Eco Association Update: November 2023
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.
Eco Atlas: A Monetary Policy Web App
This month, Eco community member Saulo unveiled ecoatlas.io, a web app he built that shows the entire onchain history of Eco monetary policy.
This marks a huge upgrade in accessibility of historical policy records — previously, to see the specific policy enacted in a given cycle, you had to either scroll back in our comms channels or read through the onchain contracts directly.
Now, it’s all cleanly viewable in a web-based UI.
In addition to showing the full history at a cycle level, Eco Atlas also visualizes each individual Trustee’s proposal and voting records:
We’re excited for this development not just for Eco, but for the future of money as a whole. Initiatives like this show what’s possible in how money might function & be publicly governed in the future — and can hopefully serve as inspiration for other projects, too.
We’re also particularly thrilled to see this level of development coming from the community — and there’s more to come here. Saulo has plans to build additional features and modules into Eco Atlas in the coming weeks. #KYEP. 👀
2024 Trustee Elections
A big focus for us at the Association right now is facilitating the second ever Eco Trustee Elections ahead of the 2024 calendar year.
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 inaugural slate of Trustees is coming up on the end of their one-year term, and it’s time to elect the slate for 2024.
Since the group’s instantiation in January 2023, the Trustees have completed 23 bi-weekly voting cycles, successfully kickstarting monetary policy for the protocol (as can be viewed on Eco Atlas!).
For 2024, the Association is proposing a few changes to the program:
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
The full 2024 proposal, including the new slate of Trustees and their personal statements, can be found in the 2024 Eco Trustee Election forum post.
Community Governance ⚖️
Eco Community Governance runs in two-week cycles called “generations”. This section summarizes any governance proposals enacted in recent generations.
In Generation 1029, the “2024 Eco Trustee Election: Preliminary Vote” proposal has been submitted. It is currently in the voting stage — if you’re an ECO or ECOx holder, vote now at governance.eco.org! As described above, this proposal by the Eco Association seeks to define the structure for Year 2 of the program.
In Generation 1028, the “Layer 3 Ecollective subDAO funding request” proposal was passed. This proposal funded an experiment for the Layer 3 group to pursue marketing & community initiatives for the protocol in the next three months.
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 1029, the winning proposal was a 12.6% APR with a 30-day lockup.
In Generation 1028, the winning proposal was a 30% APR with a 30-day lockup, along with a -5% rebase.
An interesting note: With Generation 1028’s -5% rebase, the largest rebase ever enacted, there were questions from a few users who noticed a decrease in their ECO balances. It’s great to see people noticing monetary policy’s effect, and this also showcased a need to remind users about ECO’s rebases and how they work. We’re working through that, as is the Beam team, with upcoming updates to their UI.
Subscribe to our Telegram channel to get updates when new policies are enacted.
Happenings & Shoutouts
🎉 The Eco Currency turned one! We recapped the year in a thread on the anniversary of the launch.
🏰 Beam partnered with BuidlGuidl, a well-known collective of Ethereum builders, to pay forward 5 ETH in grant funding to fund emerging builders in the onchain payments space. We’re hosting a Twitter space with Austin Griffith & the Beam team on Thursday, December 7th to talk about it — join us.
⚖️ Eco Trustee @mikeinweb shared reflections on his experience from serving as a Trustee in 2023, recapping a year of establishing monetary policy for the protocol.
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.