Telos blockchain is a smart contract blockchain protocol that runs on EOSIO software. Aiming for mainstream adoption, the protocol is built to enhance transaction speed and scalability, with its main features being its delegated proof-of-stake consensus, both EOSIO and EVM compatibility, and its 0.5 second block time.

The blockchain network is on course to combining two different protocol technologies in the blockchain space by supporting both solidity-based Ethereum Virtual Machine smart contract and EOSIO c++ smart contract. Such combination opens Telos up to the largest community of developers on the internet. Telos has been developed on top of the EOSIO software, originally produced by Block One, but uses a modified genesis block where initial account balances were fairly distributed.

Since Telos is based on EOSIO's DPoS consensus mechanism, there are only 21 active block producers at a time. An additional 21 block producers serve as standby that are continually tested for readiness by regularly rotating one standby block producer into active production. Any Telos block producer that misses 15% of the blocks in any schedule is removed from its active role, and the 22nd ranked block producer is elevated from standby to active.

Network resilience is maintained throughout this process, and the block producers are ranked and accepted by TLOS holder voting. While this limited amount of block producers allows the network for better scalability and greater speed, which result in a better user experience, it is at the expense of decentralization, similarly to the Binance Smart Chain for example.

Due to the popularity and the first mover advantage Ethereum received, EVM and its programming languages (Solidity and Vyper) are the dominant smart contract execution and development environments. However, in 2021, we saw how Ethereum became near unusable for the average user, with slow transaction times and excessive transaction fees.

In addition to Ethereum Layer 2s seeing the light to offer greater scalability, numerous competitors saw solutions developed to allow EVM support on them such as Near (Aurora), Cosmos (Evmos) or even Solana (Neon). Telos decided to implement this with its Telos EVM (tEVM), an EVM running on the Telos blockchain, allowing Ethereum based dapps to easily deploy on the Telos blockchain with all of its benefits, such as no front-running, faster transaction speeds, and low transaction fees.

Telos can be seen as a 2.0 version of EOS with a larger support of dApps. While the blockchain hasn't received a lot of developer attention so far, this native support of EVM is going to help developers port existing applications to the network in an easier way. There are already a few DeFi applications being built and if Telos wants to position itself as a new alternative to the major blockchains, it is going to start with developer adoption