Unlike other blockchains, there is no pay per use pricing model on any EOS public network. Access to the limited blockchain resources is controlled by a mechanism named staking that allows users with higher ownership on the network to have higher priority accessing the limited resources.

On an EOS blockchain network the limited resources are:

• RAM — Resource required to store the in-memory database that supports your smart contract. This resource is consumed when a new data row is added to your smart contract database table. EOS uses the Bancor Protocol algorithm to adjust the RAM price based on supply and demand. Example: RAM to store the User Token Balances Database.
• CPU — Shared CPU time to execute your DApp business logic. This CPU is consumed every time you execute a transaction on the network and depend on the code complexity defined by your smart contract, so the longer your transaction runs more CPU time it will consume. Example: Transfer Balance from User A to User B.
• Network Bandwidth — the amount of data submitted to your smart contract. This resource is consumed when you send a transaction to the EOS network and depends on the size of data transported by your DApp transactions.

DApp developers can use public resources by either staking the network’s native token, SYS, or by buying RAM in a dynamic market that responds to demand and supply. CPU and Network Bandwidth consumption is tracked in 3 day periods, so DApp developers should stake SYS tokens for that period in proportion to the amount of data statically stored, the number of transactions that take place during that period, and the amount of data transmitted.

The EOS main network allows developers to lease resources for a 30 day period to reduce costs. The REX market allows developers to affordably accommodate demand peaks.

Rex market is a decentralized market for the buying and selling of tokens on the EOS blockchain. The market is powered by the EOS token and operates through the use of smart contracts. There are no fees for trading on Rex market, and all transactions are conducted directly between buyers and sellers. The market is also Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) compliant, meaning that it is transparent and accountable to its users.

Right now, there are multiple public EOS based networks that you can use to run your DApp, notwithstanding we will limit our analysis to the following public networks:

• EOS — is the original main net launched by Block.One on June 2, 2018. EOS was the first and fastest decentralized self-governed blockchain which encourages its token holders, investors, and developers to share their voice through proposals and voting as a means for consensus. EOS coin is the network SYS currency.
• WAX — WAX is an EOSIO based side chain that allows anyone to trade digital or even physical items instantly and securely, to anyone, anywhere. WAX is the public network SYS currency.
• TELOS — is an EOS side-chain managed by the TELOS foundation that wants to empower decentralized autonomous communities, fairly compensate the main block producers and standby block producers and provide an affordable public network for DAPP developers. TLOS is the public network SYS currency.

Network Bandwidth Costs per EOS.IO Network

Every time you run a transaction, your consumption is accumulated over a 3-day period. At the end of the 3 days, your total consumption is calculated. You need to have enough CPU and bandwidth staked for the entire 3-day period.

If your application does not require a huge amount of data to be transmitted over the network, the SYS stake required will not be considered a huge cost.

The Net bandwidth cost per KB was estimated based on the following formula:

Net Price = (Net Staked / Net Available) / 3

To understand how the SYS/KB/Day dynamic pricing is calculated, please read the “How we Calculate EOS Resource Usage” article.

CPU Costs per EOS.IO Network

The CPU congestion on the EOS main network has been a hot topic over the last months since the amount of CPU available to run your DApp transactions fluctuated a lot with a huge CPU demand increase imposed by EIDOS Airdrop. It is fundamental to make sure that at any time you have the required resources to make your blockchain network submissions to go through and don’t have any denial of service for your users.

According to the table, if a dAPP requires 100 transactions per day, the minimum amount of SYS needed on March 9, 2020 would be ____.

This estimate comes out to a potential cost of about 5.4%. We also estimated the cost of lending the same amount of EOS/SYS for 30 days on the EOS Main Network. This estimate comes out to a potential cost of about 5.4%.

The CPU cost was estimated to be $X per millisecond, and we used some block producers to help estimate the price.

CPU Price = (CPU Staked / CPU Available) / 3

To understand how to calculate the SYS/ms/day dynamic pricing, please read the “How We Calculate EOS Resource Usage” article.

We recommend that you deal with CPU demand spikes for dAPPs with very irregular CPU bandwidth shapes by lending SYS on the REX market. This approach will dramatically reduce the amount of SYS that you need to have staked to accommodate your application load with no service disruptions.

RAM Costs per EOS.IO Network

If you try to use your dapp when there is not enough RAM, it will not work and people won’t want to use your dapp Most of your DApp budget will go towards the costs of RAM. Every time you run a transaction that stores new data on your smart contract database, the amount of RAM consumed will increase. If you try to use your DApp when there is not enough RAM, it will not work and people will not want to use it.

We recommend keeping the amount of information stored about your smart contract to a minimum.

Besides that, look into mechanisms and services like IPFS or decentralized storage solutions to transfer the storage to a less expensive service. Once your DApp grows, you can expect that the amount of RAM needed to run your service will increase.

We planned to use 25% of our asset to acquire the RAM. We estimated the amount of RAM needed and the cost of acquiring it based on the current prices, and we planned to use 25% of our assets to buy it.

Account Acquisition Cost per EOS.IO Network

The users of your DApp will want to use it as quickly and easily as possible, without even knowing that they are interacting with a blockchain.

In order for that to happen, DApp developers might need to pay for the network accounts required to bring new users onboard. In the table below, we estimated the costs required to set up an EOS account with 4KB of RAM.

There are some DApps that use a different scheme to avoid the cost of software integration headaches. These DApps support virtual accounts or use a hierarchical account scheme.

Revealing the Secret Blockchain DApp World of Bots

AnChain.AI uses artificial intelligence to study bot activity within the blockchain DApp world. So far, this is the largest study of bot activity within the DApp ecosystem.

Bots that scrape content from the internet are causing problems for businesses that use cryptocurrencies, making it hard to tell what metrics are real and which have been manipulated.

We analyzed the Top 10 EOS blockchain gambling DApps transactions in Q1 2019 and found that blockchain bots make up 51% of unique accounts and 75% of transactions. That’s about $6 million USD in daily transaction volume.

This report displays the various types of behavior exhibited by blockchain bots, the difficulties that come with detecting them, how our team at AnChain.AI has created a deep learning model that can accurately detect them on a large scale, and what we as an industry can do about the issue of blockchain bots.

Key Insights

1. In terms of unique accounts, the most active DApp (DApp-1) has only a small percentage of bot activity.
2. The remaining Top 10 DApps (DApps-2–10) all have substantial bot activity.
3. With 4500+ unique accounts, DApp-2 attracted the most bots (~1900) while its organic human generated traffic is lower than that of DApp-1. This dynamic hints at the competitive nature of the DApp world, in which the runner-ups are leveraging bots in order to augment overall ecosystem usage metrics.
4. Without the use of our sophisticated prediction models, DApp leaderboard websites, ratings agencies, investors, developers, and enthusiasts alike will be fooled into believing DApp-2’s significant 200K+ transactions (roughly 4x that of DApp-1 transactions) signals more popularity, value, and usage. Meanwhile the reality is that DApp-1 has the most authentic human accounts and it did not employ a bot army to augment its numbers.

Why does blockchain bot detection matter ?

This is an industry where a lot of new blockchain protocols and businesses are being created. User activity and transaction volume are often used as proxies for how well a DApp, protocol, or business is performing.

The integrity of certain metrics is being called into question due to bot activity, making it more difficult to understand, regulate, operate, and secure the industry.

In order to determine the authenticity of the blockchain industry and the crypto-assets within it, one must understand how much activity taking place is being done by bots with unknown incentives.

Bots have been around for a while, but there hasn’t been much research done on bots specifically in the blockchain industry, especially with regard to blockchain DApps.

In the legacy economy, almost 40% of all Internet traffic in 2018 was bot driven.

Bots are computer programs that carry out automated tasks. They are most evident in the millions of “price scraping bots” that crawl across the web of e-commerce sites and the army of Google bots indexing the entire internet to facilitate its search engine.

The impact of trading bots on cryptocurrency exchange volumes was recently analyzed by Bitwise Asset Management in a SEC filing report.

The report said that 95 percent of Bitcoin volume is fake. Trading bot accounts make it look like there is more activity than there really is, which can fool investors, regulators, builders, operators, and enthusiasts.

Summing-Up

It’s important to figure out how many network tokens (EOS, TLOS, WAX) you’ll need to stake in order to run your DApp. Your smart contract will need database space to save user data, and enough CPU bandwidth to support your traffic.

While you’re at it, make a list of the pros and cons of each network listed in this analysis and weigh your options. It’s not easy to switch networks, so take your time making this decision.

The cost of using an EOS sidechain is 10-50 times lower than the cost of using the EOS network, but this difference will decrease as demand for the sidechains grows. The Bancor Algorithm, which is used to calculate RAM prices, will have an impact on the cost of acquiring an account and the amount of RAM required to store information.

If your dAPP starts to get more users, the cost of storing data, acquiring CPUs, and getting EOS accounts can go up a lot. Some dAPPs charge users for some of the costs of processing transactions, but this should be done carefully so that people who use the dAPP don’t get confused.

If you’re not careful with your math and planning, you could end up in a situation where your users can’t use your service because you’ve run out of EOS resources.