Announcing Greymass for EOS Block Production
In perhaps a bit of a surprise announcement, two of the most trusted names on the Steem blockchain will be joining forces for EOS. Partnering under the name Greymass, @jesta and @anyx will be bringing together their individual skills to create a uniquely qualified EOS block production team.
The first question on everyone's mind right now is probably: "Will our EOS goals affect our individual witness activities on Steem?"
The answer is a resounding “No!” In the same way that many Bitshares witnesses also became Steem witnesses, adding value due to their vast experience with the DPOS systems and Graphene blockchains, we believe that Steem and EOS will work in a similar way. These two blockchains are siblings, with many common features and a large overlap in community members. Thanks to their related codebases and overall synergy, our experiences with Steem will accelerate our productivity on EOS, and conversely, our new experiences with EOS will drive development for Steem. We intend for this to be a mutually beneficial relationship.
In addition, part of the reason for our partnership on EOS is to avoid distraction from our own individual Steem witness responsibilities. Rather than each of us working on producing EOS blocks by ourselves, we have combined our efforts to become a single EOS block producer. This arrangement gives us more time to do what we do best -- add value to both blockchain platforms (and perhaps others too!), with our unique sets of skills and experiences.
Finally, we are not the first Steem witnesses to announce their intent to run as a candidate for EOS -- and we think that’s a good thing! We believe it is beneficial for these communities -- and for the cryptocurrency world in general -- to unite towards our common goals.
Our Mission
Greymass (Our company name, and official block producer candidate) will be headquartered in Michigan, USA. Our mission is to enrich the EOS platform by building, and helping others to build, cool and useful stuff!
Our top priority is the strong development of the EOS infrastructure and community. We passionately believe that blockchain systems can only reach their full potential when both their infrastructure and community are developed with clear intent. While we aren’t sharing too many details about our plans just yet, stay tuned -- we will be announcing a lot of cool projects soon, including our plans for eosDB, the steemDB equivalent!
Our Partnership
Although you know them as @jesta and @anyx, they are real people! Here’s a bit more info about them, and what they’ve been up to.
Aaron Cox : @jesta
Full Stack & Blockchain Developer
Aaron is a veteran web developer with over twenty years of experience, specializing in publishing platforms, social/community engines, and data mining. Aaron has released all his efforts open-source, merged his past experiences with new Blockchain protocols, and previously worked on developing a crowd-sourced review platform. In addition, Aaron has worked as the lead web developer for a number of tech companies, such as NCSOFT.
Aaron is incredibly fascinated by the impact Blockchain technologies will have on the Internet itself. Since devoting himself full-time to exploring this tech, he has built a number of apps including wallets such as Vessel, a number of block explorers, and prototypes for end users platforms such as chainBB and Reprint. Aaron is currently a top elected delegate as @jesta on the Steem, Decent, Muse, and Karma blockchains.
Scott Sallinen : @anyx
Research Scientist
Scott is a Computer Engineering Ph.D. Candidate at the University of British Columbia, with research areas of High Performance Computing and Distributed Systems, Graph Processing, Machine Learning, and Blockchain technologies. Scott has published multiple peer-reviewed papers within these domains at top-tier research conferences such as Supercomputing, and has previously worked in the research divisions of top technology companies such as Intel and Facebook.
Scott has a passion for the application of Blockchain technologies in the real world. He has built and led the @steemcleaners and @cheetah projects on the Steem blockchain for several years, in an effort to address and reduce fraud and phishing on the social media platform. Scott is also a top elected delegate as @anyx on the Steem blockchain.
Position on Dividends
A question that is on many people’s minds right now is the debate about dividends, or “kickbacks in exchange for votes” from EOS Block Producers.
Our stance is clear: we will never participate in a kickback system. Instead, we intend to use our funds to directly innovate and enrich the EOS platform.
Statement Update in 2020 - The above statement was far too much of an optimistic stance when it was originally made. Greymass at the time of this update now works within a few select "kickback systems" and contributes a small percentage of its block producer revenue to proxies who elect value-adding producers. Unfortunately. the EOS ecosystem today requires this of us in order to be within a paid position, and Greymass feels this path is the lesser of two evils. We understand the damage this behavior causes within these systems and will continue to push for the change to help solve the issues vote buying causes.
Delegated proof of stake is a trusted system, where block producers are elected based upon what is effectively a delegated form trust. It can be inductively proven that in a system where voters choose their votes solely based upon receipt of dividends, the system degrades into an un-trustable system, with no proven security model.
While voters will likely factor in many things when choosing whom to vote for, we will err on the side of caution for the sake of the security of EOS, and never offer any kickback to our voters.
This is true of all DPOS models, including Steem, and we will be publishing a blog post on Steem explains the inductive proof of this soon. We encourage all other block producers to read it before offering dividends.
Contact Us
Greymass will be run as a partnership between @jesta and @anyx, and we’ll be bringing on board new team members in the coming weeks as we hire to round out our positions and expertise. Interested in joining our team? Let us know!
We will be announcing a lot more soon, so stay tuned.
Find Us At:
Good luck in your endeavours!
I'm so very excited for you guys! You are two of my most favorite, intelligent, capable, productive people on STEEM, and it's awesome to think you'll be teamed up together doing cool stuff for EOS as a BP and more. I really am so excited to hear this.
I definitely want to know more about your inductive proof. I did a video a couple weeks ago discussing if the eosDAC airdrop could be considered a form of vote buying. It's one of my biggest concerns, and the main thing I spent weeks thinking about before joining the eosDAC launch team.
For me, it ultimately came down to how much I prefer decentralization over centralization. Instead of just a few fat cats or centralized corporations making decisions that impact everyone else, I prefer to see decentralized governance, tokenomics to incentivize participation by a wide range of people, and rewards being used for what's best for a broad community. I think DACs are the future, and I'm willing to take some risks to support that future and give DACs a voice in the governance process for EOSIO, even if they don't have a ton of money to buy up enough EOS to have a voice in influencing a block producer. My hope is, with our 12 custodians voted in by eosDAC holders, anyone holding eosDAC can have their voice heard.
Anyway, back to your post.
I think this is important for all BPs. They have to demonstrate they are providing value. I'm hopeful creating tools for DACs will be how we do that as well.
I agree, this will fail every time, and it's the reason we're working so hard on our constitution and custodian voting system to ensure we make it prefectly clear what our priorities are as a DAC. My biggest concern is we, as the launch team, create something fantastic for the EOS community and for those who want to build DACs, but we don't properly protect it, and it gets taken away from us. I think we have plenty of things in place to prevent that, just as STEEM, EOS, and many other cryptocurrency projects do via incentives that protect a collaborative commons instead of destroying it because that's ultimately the most profitable approach. By being the first, we get to set the bar high for any DACs or DAC BPs the follow us. We get to lead in technical excellent as Rob and Micheal have already done with the launch of the very first superhero testnet.
I'm really excited for you guys and look forward to working together as fellow block producers to continue improving both STEEM and EOS.
Aww shucks, thanks @lukestokes.
Agreed. I'm excited to see how DACs evolve and how they can be used for the greater good. While I have my doubts and see it as a yet unsolved problem (as we've discussed), it's exciting to see research being done.
While @greymass won't be focusing on the same aspects as eosDAC (from what I understand - governance, it's structure/tooling, and related smart contracts?), we hope the value proposition we offer will still be as coveted. I hope we have a more clear vision and statement about exactly that topic soon, but a few critical pieces I plan on proposing for the organization are more along the lines of "the application of blockchain technology" and "it's infrastructure in how it relates to the greater internet".
I'm a big believer at this point that it's possible to create value that extends outside the ecosystem of a single blockchain - much like as a web developer, you can contribute to the larger good of the internet by contributing to open-source software. We really don't see this trend yet today in blockchain, and although the software is technically open source, it's not modular and each ecosystem does things it's own way.
My personal goals recently (which will hopefully bleed into this new organization) are to attempt to do just that. I need to write a blog post here soon about all this. It is my intention that most of the open source software I create from here on out will provide value to not only one ecosystem of developers, but many, granting the developers who embrace blockchain technology a bit of mobility. This mobility will allow developers to choose what platform is best for the app they're building, and not be restricted by "what will be the easiest" or "what circle hole can I smash this square peg through". I see that a lot right now.
Very exciting times @jesta & @anyx! So psyched to hear you’re doing this!
I suppose greymass works better than Janyx or Anesta.
I was going to say Anesta sounds like some random drug and make up a funny illness it cures but apparently Anesta is already a real drug, a topical anesthetic used to treat "hemorrhoids, anal fissures, and similar conditions of the skin and mucous membranes" ....so good call on greymass :)
LOL, yeah getting lumped in those search results would have been an interesting competition for SEO!
Only 6 comments? Really?
Its great news for everyone that you guys are broadening your influence. As someone that has little to none technical knowledge, whose contribution to the value of the platform is extremely small ill be looking for "guidance" by those that i can trust to see where i might find more opportunities. You guys are those kind of people.
Good luck.
Hah, well... 6 real comments is better than getting 6 real ones and a few dozen "Nice posts!" comments I suppose.
Thanks though! We hope to be able to provide that sort of guidance and insight, while not betraying the trust we have garnered over the last couple years here (and elsewhere).
Good luck! Very exciting.
Exciting times! I went to listen to Dan Larimer talk about EOS last year. Looking forward to hearing about what projects you have up your sleeves.
A powerful partnership! It's going to be an exciting summer