expose us to data profiling, identity theft, cyberbullying, and persuasive misinformation. It’s never been more difficult to know what is real amongst the growing sea of manufactured propaganda intended to manipulate our thoughts and control our behavior.

Voice will be releasing its public beta on February 14th, 2020. Many in the community are eagerly looking forward to the launch.

Twitter Reactions

EOS Nation:

The rate of improvement for #EOSIO has so far been very impressive and we don't expect this to change any time soon. EOSIO 2.0 is just around the corner and @bytemaster7 (Dan Larimer) has already mentioned EOSIO 3.0.

Weiss Crypto Ratings:

We’ve had great respect for work and thinking that went into the #EOS project. But the Weiss Crypto Ratings model is not based on opinion. It’s driven by data. And that data has now caused a downgrade from B to C-.

Colin Talks Crypto:

We have a date for #Voice beta!

Feb 14th

But B1 is going to start running Voice on their own EOSIO chain— not on EOS.

The big question: will the main EOS chain be ready to HANDLE Voice? Will BPs enact upgrades & fixes (for example CPU) or be neglectful and let B1 pass them by?

EOS/USD weekly chart

For the last three weeks, EOS/USD has been trudging along very sluggishly in a narrow range between $2.76 and $2.63. So far this week, EOS/USD has dropped from $2.73 to $2.61. 

EOS/USD daily chart

The daily EOS/USD chart has found resistance at the 20-day Simple Moving Average (SMA 20). So far this Wednesday, EOS/USD has dropped to $2.61. This Monday, the price failed at the $2.76 resistance level and has continued to decline steadily. The Moving Average Convergence/Divergence (MACD) indicates decreasing bullish momentum.

EOS/USD four-hour chart

The four-hour market is trending in a downwards channel formation and has dropped below the green Ichimoku cloud. The four latest sessions are trending horizontally between $2.63 and $2.60. The Relative Strength Index is trending around 34, right next to the oversold zone.

EOS/USD hourly chart

The hourly EOS/USD price is moving in an upwards channel formation but has failed to breach past the resistance provided by the SMA 20 curve. The bulls will need to gather enough momentum to break above the SMA 20 curve and intraday resistance $2.62 to maintain upward momentum.

Key Levels

 

---