Eco Association Update: January 2024
Welcome to the Eco Association’s monthly newsletter. We cover developments in the Eco currency protocol and the broader community.
Before we dive in, we have two quick callouts for readers this month:
We’re hiring here at the Eco Association for a Content Marketing Manager — please send any great candidates our way!
Heading to ETHDenver at the end of the month? Beam is a sponsor, and we’ll be there with them. Come say hi at the Beam booth!
All right, let’s get to it.
Beam acquires Join
On January 25th, Beam announced some exciting news: it has acquired the Web3 shopping app Join. This acquisition will integrate Beam and Join, which will enable Beam users to make Amazon and Shopify purchases using stablecoins.
You can read the press coverage for more detail — the story was covered by several outlets, including Fortune and Cointelegraph.
Beam CEO Andy Bromberg also touched on the acquisition in a CNBC segment.
Along with the announcement, Beam released an early access waitlist—sign up at shop.beam.eco if you’d like to get on the list.
Oasis Onchain
The Beam team attended Oasis Onchain, a three-day conference in the Bahamas, to showcase & discuss how Beam is transforming ease of use in crypto payments for widespread adoption.
Beyond giving a talk about onchain payments, the Beam team also took to the ground to enable payments at the event itself — check out the video embedded in the above tweet to see attendees pay for their drinks at the bar using Beam.
And it wasn’t just a hit with the Beam users — they received raving reviews from the bartenders receiving payments using the wallet as well.
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 passed. As described in last month’s update, this is the governance proposal that finalized what the community had voted in via the “2024 Eco Trustee Election: Preliminary Vote” proposal about a month earlier — formally implementing the new trustee slate onchain and funding the program for 2024.
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 1032, the winning proposal was the “default proposal”, which means there was no change in supply and no interest rate lockup enacted. This marks the first time that the Trustee group has ever enacted the default proposal.
In Generation 1033, the winning proposal was a 10% APR with a 30-day lockup.
In Generation 1034, the winning proposal was a 10% APR with a 30-day lockup (again!).
Subscribe to our Telegram channel to get updates when new policies are enacted.
Happenings & Shoutouts
🛠️ We published a blog post summarizing a soon-to-be proposed Eco system upgrade, “Eco v1.5”, and held a Twitter Space outlining the upgrade & its importance. KYEP for more on Eco v1.5 in the coming weeks.
🔴 Beam was a recipient of Optimism’s Retroactive Public Goods Funding, announced earlier this month — congratulations to the team!
📝 The Layer 3 Ecollective, a group of community contributors to Eco, published a report on the Forum summarizing their recent progress
📣 Are you on Farcaster? Check out the newly-created Eco channel!
🟪 Jason Yanowitz, founder of Blockworks, shared a tweet about Beam and why it has the potential to overtake Venmo 👀
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.