Vitalik Buterin Recalls Old Joke About EOS as the Team Claims They are ‘Making a Comeback’

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has tweeted that EOS, a once-popular blockchain project, stands for “Ethereum on Steroids,” recalling an old joke within the crypto community.

The Ethereum mastermind praised the project, saying that the core team learned from “Ethereum’s amateurish naivety and idealism” and created a smart contract platform with much higher scalability and speed.

Buterin’s remarks came as a surprise to many, particularly since he has been very critical of EOS in the past. “V, you OK?” Cardano (ADA) founder Charles Hoskinson asked in response to Buterin.

EOS is a smart contract platform that gained popularity after its debut in 2018 when it raised USD 4.1bn in an initial coin offering (ICO). The project was considered an “Ethereum killer” because of its capacity to offer a higher rate of transactions per second (TPS).

However, throughout the years, Block.one, the developer of EOSIO, a blockchain protocol based on the crypto EOS, reportedly failed to add value to the blockchain, which led to an exodus of developers and resulted in the blockchain missing out on the decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) booms.

This forced the dissatisfied members of the EOS community to form an organization in opposition to Block.one. Dubbed the EOS Network Foundation (ENF), the organization rebelled against Block.one and took over the network codebase.

The ENF CEO Yves La Rose has vowed to “make a comeback.” In response to Buterin, he said EOS is the “most performant blockchain” and the only one that can “handle 100m+ transactions per day.”

As reported, the foundation has recently announced the TrustEVM, a new virtual machine that brings Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility to EOS, allowing developers on the EOS network to create smart contracts using the popular programming language Solidity.

Meanwhile, at 9:28 UTC, the project’s native token EOS is trading at USD 1, down by 2.2% over the past 24 hours and up 4% over the past 7 days. The coin is down by 95.6% from its all-time high of USD 22.71 reached in April 2018.