Dan Larimer to help the EOS community take control of the project

The company behind the EOS blockchain platform — Dan Larimer’s ClarionOS — will prepare the Mandel hard fork codebase, designed to give the community control over the protocol.

To finance the initiative, the nonprofit EOS Network Foundation (ENF) allocated ClarionOS 200,000 EOS (~$514,000 at the time of writing).

ENF was created in August 2021. It is led by former EOS Nation block producer Yves La Rose.

The organization sought from Block.one (B1) the transfer of EOS intellectual property rights. But instead the company, previously behind the platform’s development, pledged to allocate ENF 30 million EOS.

The community did not accept such a plan. In December 2021, the block producers voted to discontinue regular payouts in favour of B1, halting the issuance of 67 million EOS, slated for distribution over the next six to seven years.

In an interview with CoinDesk, ENF’s director of communications Zak Gall explained that B1 had long since shifted its attention and funding to the crypto exchange Bullish, which is preparing to go public via a merger with a SPAC.

According to Gall, B1 “burned” the EOS ecosystem, transferring all tokens to the new trading platform:

“Essentially, B1 handed over its assets to the new company, which is very similar to a rug pull. The community united to reach a consensus and reclaim the only asset under the network’s jurisdiction, namely uninvested EOS. Perhaps this is the first, and only, instance where a DAO stood up against a corporation.”

After B1’s departure, ENF faced a problem—the intellectual property rights to the EOSIO protocol still belong to the company. The latter also maintains a GitHub repository that has not been updated in eight months.

Gall stressed that the Mandel hard fork will return the community “operational control” over the project. He also stated that Larimer plans to launch several projects on the EOS network, including a social network.

In a series of YouTube videos, La Rose and Larimer explained that after the split with B1, ENF gained the opportunity to fund multiple startups that could work on competing ideas.

La Rose also explained that ENF plans to focus on four main areas:

• develop software that enables decentralized applications to run on the EOS network;
• provide a common framework of tools for security analysis and auditing of smart contracts;
• develop software for integrating blockchain with external applications;
• develop API providing data from the EOS network to external entities.

In his blog, Larimer explained that the Mandel hard fork is based on the EOSIO 2.0 release, although some elements are taken from other versions. He recommended that block producers “downgrade” the software to EOSIO 2.0 before transitioning to Mandel.

The update will also enable deploying more sophisticated smart contracts on the EOS network, integrate a contract structure that can execute without signatures from network participants, and simplify subsequent adjustments to the blockchain’s configuration.

Earlier in January 2021, Larimer left his post as Chief Technology Officer of Block.one. In March, he unveiled a decentralized social network, Clarion.

In early 2022, Larimer promised to deploy a ‘killer app’ designed to make EOS a platform for creating and growing DAOs.

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