Eco Association Update: April 2024
Welcome to the Eco Association’s monthly newsletter. We cover developments in the Eco currency protocol and the broader community.
Let’s get to it.
The Next Eco Era: A proposal for what’s ahead
On April 17th, Eco Co-Founder Ryne Saxe published a forum post outlining “The Next Eco Era”.
Within it, he outlines his perspective on the history of the project, where we stand today, and where we might best focus our efforts looking ahead — in short, repositioning the Eco Protocol as a payments protocol, centered around a cross-chain transaction system (rather than a currency system).
We, the Eco Association, are whole-heartedly in support of Ryne’s proposed direction. We held a Community Call on April 24th to discuss the direction with our community and have now kicked off the first of two governance actions that would begin to make the migration from a two-token currency system to a single-token payment protocol a reality.
This is certainly a big shift, but one we are very excited about — the post is a very important one to read if you’re interested in the future of the project, so please do review it and share your input if you haven’t already.
Community Governance ⚖️
Eco Community Governance runs in two-week cycles called “generations”. This section summarizes any governance proposals enacted in recent generations.
Generations 1038 and 1039 passed without any governance proposals.
Monetary Policy Governance 🧮
As described in the Monetary Policy section of the Eco whitepaper, Eco Trustees vote to enact a policy every two weeks (i.e., each “generation”).
The monetary policy levers currently available to the Trustees are:
Linear supply change (also known as “rebase”)
Random inflation
Interest rate lockups
In Generations 1038 and 1039, the winning proposal was the “default proposal”, which means there was no change in supply and no interest rate lockup enacted.
If the first governance action outlined above is voted in, Generation 1039 will mark the final monetary policy enacted on the Eco Currency.
Happenings & Shoutouts
📚 Eco Trustee Irene Tse published a write-up comparing blockchains to existing card networks, in response to the op-ed piece "Block Capital One’s Merger With Discover" written by Senator Elizabeth Warren for the Wall Street Journal on March 7th 2024.
💸 Beam rolled out a new update that lets users make three free transactions every day. These reset at 12:00 UTC, so you can plan your daily activities without worrying about fees. This new feature is a big win for anyone using the platform regularly.
🎉 Community member Ima-Abasi represented Eco and Beam at the Arbitrum Lunch Date 2.0 event in Nigeria. He spoke on a panel and showed attendees just how easy it is to make payments with Beam.
🔒 Beam is collaborating with Unlock Protocol for onchain event registrations at Consensus in Austin in late May. They are offering a $500 USDC bonus for teams registering their side events through Unlock Protocol. If you’re running an event at Consensus, this is definitely something to take advantage of!
🏝️ Oasis Onchain featured Eco and Beam in their deep dive into consumer crypto, tackling how consumer applications like payments, onchain media, and decentralized social media can impact everyday users in the Caribbean and beyond.
This email is for informational purposes only and all token-related updates are compiled from publicly-available sources (as described below). It should not be construed or relied upon as financial advice and it is not an offer or recommendation to buy or sell any asset or enter into any transaction. The development and operation of the Eco network is decentralized, so any protocol upgrades discussed above that have not yet been implemented remain subject to community governance approval. Nothing in this email is confidential and all material information contained herein is publicly available to members of the Eco community through its Discord, community update calls, independent third party websites, on-chain transaction records, and other open channels.