EOS Creator Block.one Releases Statement on Block Producer Collusion and Mutual Voting Allegations

Rumors circulating the Internet suggest that EOS might be facing a scandalous situation involving an illicit mutual voting partnership, led by Chinese cryptocurrency exchange Huobi. EOS has become one of the most widely used and high performing blockchains in the world. However, the platform’s parent company Block.one readily admits that EOS has suffered a number of setbacks since launching in June. Block.one has published a new Medium post addressing the growing evidence that the EOS blockchain governance model has been corrupted.

Concerns surrounding EOS began to come to a head last week when EOSONE posted what appears to be a leaked Huobi spreadsheet in a blogpost on WeChat. If authentic, the spreadsheet reaffirms previous accusations made by EOSONE that the EOS blockchain’s major Block Producers (BPs) have formed a collaborative alliance led by one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, Huobi. This potentially brings the integrity of the entire EOS blockchain into question. The spreadsheet includes tables titled “node mutual voting table” and “node income statement”.

Block.one’s new blog post, signed by company CEO Brendan Blumer, doesn’t deny these claims, but says, for now, that all evidence has yet to be verified:

“We are aware of some unverified claims regarding irregular block producer voting, and the subsequent denials of those claims. We believe it is important to ensure a free and democratic election process within EOS and may, as we deem appropriate, vote with other holders to reinforce the integrity of this process.”

Meanwhile, a Twitter account belonging to Maple Leaf Capital has noted a correlation in voting between Huobi (publicly known as the current fourth-largest BP on EOS’ producer ranking) and the suspected BP’s working in the mutual voting ring.

The complete report by Maple Leaf can be found here. The analysis points out that Huobi voted for 20 other BP candidates, and 16 of those candidates voted for Huobi. The documents provided by EOSONE show potential evidence for recorded payoffs for these voting exchanges.

“Huobi votes for eosiosg11111, cochainworld, and eospaceioeos in exchange for 170, 150, and 50% of the returns respectively…” writes Maple Leaf. “As an EOS token holder myself, I view such action with utter disgust, and there is a reason why our Mapleleafcap proxy only votes for a very selective group of Chinese BPs.”

CoinTelegraph reports that further potential evidence presented by Maple Leaf suggests that mutual voting was also done during the recent promotion of the Huobi Pool Token (HPT), which shared tokens with users in exchange for locking their EOS on Huobi. Maple Leaf believes that Huobi may be planning to use those tokens for future votes on the EOS platform.

This would go against Article IV of the EOS Constitution under the title “No Vote Buying”, which reads:

“No Member shall offer nor accept anything of value in exchange for a vote of any type, nor shall any Member unduly influence the vote of another.”

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of rival Dapp platform Ethereum, responded to the Maple Leaf Capital’s Twitter thread stating,

Interesting! I mean, it was completely predictable and I did predict it, but I did not expect it to happen so thoroughly and so soon!@VladZamfir https://t.co/InylvvzHFm

— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) September 29, 2018

Buterin went on to make the case that recent events point to larger issues pertaining to the structuring of the EOS governance model.

As a followup, *this* is why I do not believe in coinholder-voted on-chain treasuries. Any chain where coinholder-voted on-chain issuance is used to supposedly fund public goods can easily collapse into this kind of “I vote for your crappy project, you vote for mine” equilibrium. https://t.co/ooAyuZRf3s

— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) September 29, 2018

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