EOS price jumps 24% ahead of rebrand

The EOS Foundation plans to hardfork the EOS blockchain on September 21. This Proof-of-Stake blockchain is set to rebrand to EOSIO as the project tends to distance itself from notorious developer Block.one. In response, the EOS token has rallied more than 24% over the past 24 hours.

In a tweet on August 17, the EOS Network Foundation announced its long-awaited EOS rebrand. “Who is ready for the EOSIO rebrand? 15.5 hours… Tick Tock,” said a Wednesday tweet, implying that the foundation’s rebrand would go live on the same day.

Back on August 15, Yves La Rose, the EOS foundation’s CEO, hinted that the rebrand would launch “this week,” but only after EOS Network Foundation’s tweet, the market has entered an EOS buying craze. According to CoinGecko, the token jumped quickly by over 24% since it was posted, making EOS one of the best-performing crypto tokens of the past 24 hours.

In 2017, EOS raised a record-breaking $4 billion through its initial coin offering (ICO) but faced criticism after failing to meet its promises. The EOS token has also underperformed those of other Layer 1 blockchains and has never broken its 2018 all-time high price. Although EOS has attracted prominent backers, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, an internal struggle between the blockchain’s developer Block.one and the non-profit EOS Foundation has weighed on the project.

Led by La Rose, the EOS Foundation has worked to sever ties with Block.one. This February, La Rose announced the Foundation would seek legal recourse against Block.one for what it called “negligence and fraud” following the EOS ICO. Also, the EOS community voted to stop issuing vested EOS tokens to Block.one at the end of 2021, claiming that it had failed to deliver on its promises for EOS.

For now, the EOS Foundation is gearing up to completely break up with Block.one, entering a “new chapter” in the blockchain’s development, as La Rose said. The foundation will rebrand EOS under a new name to distance itself from the period of lackluster development that it blames on Block.one.

In addition, the EOS Foundation plans to hardfork the blockchain’s existing EOSIO codebase on September 21, a necessary step to transfer project ownership away from Block.one and its affiliated companies.

“This marks the end of a turbulent journey from a codebase controlled by a toxic entity to a truly decentralized and open source project,” La Rose said in a Monday tweet regarding the rebrand and hardfork.

Another move sparking interest for EOS is that the EOS Network Foundation opened registrations on Aug. 14 for its upcoming Yield+ incentive program.

The Yield+ is a liquidity incentive and reward program to attract decentralized finance (DeFi) applications that generate returns for their users. In doing so, the service attempts to compete with its top blockchain rivals in the DeFi space, namely Ether, Cardano (ADA), and Solana (SOL).

Since the beginning of Yield+ registration, the total value locked (TVL) inside the EOS pools has increased from 94.71 EOS to 102.18 EOS, showing a temporary spike in demand for the tokens. The TVL will likely increase in the days leading up to the reward activation on Aug. 28.