EOS traded up by as much as 24% at one point on 17 August, putting it on track for its best day’s trading since May 2021.  

Rebrand drives token higher

EOS has attracted investment from prominent backers in its five-year history, such as PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel. Indeed, its $4bn (£3.3bn) initial coin offering broke records in 2017. 

Despite such support, the project can be said to have underperformed. As of 17 August 2022, EOS’s market capitalisation stood at $1.54bn at one point, a far cry from the record $17.7bn that it enjoyed in 2018. 

Well-publicised disagreements between the EOS Network Foundation (ENF) and the blockchain’s developer Block.one have also weighed on investor sentiment. 

In an effort to arrest this stagnation, ENF CEO Yves La Rose announced this week that EOS will rebrand as EOSIO. The ENF’s divorce from Block.one will be finalised by a hard fork on 21v September. 

ENF opens registration for Yield+ programme

Investors have been attracted to the rebrand in part due to the new codebase, but also because of a chain split during the hard fork meaning all existing EOS holders will receive an equal amount of tokens on both chains. 

One driver behind the rise in investor enthusiasm was the ENF’s recent opening of registrations for its upcoming incentive programme Yield+. 

A liquidity incentive and reward programme, Yield+ hopes to attract decentralised finance (DeFi) applications that generate returns for their users. The total value locked inside the EOS pools has increased from 94.71 EOS to 102.18 EOS since registrations began. 

With the reward activation date set for 28 August, the ENF will hope that Yield+ will help EOS compete with the likes of Cardano and Solana.

As of 17:10 BST (UTC+1), EOS was trading up by 18.4% on the previous 24 hours at $1.55, and was also up 24.6% on the past seven days.