EOS price forecast for 2018 – What benchmark will the price hit now?
In March 2018, EOS traded at $6.08, representing a market capitalization of $227 million USD. According to CoinMarketCap.com, this made it the 10th highest-ranked cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization. GlobalCoinReport.com reports EOS predictions by cryptocurrency speculators anticipating a price of $37 USD by the end of 2018. This is more optimistic than our EOS prediction for 2018, which holds that EOS will reach $22 USD by the end of 2018. EOS in 2018 so far has reached a high of $18.71, which occurred on January 13th. Our EOS price prediction analysis yields a lower price than many anticipate, but we believe that the fact that U.S. citizens are essentially banned from purchasing EOS is a detriment on multiple fronts.
What is EOS?
EOS tokens are distributed on the Ethereum blockchain and are ERC-20 compatible, which is a reference to the Ethereum smart contract standard. EOS.io is what the team calls their software. EOS.IO was developed by block.one, a company based in the Cayman Islands, but whose employees and contributors are scattered throughout the world. The company calls EOS.IO an “operating system on which Decentralized Autonomous Communities can easily be built, launched, and governed.”. The company says that the name “EOS” doesn’t have one official meaning. block.one’s CTO says that while EOS operates on Ethereum now, there are plans to have their own blockchain network running by June 2018.
On June 26, 2017, a token distribution began. The number of EOS tokens distributed to authorized purchasers was determined by their contributions of Ether (ETH). 100 million EOS tokens, constituting 10% of the total number of EOS tokens to be distributed, were reserved for block.one. U.S. citizens were excluded from purchasing EOS tokens in this distribution due to concerns about “some of the logistical challenges associated with differing regulations in the many states of the United States of America,” according to the EOS.io website. The site even goes on to say that “U.S. citizens, residents, and entities should not purchase or attempt to purchase EOS [t]okens.”. The entire U.S. being excluded from trading in a currency, while certainly not a death sentence, seems like it would present challenges in terms of publicity as well as funding, particularly for a cryptocurrency and company based in the Americas. This concern should factor into any analysis of EOS future price development.
Technical Details of EOS
According to the EOS.IO white paper, EOS.IO plans to use a delegated proof of stake algorithm to establish consensus. EOS.IO uses a Transaction as Proof of Stake (TaPoS) algorithm to verify transactions. This requires each transaction to include the hash of a recent block header and is supposed to guard against replay attacks.
The white paper goes on to list what the company considers the requirements for blockchain applications. These include the ability to support millions of users, the flexibility to offer users free services, easy upgrades and recovery from bugs, low latency, sequential and parallel performance. The white paper goes on to state that Web Assembly (WASM), a new Web standard for building platform-independent applications, can be easily integrated with EOS.IO.
According to the EOS.IO Software Roadmap, it appears that project is anticipating a go-live for their blockchain in Q2, 2018. Since their own blockchain is not yet developed, purchase of EOS at this time is highly speculative. Without miners, and with unclear requirements for running a node on the blockchain, if it is even possible, it is hard to say what benefit there is to owning EOS, other than to fund the EOS.IO software. What direct benefit there is from owning EOS.IO is unclear at this time, except of course, possible increase in value.