INTRO
We are Aurora EOS, the block producer for the informed voter.
We’re a team of EOS enthusiasts and technologists committed to driving long-term platform adoption through education, market development, and community engagement.
Today, we’re announcing that we’re officially campaigning for your vote to be an EOS block producer.
Every block producer candidate must meet the basic minimum requirement— the ability to operate a full node and reliably produce blocks. But that, by definition, is a commodity. What differentiates block producers is their ability to bring additional value to the EOS community in any number of ways. Every block producer will come to specialize in certain areas, offering the EOS community domain-specific expertise.
At Aurora EOS, we’re going to focus on our strengths: Using education to cultivate an engaged and informed EOS community.
Our core team spun out from Multicoin Capital, one of the most well-respected, research-focused hedge funds in crypto. We leverage an unparalleled understanding of the EOS software and ecosystem, as well as a unique ability to communicate these concepts to a wider audience. While with Multicoin Capital, we published some of the most in-depth reports on the EOS technology stack and governance framework. You can read them here:
We excel at diving deep into nuanced and difficult subjects, developing a profound understanding of those subjects, and then helping others to do the same. This is a service that every community needs, especially one that’s this technical and that’s in its infancy. We will accelerate this in our role as an EOS block producer.
By leveraging our knowledge of EOS and our standing within the community, as well as our resources and connections to prominent investors and builders, we feel that we can help bridge the gap of understanding between the EOS community, the crypto community at large, and the 99% of the world that hasn’t yet gotten into crypto.
OUR CURRENT FOCUSES
The EOS network is still in its earliest stages— the mainnet is not yet feature-complete, and several large changes are being proposed to the core infrastructure of the network. We’ll focus our education efforts over the next quarter on:
The current EOS Constitution is an interim proposal designed to serve the network until a formal referendum can be held to adopt an official first version of the constitution. Aurora EOS supports a constitutional approach that provides checks and balances on the various participants in the EOS network and limits the power that any single entity can have. We will help the community understand the various constitutional proposals, outlining the benefits, drawbacks, and tradeoffs of each in order to allow the EOS community to make the most informed decision possible.
EOS’s current token model offers token holders pro-rata access to network resources, with an internal market to allocate RAM. A new proposal introduced by Block.one would create additional internal markets and reward participants in those markets. This would serve the dual purpose of lowering costs for developers and users while also increasing voter participation. We believe that this is the right path forward, but it would represent a significant change to the current EOS model. We want to make sure that voters understand the features and tradeoffs of this new system before enacting those changes. Large-scale changes to the core protocol should be made with broad consensus, and true consensus requires understanding.
The EOSIO software was originally designed with a network treasury, funded by inflation, that would allow token holders to vote to allocate funding to various ecosystem projects. More recently, this feature has been criticized and challenged, with some advocating for its removal and others advocating for a new design. We plan to explore the benefits and risks of the original worker proposal system, as well as offer in-depth analyses of the new designs for the system that have been floated. We believe that there are significant benefits that come from having an on-chain treasury, but we also recognize the challenge of creating such a system that won’t be gamed by whales and will result in true value creation. This is not a trivial task, and eliminating the WPS entirely may ultimately be the best course of action. It is our job to examine the different models and help the EOS community decide on how to proceed.
It is one of our primary goals as a block producer to increase voter participation. Currently, EOS voting is used to elect block producers. But the software allows for on-chain voting for all sorts of features, meaning referenda could be held directly on-chain to allow users to vote on changes to the protocol. Structuring these refferenda and introducing new processes for decision-making into the protocol is an exercise that will prove extremely important to creating a robust network long-term. We plan to dedicate significant resources towards researching different approaches designed to ultimately put control in the hands of token holders.
We also believe that voter participation can be increased significantly from current levels. We will work hard to get every group of token holder onboarded into the voting process. This requires certain tools that make it safer and easier to vote, but also requires education regarding not just about the tools and options available for voting but also the initiatives being voted on themselves. The EOS ecosystem needs informed voters participating, and we will help make that happen.
The current version of the EOS mainnet doesn’t include all of the features outlined in the EOSIO white paper— several of these features are still being built with the intention to integrate at a later date. We are very excited about many of these proposed features (EOS Storage, multi-threading, inter-blockchain communication). We’ll advocate for formal security audits of any newly integrated features. We also plan to release content and explainers on various proposals so that developers and users are fully aware of all of the different options available to them to build on EOS.
OUR TEAM
Myles Snider, CEO
Myles formerly led research at Multicoin Capital, where he developed expertise on EOS and became a respected figure within the EOS community. During his time at Multicoin, he published many of the crypto industry’s most well-regarded research reports, including three specifically about EOS. Myles fell down the crypto rabbit hole in 2014 and became an early BitShares adopter after becoming fascinated by decentralized stablecoins. He became intimately familiar with Dan Larimer’s Graphene framework, delegated proof-of-stake, and many other features that became important parts of the EOS tech stack. He has been following EOS closely since its inception. He is actively involved in the EOS community, the crypto investor community, and has worked directly with large enterprises building on blockchains. He also built The Stablecoin Index, an open-source tool for tracking and comparing stablecoins.
Tim Ogilvie, CTO
Tim has spent 20 years starting and operating technology companies. Most recently, Tim founded Y-Combinator-backed Think Gaming, a SaaS data platform focused on mobile games. Previously, he was founder and CEO of AdBuyer.com, an early demand side platform (sold to Mediaocean), and was a pre-launch employee at two successful consumer internet companies, Interactive Search Holdings and Pronto (both sold to IAC/InterActiveCorp). He graduated from Yale University with a B.S. in Computer Science.
Seth Rinney, Head of Infrastructure
Seth has architected and implemented large-scale big data pipelines and devops systems on AWS at Paytronix, a provider of loyalty solutions, and OM1, a health outcomes and registries company focused on the measurement and prediction of treatment outcomes. Previously, Seth was the CTO of Haystagg, a real-time ad bidding technology start-up. Seth has considerable experience consulting on cloud security and compliance in the Financial Services/Securities industry. He graduated from Yale University with a B.S. in Astronomy & Physics.
Aurora EOS is an independent company based in Austin, Texas. To learn more about our organization, see our block producer compliance and disclosures here.
OUR VALUES
Block producers work for the EOS network, which means we ultimately work for the EOS community. It is our objective, first and foremost, to serve the EOS community with reliability, transparency, and with long-term goals in mind.
The core values of our organization are the following:
EOS is a community-driven project. Our goal is to cultivate and expand the EOS community. Education is the single most important aspect of community-building, and that is where we excel. Sensible governance comes next— working with the community to properly govern the EOS network based on the wants of EOS token holders. Finally, we realize that the EOS community is a diverse group of people made up of users, developers, investors, enterprises, entrepreneurs, proxies, block producers, and many more. We aim to bridge the gaps between these various groups.
Integrity is defined as “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.” We strive to embody this quality in everything we do. We believe that transparency is a requirement for every block producer candidate that hopes to serve the EOS community. We plan to offer quarterly reports that outline our efforts and the progress of our organization. We commit to serving the needs of the EOS community, first and foremost, and to acting in accordance with the wants of the EOS token holders at large.
Aurora EOS will not engage in vote-buying of any sort. We believe the practice degrades the security and quality of the network and its validator set. We will never purchase votes.
Our server setup offers best-in-class security to allow us to reliably and consistently produce blocks. Our setup is designed for maximum uptime, safety, and redundancy. Our team has over 40 years of combined experience in running enterprise-grade servers, and we will use this knowledge to not only make sure our operations are extremely secure, but also to adopt the same safety-focused approach in enacting code changes and network upgrades.
EOS is currently the most performant and scalable blockchain in existence, and we intend to further our lead. Our first goal is to implement all of the major proposed features of the EOSIO software, including EOS Storage, multi-threading, resource exchanges, and more. After that, we plan to focus on consistently and safely scaling up our own infrastructure in order to maximize the performance of the EOS blockchain and to offer the best experience to developers and users.
WHAT’S NEXT?
It’s time to get to work!
Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates on the EOS ecosystem, and follow our blog for weekly content. We’re honored to be a part of the EOS community, and we look forward to taking this journey together!
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Aurora EOS is the leading block producer for the informed voter. If you find our work helpful, please vote for our node: auroraeoscom
If you prefer to proxy your vote, our proxy account is auroraeosprx
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