Author: Marco González

Editor: Randall Roland

On June 14th, the EOS Network Foundation announced the Mandel 3.1 Release Candidate 1 with these words:

Mandel was a placeholder name for rebranding the third version of EOSIO. Momentum for developing EOSIO 3.0 began in the minds of a core group of mainnet developers. Many were already well-known within the community. The EOS Network Foundation was born out of these independent minds.

Independence remains central to the ENF’s mission. Prior to Mandel, developing on EOS faced several challenges. Funding and coordination were among the most inhibitory. Developers expected pre-ICO and inflation-accrued investments to support new projects. Instead, allocated funds went unspent under the administration of Block.One. Coordinating project planning also suffered devoid of the requisite tools.

Even those not reliant upon early investments voiced their disapproval. Well-funded developers unfamiliar with EOSIO often complain about the limited build tools available to support their ventures.

The ENF sets its sights on meeting the funding and tool requirements of mainnet developers. Furthermore, the ENF leads development to ensure the mainnet’s fundamental needs are met. The Foundation establishes instrumental working groups to achieve such ends. In Mandel, the ENF has presented what expects to lay a strong foundation for the future of EOS and the greater ecosystem.

The first version of Mandel becomes the third generation of EOSIO. It redefines the mainnet. Many of Mandel’s initiatives tackle community concerns that’ve festered for many months (some, even years). The ENF highlighted new features in a thread (1, 2) accompanying the original announcement:

For those who aren’t developers, essentially the new features will make it easier to get new projects off the ground. Another key objective is facilitating diversity for dApps. Conversations involving subjective billing, transaction finality, plugin logs, and computational costs have all circulated around community chatrooms in recent months.

Antelope (placeholder name Mandel) has implications beyond the EOS mainnet. Like EOSIO, Antelope is open-source technology for establishing a blockchain network. Future chains that wish to connect to EOS will want to consider Antelope. The release candidate was made ready for block producers (BP) to test and eventually approve.

Keep in mind that Antelope Leap 3.1 RC1 is NOT a hard fork- rather, it’s a consensus upgrade. There won’t be two chains left in its wake. The EOS mainnet runs on Antelope as the top 21 block producers come to agreement with a ⅔ +1 consensus. Note that if BPs hadn’t come to consensus, then token holders could’ve restaked to BPs who would.

Extensive testing precedes the release of new versions of the EOS blockchain. Testing isn’t only open to BPs. As an open-source project, Antelope Leap 3.1 RC1 is the concern of all EOS app developers. Again, officially adopting Antelope Leap 3.1 as the new EOS mainnet requires consensus among the top 21 BPs before the code can be upgraded. As a release candidate, Leap 3.1 may change to satisfy BP concerns or any faults found during testing.

ENF Founder and CEO Yves La Rose introduced Mandel 3.1 (now Antelope Leap) with these words:

4 years is a long time in blockchain. Given EOS’ capacity for lightning speed transactions, 4 years seems like an eternity.

Indeed Antelope Leap 3.1 is the first true community released mainnet. Previous versions of EOSIO were led by a private corporation. What’s so amazing is how much more comprehensive and faster the Foundation-led product has been. Even in its breadth, it seems destined to outperform the centralized development of versions 1.0 and 2.0. It’s a testament to the potential of blockchain and the EOS Community.