Eco Association Update: December 2023
Happy New Year! 🎊
And 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.
Welcoming our 2024 Trustees! 👋
As mentioned in last month’s update, a big focus for us at the Association in Q4 2023 was in facilitating the second ever Eco Trustee Elections heading into 2024.
The Trustee construct is a foundational component of the currency & protocol as a whole, a key pillar on which the entire system is built. Every two weeks, Trustees enact monetary policy onchain for the currency via a dedicated dApp and voting process. See the Eco Whitepaper or Manual for more information.
The initial proposal for the 2024 program, “2024 Eco Trustee Election: Preliminary Vote”, passed in early December — and the final proposal, enacting everything therein onchain, has passed as of today (Thursday, January 4th).
As mentioned last month, the Association proposed a few changes to the program for its second year:
A smaller slate, with just nine Trustees for 2024
The addition of the “Trustee Observer” construct, a lower-touch role for Alumni Trustees to maintain involvement with Eco
A revised compensation structure, shifting the balance of incentives to extend beyond onchain voting
We’re excited to announce the slate of Trustees who will be enacted for 2024 as of Friday, January 5th!
They are:
Chris Berg — Co-Director of Blockchain Innovation Hub & Professor of Economics at RMIT
Evan Kereiakes — CEO of Lumina Labs, formerly at the Federal Reserve
Irene Tse — Macro Investor, former North American CIO at JP Morgan Chase & Co-Head of US Rates Trading at Goldman Sachs
Jeff Snider — Host of Eurodollar University, Chief Strategist at Atlas Financial
Michelle Lai — Board Director at Electric Coin Company (Zcash), Governance Council at Synthetix, former Private Equity investor
MikeWeb — Eco Community Representative
Pete Dattels — Former Senior Member of the IMF
Pure Macro — Deputy CIO at Coinbase Asset Management & Former Senior Research Director at the Bank of Canada
Subspace — Eco Community Representative
While Year 1 of the Trustee program was about getting it kickstarted and building a record of conducting onchain monetary policy, we expect Year 2 will shift more towards innovation and growth, expanding on the foundations built by the group in the first year.
The group has some exciting ideas for 2024 that we look forward to watching them explore!
Community Governance ⚖️
Eco Community Governance runs in two-week cycles called “generations”. This section summarizes any governance proposals enacted in recent generations.
In Generation 1031, the “Cohort 2 Election” proposal was submitted. As described above, this is the governance proposal that finalizes what the community had voted in via the “2024 Eco Trustee Election: Preliminary Vote” proposal about a month earlier — it formally implements the new trustee slate onchain and funds the program for 2024.
In Generation 1030, the “EGP #010 Rectify TrustedNodes votingRecord numbers” proposal passed. This proposal was for a technical update to the protocol that (a) enables trustees to redeem their vested rewards as intended, and (b) provides a patch to ensure the 52-week trustee terms will turn over at exactly the right time.
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 Generation 1031, the winning proposal was a 16% APR with a 90-day lockup.
In Generation 1030, the winning proposal was a 35% APR with a 30-day lockup. This was the highest Base Interest Rate the Trustees have enacted yet.
Subscribe to our Telegram channel to get updates when new policies are enacted.
Happenings & Shoutouts
🎙️ Beam team members Shahrukh & Albert joined Optimism’s Demo Day where they presented a fantastic technical overview of Intents for Smart Contract Wallets — check out the recording.
📝 Community member dr3a.eth wrote a great article on Mirror reviewing some of Eco’s highlights from 2023
🏰 We hosted a Twitter space with Austin Griffith & BuidlGuidl, a well-known collective of Ethereum builders, to discuss BuidlGuidl’s Cohort Stream model and Beam’s current Cohort Stream for funding builders ushering in the golden age of onchain payments.
If you’re looking to build in the payments space, check out goldenage.buidlguild.com and join the Telegram group to contribute.
🏆 Beam held a holiday contest giving users the opportunity to win USDC & ECO. Congrats to the lucky winners!
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.