The process took nearly two arduous weeks, but the EOS blockchain has officially gone live.
According to data from UK-based block producer EOS Authority, the blockchain went live at approximately 17:46 UTC, immediately after block producer voting passed the 15 percent threshold necessary to activate the network.
The mainnet had technically launched a week earlier — after the various EOS launch groups finally agreed to attempt to activate the network — but it could not become functional until users staked 15 percent of the total supply of EOS tokens to vote for the network’s 21 block producers, who verify transactions on the platform.
Few users were quick to stake their tokens, and less than one-third of the required 150 million tokens had been staked as of Tuesday. However, voting picked up over the next several days, particularly once cryptocurrency exchanges began to stake tokens on behalf of their users, and a flurry of votes led to the official launch on Thursday.
The EOS mainnet went live on June 14 at approximately 17:46 UTC.
Blockchain development firm Block.one, which raised $4 billion to fund the development of the first version of the EOSIO software but did not participate in the mainnet launch, congratulated the community in a statement.
“We are witnesses to history,” wrote the firm, which owns 10 percent of the 1 billion circulating EOS tokens. “Never before has a decentralized network of this size and scale been launched in such a short time.”
The EOS price has outperformed the market in the day since its launch, rising 7.5 percent to $10.89 at the time of writing — nearly five percentage points more than the overall index, which rose by 2.6 percent during the same timeframe. EOS currently has a $9.8 billion market cap, making it the fifth-largest cryptocurrency according to this metric.
Notably, EOS is not the only top 10 cryptocurrency in the process of migrating from the Ethereum network — where they have been structured as ERC-20 tokens — to independent networks. Tron, the 10th-largest cryptocurrency, released its mainnet software on May 31 and plans to finalize the transition before the end of June.