Eco Association Update: July 2023
Welcome to the Eco Association’s second monthly newsletter. We cover developments in the Eco currency protocol and the broader community.
It’s been quite a month — we went to Paris, Beam launched… and yet somehow it still feels like last week that we were writing the June update.
All right. Let’s get to it.
Beam Wallet Launch ⁜
In last month’s update, we touched briefly on the Beam Wallet (beam.eco) created by Eco Inc—and just last week, Beam had its full-scale public launch.
As a refresher, Beam is a dead simple non-custodial wallet focused specifically on payments—and as a result of its ease of use, people seem to have taken to calling it ‘Onchain Venmo’.
If you haven’t already, go check it out for yourself at beam.eco.
Reception was pretty incredible—the launch far exceeded the team’s expectations. Media coverage was widespread, with articles written by outlets ranging from Techcrunch to Coindesk to Decrypt.
Part of the beauty of Beam is that, since it’s all onchain, many of its adoption metrics are available for anyone to see.
Some figures as of the time of writing:
33K accounts hold the ECO token on the Optimism network (was less than 1K pre-Beam)
43K transfers of ECO have occurred on Optimism
892 Beam Names — i.e., usernames in the app — have been created
Oh and—another indication of interest—our @eco Twitter account gained over 20K followers, going from 36K to 58K followers in just the first three days post-launch 🤯
A few snippets of positive reception from Twitter:
In the coming month, much of the Association’s focus will be on continuing to build off the momentum that Beam has generated for the project at-large—helping amplify it, get new eyes on Eco, and expand our community.
Needless to say, we’re very excited for the catalyst that Beam presents for Eco.
Grants Launch ⚡️
On the heels of the Beam Launch, we launched the Association’s first ever grants program.
We’re starting small, with just three grants, to test the waters and get things right.
If you have Web3-native front-end devs or data analysts in your network, we’d love if you’d share this web design grant & this dashboard grant, respectively—we’re hoping to get some high-quality submissions (and we welcome any feedback on our structure!).
Community Governance ⚖️
Eco Community Governance runs in two-week cycles called “generations”. This section summarizes any governance proposals enacted in recent generations.
Generations 1018 and 1019 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
After the milestone reached in Generations 1017 & 1018 of the first ever rebases on the protocol, monetary policy was simpler in Generation 1019 — a 7% APR lockup (120-day duration).
Generation 1020’s monetary policy will be enacted on Saturday, August 5th. Subscribe to our Telegram channel to get live updates when new policies are enacted.
Happenings & Shoutouts
👏 Eco Community member Flarcos finished development on his point-of-sale system, Tender Merchant, and orchestrated the first ever IRL transaction in ECO at a luxury retail store in Nigeria. We will be sharing more on this soon!
🔵 A huge shoutout to the Base team for hosting us at EthCC in Paris — we had a chance to take over the Base booth for an hour to demo Beam to the Ethereum community, which was an incredible experience.
🔴 Andy Bromberg, CEO of Beam & the Eco App, joined Optimism’s OP Radio Twitter Space this week for a great conversation about Beam — check out the recording here.
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.