Days After Launch, the EOS Blockchain Still Isn't Live

Days after first initiating its launch in an unorthodox, distributed process, the EOS blockchain isn't yet live, but so far, the software appears to be progressing toward that goal without major issues.

As profiled by CoinDesk, after raising a reported $4 billion over the last year to create the software necessary to launch the blockchain, the company that created it is leaving it to its community to actually get it off the ground. That doesn't mean there haven't been material updates, however, or that Block.one, the company in question, hasn't been involved in the initial booting effort.

Rather, the company released version 1.0.0 of the EOS software on Saturday and already it's published one update to the code, version 1.0.1, a release that Block.one CTO Daniel Larimer described as preventing a "potential crash" in the update notes, along with other minor issues.

This means that, as of now, participants in the EOS initial coin offering (ICO), which ended on Friday, have purchased all the initial ethereum tokens that will ever be used to bootstrap the project. The plan was always for these tokens to be frozen at the end of the ICO, in preparation for a formal blockchain launch, meaning those coins won't be tradeable again until EOS is live. (It's unclear at this time how exchanges are managing their book-keeping while trading continues.)

The last big event took place June 2 at 10:59 UTC, when the tokens froze on ethereum and so-called "snapshots" were taken in order to preserve a record that can later be used to allocate tokens issued on the EOS blockchain to their owners. By all accounts, this occurred on time and without any issues (here's one description).

Still, it has been remarkable how unified block producers, or the entities jockeying to process transactions on the new blockchain (and thus receive its rewards), have appeared outwardly given the global scale of the launch.