Revitalizing EOS: from a neglected protocol to an independent engineering ecosystem

When I joined in early 2022, leadership had already begun moving toward an internal engineering organization. I worked alongside them to shape how that transition would function and how it could address the ecosystem's broader needs.

An important part of my work involved translating research and investment recommendations into executable initiatives. I evaluated responses to requests for proposals, worked with prospective delivery teams to refine their submissions, and advised the stakeholders responsible for funding decisions. I was not the funding authority; those calls were made collaboratively. Once projects were approved, I participated in progressive acceptance and delivery oversight to help ensure the resulting work met its intended objectives.

This process exposed a recurring limitation: funding alone could not guarantee access to the specialized expertise required for complex blockchain infrastructure. We consequently evolved a more flexible approach to technical investment. Core protocol maintenance and selected developer tools increasingly became internal responsibilities, while applications and broader ecosystem utilities could still be developed by external teams through grants and partnerships.

The boundary was deliberately adaptive. As projects progressed, we reassessed delivery risk, technical complexity, and available capabilities rather than treating the original funding arrangement as permanent. In subsequent initiatives, including EOS EVM and instant-finality development, this sometimes meant transitioning responsibility from external contributors to the internal engineering organization while preserving valuable expertise and collaboration. The objective was not to replace external development. It was to build an ecosystem capable of reliably delivering its most important technical priorities.

Alongside six senior blockchain engineers, I helped establish the product and delivery capabilities of the foundation's new engineering organization. As founding product manager, my responsibility extended beyond maintaining a backlog or translating requirements. I developed an interconnected operating model covering:

I took ownership of the foundation's organization-wide roadmapping practice, creating and maintaining its roadmaps throughout my tenure. These artifacts brought together protocol engineering, technical working groups, ecosystem initiatives, and funding programs into a shared view of organizational priorities, dependencies, and timelines.

Building on an earlier roadmap initiative, I developed the planning and communication approach as the foundation expanded its internal engineering capabilities and ecosystem development efforts.

Public GitHub initiative backlogs and regularly updated roadmaps helped make technical work more transparent and provided ways for developers and ecosystem participants to contribute feedback. The resulting organization was not simply a new team of engineers. It had a framework for making decisions, managing dependencies, coordinating releases, and communicating its work across a decentralized network.

The first major test of this operating model was the development and release of an independently maintained EOS protocol implementation. The engineering effort began with an established EOSIO codebase, incorporating selected fixes and improvements from other versions while preparing a new release under the Antelope Leap framework.

Executing the transition required substantially more than publishing software. The team needed to align engineering scope, coordinate backports and security assurance, prepare release candidates, communicate upgrade requirements, and ensure that independent network operators understood how and when to migrate. I helped develop the release and migration plan and coordinated across internal engineers, external technical partners, block producers, and exchanges.

On September 21, 2022, EOS block producers completed the coordinated hard fork to Antelope Leap 3.1. The milestone established the network's independence from its original protocol maintainer and demonstrated that the new engineering organization and broader ecosystem could collectively deliver a critical infrastructure upgrade.