EOS To Become More Affordable
September 7, 2018 11:26 PM
EOS block producers have elected to change the requirements for creating an account, claiming the new rules will reduce costs by 25 percent.
A group of EOS block producers have approved a plan they hope will keep the costs of EOS account creation down. This new protocol stems from the price spike for RAM that occurred in July when, over the course of a few days, the price of RAM on the EOS network increased nine-fold. The cost of account creation is affected because each account purchased currently requires at least 4KB of RAM.
Since account purchases, and the associated RAM, are necessary for the development of Dapps, some worried the network was on its way to becoming cost prohibitive. Shortly after that crisis, Dan Larimer, creator of the EOS.io, proposed changes to the network protocol that he believed would reduce prices. It now appears these changes have been approved by the voting block producers and will go into effect.
On Thursday September 6, block producer EOS New York announced it and 14 other block producers have approved the plan. In a post on Medium, EOS New York wrote:
«Many users of EOS decentralized applications (dApps) are early adopters, people who are eager and willing to spend the time to understand the EOS blockchain. But in the future, users will not be as eager. The users of the future will want to use the new dApp they found as quickly as possible. In fact, they may not know they’re about to interact with a blockchain at all.»
«For that to happen, dApp developers will need to pay for the network resources required to onboard users (or pass this cost on to users). Reducing this cost by 25% dramatically reduces the barriers to development when considering account creation at scale.»
The 25 percent reduction seems to be based only on the reduction in the minimum RAM requirement from 4 kilobytes to 3 kilobytes – this would represent a 25 percent reduction in cost relative to whatever price accounts would have cost had these changes not gone into effect. However, this does not mean that the cost of account creation will remain 25 percent lower than before the rule change went into effect. RAM prices do not remain stable, nor does the price of EOS. (Accounts are purchased in EOS, not fiat.)
Tim Prentiss is a writer and editor for ETHNews. He has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Nevada, Reno. He lives in Reno with his daughter. In his spare time he writes songs and disassembles perfectly good electronic devices.
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