Eco Association Update: June 2023
Welcome to the Eco Association’s new monthly newsletter. We’ll be covering developments in the Eco currency protocol and the broader community.
But first… a call for Paris-goers: We’ll be in Paris for EthCC in two weeks’ time! ✈️
If you’ll be there, reply & let us know — we’ll have a cool demo to show you IRL 👀
All right. Let’s get to the update.
Optimism Bridge Launched 🔴
The ECO currency is now live on Optimism, a Layer 2 rollup on Ethereum. This is one of the biggest developments in the Eco protocol since its launch, and enables ECO to be sent far more cheaply than before—with fees in just the tens of cents.
Why is this important? Eco is deployed on Ethereum mainnet, arguably the most secure and functional smart contract platform out there—and if you use Ethereum, you’ll already know that fees remain high on mainnet, often costing several dollars to complete a transfer. Layer 2 blockchains like Optimism help solve this problem.
If you have ECO and want to bridge it to Optimism, you can use Optimism’s bridge interface.
The core functionality for the protocol — including community governance and monetary policy governance — remains on mainnet. But now transfers of ECO are possible on Layer 2.
For those technically inclined: because of ECO’s rebasing functionality, ECO couldn’t be bridged with Optimism’s “standard bridge.” Instead, a custom bridge had to be developed and audited. Here is the code, and here is the audit report.
Beam Wallet Development ⚡️
In spite of how quickly product development is happening in the crypto space, it’s still way too cumbersome for the average person to transact onchain.
To get to mainstream adoption, consumers globally — including people who are not crypto-savvy — need options that are simpler to use than what’s out there today. To address that, Eco Inc. built a product called “Beam.”
Beam is a dead simple non-custodial wallet. Much of Beam’s simplicity is enabled by recent developments in Ethereum’s technology, most notably ERC-4337. This is the bleeding edge of Ethereum development — and it’s very exciting that this wallet will soon be in the wild.
Keep your eyes peeled — it’ll be rolled out later this month.
Community Governance ⚖️
Generations 1016 and 1017 passed without any governance proposals.
In Generation 1018 (the current generation), EGP #009 was submitted. Here is the forum post. The proposal seeks to ensure that rebasing monetary policy is properly reflected on L2.
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 1017, a milestone was reached: after seven months of the currency being live, the Trustees enacted the first ever rebase. The winning proposal was a -0.5% rebase and a 7% APR lockup (120 day duration).
In Generation 1018, another rebase was enacted. The winning proposal was a -1% rebase and a 7% APR lockup (120 day duration).
These rebases are — as far as we know — the very first of their kind: linear supply changes manually voted in by an independent governance body overseeing a currency onchain. What’s more: this type of monetary policy that directly affects wallet balances is something not seen in fiat currencies — this marks the start of a meaningful experiment.
Happenings & Shoutouts
📩 We spun up an Association-run Telegram group for governance updates (e.g., whenever a new Monetary Policy is enacted or a governance proposal is submitted). Subscribe here.
✏️ An updated version of Eco Academy is live! Shoutout to community member Stefan for maintaining & bringing this community-owned resource up-to-date.
🥇 Community members Saulo & Jeremie attended ETHGlobal Lisbon and placed 1st in Optimism’s “Decentralize our Identities” category for their project Attestations Echo.
🏆 Eco Inc. team members Shahrukh, Srikant, and Dirk attended ETHGlobal Waterloo and placed 1st in the Lit Protocol prize track for their project The Lit Paymaster, which enables permissionless gas abstraction for ERC-20 tokens.
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.