Eco v1.5: A New, Upgradable System
This post is an intro for the Eco Community to a system upgrade currently in development called “Eco v1.5”.
The upgrade will be proposed via community governance in the coming weeks.
TL;DR
Eco v1.5 is a redesign of the Eco protocol that changes some low level technical details and the protocol’s design architecture, but doesn’t appreciably change the way the protocol works for end users.
The redesign makes the protocol much simpler to upgrade, and adds some quality of life improvements like cheaper transfers, simpler code for new developers, and opt-in voting for gas reductions.
Background
The Eco currency & protocol were launched in November 2022, after a 4 year period of research and development. As a result, the protocol launched with some technical debt, and an architecture that doesn’t follow solidity best practices as they exist today.
In the year following launch, a lot has happened in the Eco Community: the Trustee program started up (and monetary governance along with it), Beam launched, the Eco Association emerged, the community-driven Layer 3 group continued to grow and evolve, and token-based governance has enabled community-led decision-making.
It has become clear in the year since launch that, in order to further build out and upgrade the protocol and to enable great experiences for users, it needs to be simpler. As mentioned earlier, the launch version of the currency v1 was built on legacy design decisions that made the protocol clunky and complex. It became evident that something had to change, especially when deploying the Optimism bridge, which highlighted how complex the system was.
Eco v1.5: What it is
Eco v1.5 is a redesign of the Eco protocol that changes some low level technical details and the protocol’s design architecture, but doesn’t appreciably change the way the protocol works for end users.
In short, it is a redesign of the architecture of the entire Eco smart contract system that makes it more modular, maintainable, and future-proof. Besides being more elegant and workable, it’ll enable new developers to more quickly understand how the Eco Currency works.
The end user benefits will, for the most part, be realized by what comes next: capabilities that will be built on top of Eco v1.5.
The main near-term user benefit is that adding new monetary levers — and porting existing monetary levers to Layer 2 — will be much easier. Shortly after launch, the Association and core development team plan to propose interest rate lockups becoming available on Layer 2 (specifically, Optimism), which is made possible specifically due to this upgrade. Enabling lockups on Layer 2 will not only reduce gas fees, but will enable lockup interfaces to be built within products that live on Layer 2, like Beam.
Eco v1.5 also enables some quality of life changes: gas savings on Mainnet transfers, opt-in voting, simpler architecture for developers, and more. Beyond that, the world is our oyster when it comes to future upgrades. Eco v1.5 would make a number of potential directions practically doable that aren’t really workable today: enabling voting in governance on Layer 2, adding new monetary policy levers, and more.
To summarize, Eco v1.5 is a much more modular and extensible system — one that lays the necessary foundation for protocol growth in a way that didn’t exist before.
What’s Next
We’ll hold a Twitter space on Thursday, February 1st at 11am PT with some of the development team behind the effort to share more detail and answer any questions. Mark your calendar.
A proposal will then be made to governance in the coming weeks for the community to vote on the upgrade.