RAM It All: Rising Costs Are Turning EOS Into a Crypto Coder's Nightmare

In order to onboard users to an EOS dapp, developers generally have to make sure they've secured sufficient amounts of three separate resources: RAM, which amounts to state storage on the blockchain; CPU, which measures average consumption of computing resources in microseconds; and network bandwidth, or NET, which measures average consumption in bytes.

Yutin Chen, CEO of PandaFun, a game that recently launched on EOS, said the team bought 10,000 EOS worth of RAM or around $65,000 at current EOS prices.

The company also staked 10,000 EOS for CPU and 1,000 EOS for NET. Although, Chen made it clear that most of the RAM would go toward an upcoming token sale, saying, "The game doesn't cost that much."

The cost of deploying the ethereum smart contracts could be $1 or $100, but it's a far cry from what it would cost on EOS. Ultimately, that's not only a problem for the developers, but also EOS users.

Even before the EOS mainnet launched in June, an open issue of GitHub argues that the RAM model "Simply can't work if your target is to create tens or hundreds of million user accounts for your dapp!".

One, the company that developed the protocol and held the $4 billion EOS ICO, wrote that block producers could free up maliciously consumed RAM by enforcing the principle that "Intent of code is law."

According to Dapp Radar, just a handful of EOS dapps have more than 100 daily users, so how strapped for CPU could the network be?

EOS Knights suggests staking at least 15 EOS on CPU to play the game, but the Reddit user claimed that even a $500 stake would not meet the recommended required CPU time.

It may be overly simplistic to say that ethereum pushes costs onto users, while EOS pushes costs onto developers.

For one, whereas a popular dapp like CryptoKitties can clog the entire ethereum network, EOS staking does guarantee a certain minimum access to CPU. Another potential advantage is that unlike ethereum's gas, investments in EOS resources can be recouped.