The best way to describe EOS is to compare it with the concept of Ethereum. In Ethereum we have a bare-bone computer (called Ethereum Virtual Machine) and some apps trying to run on top of it.

Those apps have a tough job to do, because apart from some basic stuff, like the ability to send funds and maybe store some data, they need to take care of pretty much everything else.

And because everything is being implemented in the application layer, it’s being done within relatively inefficient scripting environment. Which makes it really hard.

Furthermore, even if some generic solutions eventually emerge as a result of these efforts, they will be expensive to use, as every single line of their code will incur a run-time cost in the form of gas payments.

So what are we missing here?

Right, we need a blockchain operating system.

And this is what EOS is about. EOS is an operating system for running decentralized applications.

Actually, it’s both – it’s a computer and an operating system on top of it.

Generally, there are two ways of building a smart-contract platform.

The first option is this: you start with creating the whole thing, and then attempt to build some concrete apps on top of it. Most likely, reality will hit you hard when you try to make those apps actually useful. However, this is the prevailing approach in the crypto-space. Systems like Ethereum, Cardano, Neo or Lisk are being created using this approach.

Here’s an alternative: you start with building a couple of concrete, non-trivial apps, inevitably make some mistakes while doing this, learn from those mistakes, and, as a next step, figure out what’s common between your apps, and only then start building the abstraction layer.

The latter is how EOS was born. The team of developers behind EOS have already built some of the most successful blockchain apps in the crypto-space, and now they have set out to leverage their experience by building a general-purpose platform called EOS.