What is Daniel Larimer?
Crypto Glossary Definition
eator of the cryptocurrency platform BitShares, co-founder of the blockchain social platform Steemit, and is CTO of EOS.
Why Daniel Larimer Matters
Daniel Larimer is a blockchain developer known for creating BitShares, Steem, and EOS, and for popularizing Delegated Proof of Stake as a consensus mechanism — a notable figure in blockchain's technical history alongside Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik Buterin.
Daniel Larimer in Practice
A blockchain developer researching consensus mechanisms in the early 2010s grows frustrated with Bitcoin's Proof of Work, believing its energy costs and slow transaction throughput make it impractical for applications needing fast, cheap settlement. That developer, Daniel Larimer, goes on to design an alternative called Delegated Proof of Stake, where token holders vote for a limited set of trusted delegates to validate transactions, trading some decentralization for dramatically higher speed. He implements the idea first in BitShares, a decentralized exchange platform, then applies similar principles to Steem, a blockchain-based social media platform designed to reward content creators directly, and later to EOS, a smart-contract platform aiming to rival Ethereum on throughput. Someone researching the history of consensus mechanisms today, trying to understand why platforms like Cardano and Tezos ended up incorporating delegate-style voting into their own designs, will eventually trace the concept back to Larimer's early experiments. Alongside Satoshi Nakamoto's anonymous invention of Bitcoin and Vitalik Buterin's creation of Ethereum, Larimer is frequently cited as one of the handful of technical figures whose specific design choices shaped how an entire category of blockchains — those prioritizing speed over maximal decentralization — actually work under the hood.
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