In December 2019, block.one published a new proposal to replace the somewhat broken REX resource model that currently powers the EOS mainnet and other EOSIO blockchains.
The model from block.one plans to replace REX with a “resource rental market” where “user[s] will pay a resource rental fee via a smart contract to be granted 30 days worth of CPU/NET from the total supply. After 30 days the rental must be renewed and pricing is automatically adjusted using a market based mechanism, based on changes in supply and demand for CPU/NET resources.”
Our team has had some spirited debates on the issue with a diversity of strong opinions, but when the dust settled, we were able to reach a consensus after setting a few ground rules on how we should come to decision on our stance, before we actually agreed on what our stance would be. The first requirement we all agreed upon was to define what we think would be the best resource model for EOS from scratch rather than trying to work backwards from the block.one model. We love block.one, but we are here to be honest to our voters, and decided to formulate our stance by comparing what we think is best for the community to what block.one is proposing.
In addition, at Rapid, we believe in physics, not metaphysics, and decided that we should come to our decision on which resource model is best by looking at hard evidence from comparable platforms rather than trying to theorize about which model would be best for the community.
After more discussion we decided to analyze 3 successful comparables in our pursuit for evidence of what resource model would work for EOS:
- Amazon Web Services EC2
- Ethereum (Analysis Article Coming Soon)
- Western Union (Analysis Article Coming Soon)
We then analyzed the fee structures of each of the comparables to examine find out what would work best for EOS, and we will be reporting our findings in a series of 3 articles that cover each comparable in depth.
Our Conclusions
After analysing the comparables, we concluded that Block.one’s proposal is an excellent step in the right direction and should be implemented, however, it is necessary for further work to be done so we can allow users to choose to pay monthly (as proposed by block.one) or per transaction in a manner similar to Ethereum. This would enable potential EOS users to experience the advantages of dApps on the platform without having to lock into what amounts to a monthly resource subscription.
That being said, since we believe that a monthly based rental model is better than the existing REX model, we believe that block.one’s proposal should be implemented as soon as possible, and that as soon as it is implemented, we should begin work on adding per transaction billing.
