EOS's Experimental Launch Might Be Putting Investor Money at Risk

As EOS is set up to enable self-governance by its users, it's these individuals and companies who have to make the first move, electing who they'd like to process transactions that occur on the network in an elaborate global vote.

"The biggest 'miss' in EOS launch is the failure to understand that retail EOS investors will be reluctant to vote with their private keys on the line," one EOS user wrote on Telegram.

Across community forums, distrust in third-party software created for EOS is matched only by the confusion faced by users engaging with the voting process.

Backing up, it's helpful to understand why private keys are needed to cast votes on EOS in the first place.

A private key is required with the use of any of the EOS voting software for two reasons - verifying the vote is legitimate and correlating that vote to a users' holdings, which is used to determine the weight of a vote.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Alexandre Bourget, co-founder of block producer candidate and voting software provider EOS Canada, said the current voting tools are on a spectrum of security, from trustworthy to extremely high risk.

Bancor's Levi said, "Use a downloadable voting tool that runs locally on your machine and outside the browser where votes are susceptible to manipulation by toolbars, botnets and other bad actors."

While open-source voting tools like Scatter, Greymass, LiquidEOS and EOS Canada's "EOSC" have not been third-party audited, each company or project behind those applications has made an effort to limit the degree of private key exposure and carefully document these processes.

As mentioned, because private keys are more susceptible to theft when they're used online, Tokenika has designed a tool that generates the vote offline, only connecting to the internet to publish the record of the vote.

Szumny warned EOS holders not to experiment, to be diligent about the use of their private keys and to take part in the voting process slowly so as not to make quick mistakes.