EOS has been experiencing a resurgence of sorts, alongside the rest of the market. Entering the month of July at $8.03, it has since seen two solid leg-ups. It went all the way up to $8.92 during Monday and has since embarked on a July 4th run, which currently has it up at $9.35. It has broken clean through the previous $9 resistance level and is looking to break even higher if Bitcoin continues to move favorably. The $10.00 and $10.23 (200-DMA) levels are seen as the next in line to be tested and hopefully broken. Currently sporting a market cap of $8.334.324.700, EOS remains the 5th most valuable cryptocurrency in the world.
EOS’ mainnet swap struggles have been written about heavily, perhaps even somewhat too harshly. The voting issues have been mitigated, the network pause and hacked accounts have been resolved and a new constitution is apparently being worked on by Dan Larimer and the block.one crew. Not launching a testnet before going live with a mainnet is definitely biting the project by the behind, as even after these mentioned issues are addressed, new seem to pop up.
Recently the news reported that EOS is running into a RAM-related trouble. The main point is that many people see RAM as the real resource of the EOS ecosystem and therefore the demand increased the RAM price massively, resulting in theoretically high cost to actually use the EOS ecosystem (account creation most notably as a used indicator) which could damage the platform as a whole.
Basically there is a smart contract that swaps EOS and gives you RAM in return and whenever somebody does that the price increases automatically (decreases if you sell RAM back to EOS). This allows the RAM price to be almost independent of other EOS allocations and provides liquidity for RAM for people who need it.
This isn’t the first time EOS ran into issues with memory, as it was previously suggested that additional 12 thousand EOS would have to be printed to ensure that the mainnet has enough RAM to come alive. The problem right now seems to be the fact that EOS decided to let EOS RAM allocation be conducted by the free market. The EOSIO Dawn 4.0 utilizes a market-based allocation approach which allows the RAM prices to be created freely by the supply and demand.
The demand is definitely there, as anyone who wants to run a dApp on the EOS mainnet needs to have RAM in order to do so. However, the supply side remains an issue, as shortages of RAM and prices getting inflated as a direct cause of that are already being reported.
The issue wasn’t present in the Dawn 3.0 version of the mainnet as it had fixed RAM prices. However this was changed in the latter version:
“Under Dawn 4.0 the system contract now buys and sells RAM allocations at prevailing market prices. This may result in traders buying RAM today in anticipation of potential shortages tomorrow.”
This has seemingly resulted in RAM hoarders becoming a thing on the EOS mainnet, with 85% of the resource being held by a select few individuals. The memory resource has seemingly been bought up in advance by these individuals in anticipation of the future EOS dApps going live. The prices have skyrocketed as a result of that, forcing developers to pay around 715 EOS (almost $6500) for 1 MB of RAM.
There are several solutions being suggested here. Some community members propose RAM confiscation from those that aren’t actively using it; others believe that the supply of RAM will naturally increase through the workings of the so-called Moore’s Law. The first one will require a centralized intrusion into a process that was supposed to be decentralized, which is bad. The second one will require time, which isn’t something crypto platforms have in abundance. Ultimately, a solution will have to be found soon, if the platform wants to have developers creating those much needed dApps for EOS.
