Eco Association Update: September 2023
Eco Association Update: September 2023
Welcome to the Eco Association’s monthly newsletter. We cover developments in the Eco currency protocol and the broader community.
After a full summer, September was yet another busy month and we’ve got a lot to cover — so let’s get to it.
Doubling Down on Crypto
In case you missed it, Andy Bromberg announced that the company behind Beam & the Eco App is doubling down on crypto-native products and sunsetting its US-only fintech app.
His thread covers the high-level, and the story was also picked up by Decrypt.
As the Association, we’re excited by this shift — recent technological advancements in the Ethereum ecosystem open the doors to many things that were not previously possible, and this announcement reflects a strong commitment to an onchain future.
We recently hosted Andy for a Community Call where he covered more context on the decision and answered questions from the community — listen here.
Permissionless Recap
We attended Permissionless, one of the US’ foremost annual crypto events, in Austin, Texas.
The purpose of our attending was to join the Beam team in helping promote the wallet — and it was a great success.
While we had a booth on the main conference floor and many great meetings with partners and industry leaders, the highlight of the conference was the party Beam hosted on the Monday night.
The party was one of the main opening events for the conference on night one — and was a hugely successful real-world experiment in using ECO, the Eco Currency, for IRL payments via Beam.
All attendees had the opportunity to use Beam to pay in ECO, a key feature of the event. Small cards with QR codes served as drink tickets for the evening, which let attendees scan to spin up a Beam wallet pre-funded with ECO which they could use to pay at the bar.
It was pretty incredible to see attendees experience the power of the wallet firsthand in a setting like this — and to see ECO being used as a currency to buy pints! — with many expressing their excitement around such a seamless payments experience being possible onchain.
And finally, to round it all out, on the last day of the conference Andy gave a talk about Beam & the Golden Age of Onchain Payments — you can watch it here.
Community Governance ⚖️
Eco Community Governance runs in two-week cycles called “generations”. This section summarizes any governance proposals enacted in recent generations.
In Generation 1024, EGP #010 Patch TrustedNodes Contract was passed. Here is the forum post. The proposal was a minor protocol upgrade that patched some issues with the TrustedNodes contract around trustee reward withdrawals.
Generation 1023 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
In Generation 1023, a 5% APR lockup (120 days) was enacted.
In Generation 1024, a 7% APR lockup (120 days) was enacted along with a linear supply change of -1%.
In Generation 1025, an 11.2% APR lockup (45 days) was enacted.
Subscribe to our Telegram channel to get live updates when new policies are enacted.
Happenings & Shoutouts
🏆 Base, the new Ethereum L2 incubated by Coinbase, held a grants round for new protocols, tools, and infrastructure built on it — and Beam was selected as one of the five winners out of 143 projects. Beam will be donating its 5 ETH winnings to other projects in the ecosystem.
🌎 Andy was on CNBC for a conversation about the future of payments with reporter Talia Kaplan. Check it out for a far-reaching conversation covering the golden age of onchain payments, self-custody, regulation, and more.
📝 We continued to share our thinking on Account Abstraction — Annika posted a tweet thread about smart contract accounts, and the Beam team published a technical writeup on how Account Abstraction works in Beam today and what’s ahead.
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.