From EOS to Vaulta: A $4 Billion Dream, a Community Coup, and the Ones Left Behind

Between June 2017 and June 2018, a company called Block.one ran the longest initial coin offering the industry had ever seen. For a full year it sold EOS tokens to anyone who wanted in, and by the end it had collected roughly $4.1 billion — more than many tech IPOs, raised before a single line of the final product was running in production.

The pitch was intoxicating. EOS would be the "Ethereum killer": a blockchain with no transaction fees, fast enough for real applications, designed by Dan Larimer — known in the community as "BM" — who had already built two earlier crypto projects. Investors believed. In April 2018, weeks before the network even launched, EOS traded above $22. It was a top-five cryptocurrency on pure expectation.

The mainnet launched in June 2018, and the cracks appeared almost immediately. Instead of thousands of independent validators, EOS relied on just 21 elected "block producers" — and researchers and community members soon alleged that the big producers were voting for each other in a cartel-like arrangement. In 2019, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission fined Block.one $24 million for running an unregistered securities sale — a slap on the wrist compared to the $4 billion raised.

Then the builders started leaving. In January 2021, Dan Larimer quit. Block.one shifted its attention to a new venture, the Bullish exchange, and to buying back its own stock. Development on the network itself slowed to a crawl. The token that had traded above $22 spent years grinding downward, eventually losing more than 95% of its peak value. The community's verdict was brutal: Block.one had taken the money and moved on.

What happened next had never been done before in crypto at this scale. In late 2021, token holders rallied behind a new community-run organization, the EOS Network Foundation, led by a longtime community figure named Yves La Rose. In December 2021 the elected block producers voted to halt the ongoing token payments that Block.one was still contractually receiving. In effect, the community fired the company that had created the network.

For a while, the revival looked real. The foundation funded a modernized codebase, launched an Ethereum-compatible environment in 2023, and handed out grants to developers. Weekly progress reports gave holders something they had never had under Block.one: transparency. But the token price kept falling, and the reports — weekly, then monthly, then quarterly — slowly thinned out. After early 2024, financial disclosures stopped altogether.

In March 2025, Yves La Rose announced the boldest move yet: EOS would be renamed Vaulta and reborn as a "Web3 banking" network — wealth management, payments, tokenized assets, insurance, with an advisory council of banking veterans. The market loved the news for a moment; the token jumped 30 to 50 percent. In May 2025, holders swapped EOS for a new token called A, one for one.

But a rebrand changes the story, not the fundamentals. The new A token briefly rallied and then resumed the same long slide. By late 2025 it was changing hands around $0.21 — roughly 99% below the price EOS commanded at its 2018 peak.

On November 12, 2025, Yves La Rose — the man who had led the revolt against Block.one and promised the community it would never be abandoned again — announced his resignation as CEO of the Vaulta Foundation. The statement was gracious and forward-looking, promising an orderly, on-chain election of a successor.

The community's mood turned within weeks. Community investigators alleged that core treasury accounts were still controlled by the departing leadership long after the resignation, that his preferred successor immediately proposed another multi-million-dollar grant, and that the foundation had burned through tens of millions of dollars in four years with little to show for it. An open letter circulating in the community accused the foundation of betraying the same ideals it was founded to defend. These remain community allegations — but the trust that took four years to rebuild collapsed in a matter of days.

What's left of EOS — now Vaulta — today? A technically capable network with almost no one using it, a token deep in the triple digits of the market-cap rankings, and a scattered community of long-term holders who have now watched two sets of leaders arrive with big promises and leave through the back door. Some still build. Some still vote. Most simply hold, waiting for a turnaround that gets harder to imagine with every rebrand.

The story is worth knowing because it repeats. A giant fundraise is not a delivery guarantee. A foundation that stops publishing financial reports is telling you something. A rebrand is marketing, not progress. And in crypto, the people left holding the token are almost always the last to know. If you want the neutral, current facts about the network itself, see our Vaulta explainer — but keep this story in mind when you read it.