The EOS project fascinated me from the very beginning.

I first met the team at Consensus 2017. They went all out at the big blockchain event, hosting a bash that reminded me of the go go early days of the dot com boom and giving talk after talk.

But spectacle never interests me. I’m not fooled by pretty lights and pretty words. It’s the depth of ideas that matter.

And they had ideas in spades.

For the first time in crypto I saw a team trying to solve some of the real challenges facing the space, the ones I thought only myself and a few others had even remotely considered. With my Cicada concept project I spent a year at the whiteboard trying to find radical solutions to the hardest problems in crypto: scale, adoption, governance, identity, reputation, distribution and demand to name a few. I dug into old papers and ideas, hunting for hidden gems.

I also studied all the projects out there, mining them for their greatest solutions.

Yet more and more I found nobody solving the most pressing problems in crypto. Even worse, they didn’t even see the real issues.

If you can’t even see the problem, you certainly can’t create a real solution.

It’s like those long division tests you hated in grade school: If the first part is wrong, the rest of it is automatically wrong.

But the EOS team did see the big problems and the big picture.

For example, I’ve often said that for a crypto ecosystem to really flourish you need free transactions. It’s just a basic fact that some things in life have little or no value and they’ll never have value.

And yet everything on crypto platforms costs money.

It seemed so obvious to me and yet I hadn’t found a single team out there that understood that simple fact. Then I met the EOS team and they not only saw the problem they framed it better than I did.

“If you went to Amazon and it cost you three cents to load the page you’d never load the page.”

That’s it in a nutshell. If Amazon charged for everything, you’d never even get through the front door because you don’t know what’s on the other side!

You have to see the merchandise before you even consider buying it. Anything could be behind door number one. You might find Amazon’s beautiful cornucopia of products and elegant design or you find a disgusting scam site.

EOS was just one of the many projects at Consensus. It was an amazing conference all around, filled with incredible energy and possibility.

Go back and look and you’ll see that the real crypto buying boom started that very week, as projects announced innovation after innovation. Zcash rocketed to new heights as JP Morgan announced adoption of their privacy protocols. Dozens of other coins saw their valuations spike hard.

I left the conference drunk on wine and ideas, my head swirling with possibilities.

But it was EOS that loomed largest in my imagination.

And I was determined to buy into the project as soon as I could get my grubby little hands on their shiny digital coins.

The EOS project fascinated me from the very beginning.

I first met the team at Consensus 2017. They went all out at the big blockchain event, hosting a bash that reminded me of the go go early days of the dot com boom and giving talk after talk.

But spectacle never interests me. I’m not fooled by pretty lights and pretty words. It’s the depth of ideas that matter.

And they had ideas in spades.

For the first time in crypto I saw a team trying to solve some of the real challenges facing the space, the ones I thought only myself and a few others had even remotely considered. With my Cicada concept project I spent a year at the whiteboard trying to find radical solutions to the hardest problems in crypto: scale, adoption, governance, identity, reputation, distribution and demand to name a few. I dug into old papers and ideas, hunting for hidden gems.

I also studied all the projects out there, mining them for their greatest solutions.

Yet more and more I found nobody solving the most pressing problems in crypto. Even worse, they didn’t even see the real issues.

If you can’t even see the problem, you certainly can’t create a real solution.

It’s like those long division tests you hated in grade school: If the first part is wrong, the rest of it is automatically wrong.

But the EOS team did see the big problems and the big picture.

For example, I’ve often said that for a crypto ecosystem to really flourish you need free transactions. It’s just a basic fact that some things in life have little or no value and they’ll never have value.

And yet everything on crypto platforms costs money.

It seemed so obvious to me and yet I hadn’t found a single team out there that understood that simple fact. Then I met the EOS team and they not only saw the problem they framed it better than I did.

“If you went to Amazon and it cost you three cents to load the page you’d never load the page.”

That’s it in a nutshell. If Amazon charged for everything, you’d never even get through the front door because you don’t know what’s on the other side!

You have to see the merchandise before you even consider buying it. Anything could be behind door number one. You might find Amazon’s beautiful cornucopia of products and elegant design or you find a disgusting scam site.

EOS was just one of the many projects at Consensus. It was an amazing conference all around, filled with incredible energy and possibility.

Go back and look and you’ll see that the real crypto buying boom started that very week, as projects announced innovation after innovation. Zcash rocketed to new heights as JP Morgan announced adoption of their privacy protocols. Dozens of other coins saw their valuations spike hard.

I left the conference drunk on wine and ideas, my head swirling with possibilities.

But it was EOS that loomed largest in my imagination.

And I was determined to buy into the project as soon as I could get my grubby little hands on their shiny digital coins.