This post briefly summarizes the Eco Governance Proposal that Eco Association plans to submit during the governance cycle beginning on December 10. This proposal would elect the first Eco Trustee group and fund the Trustee compensation contract. [Note: When the proposal is formally submitted, we will update this post with the link to the submission on Etherscan.]
Summary
Eco Trustees are responsible for governing monetary policy in the Economy. In particular, every two weeks, Trustees discuss, propose and vote on various ECO supply change functions through a dedicated dApp and process. The system only compensates Trustees when they register a vote in a given policy cycle; they have then ‘vested’ into a set number of ECOx tokens which unlock and become claimable one year after the policy cycle in which they are earned.
Various Eco stakeholders (including the Eco Association, community members, founders and employees of Eco, Inc.) have collaborated to recruit 22 highly qualified, highly aligned Trustee candidates—economists, analysts and advocates from DeFi, traditional finance, central banking and this community representing a variety of viewpoints and skill sets. During the week of November 28, these candidates were introduced in Discord where community members can freely engage with them. They are listed below, with brief bios.
Proposal
This proposal would elect the candidates listed below as the first group of Eco Trustees, registering their respective dedicated wallet addresses to a whitelist for accessing the monetary governance process. This proposal would also fund the Trustee compensation contract with 5,500,000 ECOx, intended to compensate each Trustee with up to 250,000 ECOx over an initial one-year term (~9,615 ECOx per Trustee per successful vote submission).
Elected Trustees would begin enacting monetary policy during the system generation proceeding between January 7-21, 2023.
Trustee Bios
Annika Lewis leads community grants at Gitcoin after spending 10 years across retail & commercial banking, fintech, and venture capital. Annika cares deeply about crypto because it gives us the tools we need to enact a new, and improved, monetary system that emphasizes democratic, bottom-up decision-making — a system that will work for all, not just those at the top. In Eco, Annika sees a unique experiment that seeks to take the best from both fiat & crypto, drawing inspiration from elements of traditional central banking that have been highly effective, and layering on improvements made possible by digital tooling.
Antares Wald (pseudonym) holds a PhD in economics and focuses her research on market design––combining game theory, algorithms, behavioral experiments, and empirical analysis to translate abstract goals into code-able objectives and implementations. She cares about crypto as a technology that enables people far and wide to realize that currency is community, calling Eco one of the most exciting and ambitious experiments in recent years with equal focus on using crypto/blockchain to improve both record-keeping and governance to enable community (and therefore, currency).
Ben Hoffman has an academic background in philosophy, mathematics and statistics, and previously worked as a researcher at the utilitarian charity evaluator GiveWell, and led a credit risk analytics team at Fannie Mae. He is perhaps better known for his blog, Compass Rose. His interest in blockchain focuses on its basis for currencies that have the potential to enable the sort of price stability and easy payment processing characteristic of modern national currencies, without empowering as much centralized extraction. It follows that his specific interest in Eco is its vision to be a cryptocurrency accountable to the people using it to voluntarily transact with each other—enabling any number of profound possibilities for the way we perceive and measure scarcity and abundance.
Bismarck Analysis is a leading political risk consultancy that provides intelligence-grade analysis on industries, institutions, markets and live actors. They seek to assess how societies are maintained and advanced, which strategies are effective for longevity, how knowledge is transferred, and how individuals can maintain dynamism within organizations. To that end, their research often focuses on governance institutions and bureaucracy. Bismarck will assign a team to Eco governance (collectively filling a single Trustee seat). Bismarck views DAOs and DeFi as testing grounds for experimental governance structures, producing extremely specific data on the dynamics and costs of coordination. Their primary interest in contributing to Eco’s monetary policy is the study of a young economy in real time, and the ability to test conclusions about how coordination works in this new context.
Chris Berg is an Associate Professor and co-director of the Blockchain Innovation Hub at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. His research is focused on cryptoeconomics, with a background in regulatory policy and economic history. He keeps an active blog and previously was an opinion columnist and think tank researcher focusing on civil liberties and regulation. His interest in Eco is how it raises complex questions about the nature of money and money as an institutional technology.
Demian Reidel previously served as Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Argentina as a member of its monetary policy committee, where one of his responsibilities was to use the different policy instruments to achieve monetary and financial stability. Building on his background in physics and finance, he is currently the co-founder and CEO of a medical technology startup after a career otherwise spent in investment banking (prior to his time at the central bank). One of the features of crypto—and Eco in particular—that he finds particularly attractive is the creation of decentralized monetary authority, helping Eco respond to the different types of shocks that would affect crypto and the economy as a whole.
dmititup (pseudonym) is a member of the Eco community who has repeatedly distinguished himself with in-depth analysis pertaining to many of the community’s most pressing problems or biggest ideas (reputation systems, price indexes, etc). dmititup has a background in private equity as well as product management. He asks a profound question when contemplating the Eco vision and the Trustee mandate: “If $1 today is not able to buy the same amount of human intelligence vs. the amount yesterday, does it mean that human intelligence is under-utilized, hence the pace of solving problems is slower than it can be if purchasing power is stable?”
Elena has worked in crypto protocols such as Ethereum, Zcash and Stacks for the last four years, mainly in community-facing and marketing roles. In particular, she has participated in or contributed to token-weighted governance processes, token-curated registries, user-education and onboarding, competitive research and go-to-market campaigns. Elena seeks to fulfill the Trustee role in a way that leverages her experience working in crypto communities and being a liaison between various stakeholders—establishing an effective feedback loop with the broader Eco community to support the broader mandate of maximizing wealth held in Eco.
Evan Kereiakes has been contributing research, design and analysis to leading crypto projects for many years now, after previously working as a researcher and foreign exchange portfolio manager at the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve, respectively. Evan is currently COO of Node Finance and also holds a leadership position at Ubeswap. Evan views Eco as the first non-USD, demand-driven cryptocurrency with embedded monetary policy controls—a powerful evolution in the application of blockchain technology, and the main motivation to contribute to Eco as a Trustee.
Hermann is a senior researcher at a major blockchain research center and research director at a European crypto fund. He has a background in both computer science and financial economics and previously served as a finance professor at a major German university. Hermann believes ‘digital money’ should not be what crypto is today, and that ECO is the most serious attempt he has seen to do it better (rather than trying to mimic fiat money).
Irene Tse is a macro investor with a deep understanding of global financial markets and specialized knowledge of China’s economy and financial and capital market policies. She has a deep interest in digital assets and technology, and in recent years has focused on researching digital assets, tokenization and understanding the macro implications to formulate digital asset strategy for traditional financial institutions. Irene has an academic background in economics and computer science. She has managed her own hedge fund, served as the North American CIO at JP Morgan Chase (directing multi-strategy investments including rates, mortgage-backed securities, structured products, municipal bonds, FX, and equity indices), and before that was a partner and co-head of U.S. Rates Trading at Goldman Sachs. She has also served on the U.S. Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee. Irene recognizes Eco as the first project trying to use crypto technology mobilized by communities to solve tough questions related to monetary design, governance and accountability—calling it the most complex, ambitious project she has seen in her career.
Jeff Snider is a deep researcher of monetary systems and global macro trends, well known for his various publications. He currently serves as Chief Strategist with Atlas Financial, after serving as Chief Strategist and Head of Global Research at Alhambra Investments. Jeff also co-hosts the Eurodollar University podcast. Jeff recognizes that though many can feel there’s something wrong with the money system, they may not know just what it is. He correctly identifies Eco not as a crypto project, but as a currency project, stating “We have here the potential for getting money right for the first time in a very, very long time. The fruits of success aren’t just incalculable, they are demanded.”
Josh Barach is the founder and managing partner of Philip Equities, LP, which invests in global equities that trade at significant discounts to intrinsic values across all sectors and market capitalizations. Josh previously worked under Julian Robertson at Tiger Management where managed similar value investment opportunities and strategies. Josh has an academic background in philosophy and political science and wrote his thesis on reflexivity in politics, policy, law, and financial markets. Josh is traditionally a (self-admitted) crypto skeptic but also recognizes that “the paradigm of strong global demand for the product of money without any strong money product creates a compelling market opportunity for ECO.”
Luca Prosperi is deeply involved in the DeFi ecosystem in particular as the curator of dirtroads.substack.com, advisor to Cherry Ventures’ crypto-dedicated fund, and until recently as a core team member (and now governance delegate) at MakerDAO. Following his departure from the daily operations at Maker he has focused on his own upcoming project, researching crypto-governance and potential solutions that could elevate crypto rails to the next level of adoption. Previously Luca spent 15 years in finance as a strategic consultant, investment banker, and investor. Luca recognizes Eco is a “behavioural currency at its core, and in being so it is probably the most ambitious monetary project that we currently have in crypto.” As a DeFi native, his stated interest in being an Eco Trustee is “to balance experimentation and stability in sustaining the evolution of Eco, as a project, and $ECO, as a currency.”
MikeWeb (pseudonym) is a widely recognized voice of reason within the Eco community, recently profiled in the Hola Eco! blog. Mike is located in Estonia and is a full-time crypto/DeFi contributor. Previously his professional background is in international trade, contract management, logistics, risk assessment and insurance coverage. His stated goal is to “make ECO as transparent as possible with the interest of the community being the top priority…working hard to provide efficient connections & communications between a smart and extremely qualified ECO trustee team and ECO users.”
ML (pseudonym) has focused on community, product and business development across a host of high profile crypto projects—both custody and payment companies (as the first business hire at Anchorage, and also with Bitpay and Copper), as well as with protocols and dApps, especially with a focus on privacy (she was on the Zcash grant board and advises Light Protocol and Cask Protocol). Before ML worked in private equity investing and M&A, working with financial institutions like banks and asset managers in Asia Pacific. Recognizing money as a constantly evolving product, ML’s interest in Eco stems from being able to experiment with and design an economic model that puts the power to govern back in the hands of the people, with simpler incentives, more transparent decision-making and well understood accountability.
Manny Rincon-Cruz is a financial historian (at Hoover Institute, Stanford University) as well as a DeFi founder (Buttonwood Protocol). Manny recognizes that DeFi today is ripe for experimentation and evolving with many similar constraints to other money movements in history—confined to a low-throughput world with high transaction costs and high information latency—and therefore there is much we can take from monetary history as we seek to improve DeFi. Manny’s interest in Eco is the potential to avoid the pitfalls of moral hazard that have slowed financial innovation: “Eco offers an opportunity to see, in real time, the benefits of working with complex systems on their own terms. Traditional finance has been turned into a monoculture farm, dominated by too-big-to-fail, government-supported banks with near-identical balance sheets. Digital finance might still follow a different path—as a garden lightly tended to allow new and interesting varietals to take root.”
Niall & Lachlan Ferguson jointly propose to fill one Trustee seat, with Niall undertaking analysis and commentary, and Lachlan engaging more deeply with the Eco community to ensure their viewpoints are informed and representative. Niall is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is a leading economic/financial historian, and a prolific commentator on both politics and markets; he is the author of sixteen books, including The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower (a NY Times Bestseller). Lachlan is a business and compliance analyst for a crypto-insurance startup and has been actively researching cryptocurrencies for over five years, recently finishing his masters thesis on the relationship between regulation and technology adoption of cryptocurrency. Their interest in Eco is that it is one of the few protocols actually trying to conceptualize what is required of digital money to act as real currency.
Pete Dattels was a senior member of the IMF for many years, after spending part of his career in central banking as well. At the IMF, he led the money and capital market monitoring function, and was responsible for coordinating the IMF’s highly anticipated Financial Stability Report. Pete recognizes the profound possibilities of DeFi, especially vis a vis “centralized intermediaries and seeing their weaknesses in governance, transparency and unfortunate schemes that have eroded trust and clouded the outlook for the sector.” Pete’s interest in Eco is in aiming to “build trust through user-based governance, oversight and openness” and believing that ECO addresses “one of the missing elements” in crypto currency models: you cannot have a real, independent ‘currency’ without some concept of a ‘central bank’ managing policy.
Pure Macro proposes to fill a single seat with the joint effort of Bob Amano and Marcel Kasumovich. Together they bring a background in macro market analysis and fund management as well as central bank experience. Bob and Marcel are partners at Pure Macro and previously colleagues at the Bank of Canada, where Bob was Senior Research Director. Marcel is currently the Deputy CIO at One River Digital Asset Management and focuses on digital currency and macro research. Previously he worked with the IMF, Goldman Sachs, and the Soros Fund. Their interest in Eco is to conduct novel research on the nexus between digital currency dynamics and monetary policy. They offer meaningful contributions to the formulation and discussion of monetary policy in the ECO economy, bringing expertise and experience from four worlds: (i) cryptocurrency research and analysis; (ii) real-world monetary policy formulation; (iii) academic research in monetary and macro economics; and (iv) traditional asset trading and macroeconomic analysis.
Subspace (pseudonym) has been a voice of conscience, curiosity and consistency in this community since its first week. Subspace has deeply engaged with all things #eco-nomics along the way, and even made the first ever ‘purchase’ in Eco Points. Subspace is a computer and gaming enthusiast with professional experience in research biology, infrastructure threat and risk assessment, and healthcare IT. Crypto has led Subspace to research the historical impact of central banks, and commit himself to finding a better design for monetary governance. With respect to his candidacy: “My mission is to keep this governance group transparent and focused. I offer integrity and honesty. I will NEVER vote for something that only affects my own interests. And finally, I offer you belief in Eco and my time. I am here because I believe Eco can positively change all of our financial situations.”
Wagmi Labs is the venture of Isfandiyar Shaeen, better known as Asfi in DeFi communities. Wagmi Labs is dedicated to bridging the gap between monetary theory and on-chain experiments trying to create non-sovereign money. They are well known for their analysis and involvement in governance across many important DeFi projects. At present their focus is creating interactive educational content for these protocols. They are interested in Eco because they believe that studying the rationale of monetary policy proposals submitted through a competitive process will help us get closer to the optimal form of non-sovereign money.