A blockchain that raised $4 billion in its initial coin offering (ICO) with little to show in its early years is aiming for crypto glory once again – years after almost being written off by skeptics.

EOS, whose native eos (EOS) tokens once reached a market capitalization of $14 billion at a lifetime peak, is gearing up for a complete resurgence in network activity and growth with extensive support planned for application developers.

That is thanks to the efforts of EOS Network Foundation, whose CEO Yves La Rose is leading plans for a consensus mechanism upgrade, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) solution, and an overall renewed growth strategy, per crypto research firm Messari.

The EVM mainnet is slated for an Apr.14 release, with updates and improvements planned in the weeks and months to follow.

“Combining the performance of EOS with the familiarity of Ethereum, Solidity developers are in for a treat,” Rose tweeted last week. “At 800+ swaps per second, $EOS EVM will be BY FAR the fastest EVM, benchmarked 3x faster than Solana + BNB and 25x faster than Avax”

  

On April 14th, #EOS EVM will launch!

Combining the performance of EOS with the familiarity of Ethereum, Solidity developers are in for a treat.

At 800+ swaps per second, $EOS EVM will be BY FAR the fastest EVM, benchmarked 3x faster than Solana + BNB and 25x faster than Avax. 

— Yves La Rose (@BigBeardSamurai)  March 1, 2023  

EVMs refer to the environment in which all Ethereum accounts and smart contracts live, serving as a virtual computer utilized by developers for creating decentralized applications (dApps). When deployed on other blockchains, EVMs can allow developers to build dApps and DeFi applications similar to how they would on Ethereum.

EVMs are a large part of EOS’s future plans.

“Many of the developers who have left EOS have done so not because they want to, but because Ethereum, for all its deficiencies, is where the action is,” the foundation said in a January post.

“EVM compatibility is essential to the potential of EOS, not just technically but also from a business perspective. Ultimately, it is essential that we welcome more Solidity developers and users to EOS, and an EVM on EOS is an excellent bridge to do just that,” it added at the time.

A grants program will fund developers working on such applications, starting from $10,000 to over $50,000 based on criterias such as the size and scope of the initiative. Grants can be provided to builders of wholly-new products, or to fund maintenance and upgrades of existing tools.

EOS tokens and ecosystem to benefit

Network upgrades, grant programs and interoperability with other blockchains could ultimately bolster eos token prices and the $125 million in total locked value (TVL) on EOS-based DeFi applications.

The tokens trade just over $1.20 in Asian morning hours on Monday, down ten cents from Friday. Price-chart analysis suggests resistance at $1.80 if the tokens jump in the coming weeks, with another major resistance at $2.90.

As such, TVL has already increased $50 million since the start of this year in the lead-up to April’s EVM launch. Applications such as EOS REX and Vigor, both lending protocols, have added more than 8% in lock value in the past week alone.

Per Messari, the network is averaging 1.3 million daily transactions and 38,000 daily active addresses on a year-to-date basis and averaging 1,785 new addresses per day.