Hoarders Drive EOS RAM Market Prices Beyond Affordability

In order to distribute RAM across the EOS network, the EOSIO Dawn 4.0 mainnet uses an updated market-based allocation approach allowing token holders to buy and sell database space at prevailing market prices.

Decentralized applications require a significant amount of memory space to store temporary data for their programs, which developers can purchase with EOS on the EOS RAM market.

The updated RAM market lets trades fluctuate the value of RAM on the network.

"Under Dawn 4.0 the system contract now buys and sells RAM allocations at prevailing market prices. This may result in traders buying RAM today in anticipation of potential shortages tomorrow."

With over 85% of available RAM being kept by select individuals, the demand for the scarce developer resource is driving prices beyond affordability.

At the current rate, the cost of 1 MB of RAM is approximately 715 EOS. Given that there are no applications currently running on the EOS platform, it makes little sense why 85% of the available RAM has already been claimed for use.

As a solution to RAM hoarding, the EOS community has proposed block producers confiscate utilized RAM from hoarders who intend to profit rather than allocate data space for developer use.

An EOS blog post mentions that through Moore's Law - a prediction that computation power will double every two years - the network's supply of RAM will eventually increase to 4TB. "Over time Moore's law will allow block producers to upgrade to 4TB or even 16TB of RAM and this increase in supply will trickle into the the EOSIO RAM market lowering prices."

This upgrade to RAM capacity requires a two-thirds or greater vote by the 21 block producers governing the EOS network - leaving the future of the RAM market in the hands of a centralized body who may or may not own RAM themselves.

RAM traders and speculators hoarding their RAM holdings in a market shortage have little incentive to free up memory space for developer use, creating an unanticipated obstruction to DApp development on the EOS platform and a price per MB that will continue to rise towards infinity.