I am very excited about the Era 2 proposal. As I consider myself an online web3 social sleuth and consumer crypto advocate. consumer crypto means ACTUALLY SPENDING CRYPTO! a common theme I continue to see arise in this cycle is this is the year of consumer crypto.
A cross-chain payment protocol is something I think would be incredibly compelling and if adopted could be incredibly successful for the Eco protocol, because there really isn’t anything out there right now—Era 2—that exists/executes well.
I’ve personally found that I’ve wanted to buy something using Coinbase commerce with holding a total amount of assets that can cover the cost, but my assets are fragmented across different chains meaning I have to fragment transactions to get my assets onto the same chain to then make a purchase (meaning I likely lose my original total balance due to fees of migrating assets).
If you think of a product like Beam, a user is able to spend all or some of their digital dollar balance in one transaction (even if the assets are different stablecoins across different chains.) Beam has proven this works with supersends and with merchant activations. I’d like to live in a world where I can spend my stablecoins across multiple different chains in one simple transaction and I believe Era 2 will solve this problem.
The idea of a new school meets old school style of traditional monetary policy with blockchain infrastructure is incredibly compelling and innovative, but I think it makes sense to pause that so there can be more focus on building better infrastructure of a cross-chain payments protocol.
There are a lot of different ways that ECOx could be integrated into the Eco protocol, over the coming weeks we will all definitely be exploring the options and choosing the one(s) that make the most sense for the long term growth of the network!
In some ways, I’m sad to see monetary policy end because I see the huge potential in it and the whole design of the current protocol… But I’m also glad about this post and discussion. I consider it a fantastic start for the team to listen to the market and evolve with the demand, rather than retaining something that might work in the future. I respect the present protocol; it’s revolutionary and has taught me a lot about economics. Eco is avant-garde, making it difficult for people to understand, especially in a market that was not ready for it.
However, we have the experience, tools, and participants of a fantastic experiment. I’m confident that it will inspire and be put to good use in the future, for others and even ourselves. So, I don’t see this as an end but an evolution with perhaps a small pause of what will serve us greatly.
I believe that payments and cross-border transactions are vastly undervalued and that they are not, and likely never have been, fixed. Transfer fees, service fees, conversion rates, middleman fees, countless apps, and long waiting in the process… I believe we have good technological improvements and an exciting chance to refocus, to fix something greater than a currency. Currencies come and go, but payments will always be here.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every trustee for their participation and contributions. Your participation and involvement were superb. Thank you!
Thank you for started an open discussion and gave us all a chance to share opinions about these very important and significant changes.
Probably the core point for me here is “money is only as good as its network effect”. It doesn’t really matter if we’ve built the most fair and invulnerable money system if it just doesn’t have a chance to live and be used at this point.
Another important point for me is the fact that we’re not forever sunsetting the initial idea of “an open financial system with better money governed for its users and by its users”, but rather suspending it to a point where it has a real chance to develop and actually scale naturally.
So we’re not trying to build something that just can’t work as it supposed to at the current stage but focusing on something that can actually help us to get closer to the initial idea of better money. Something that market in its current state is ready and contributes to.
It’s difficult to make assumptions without specific details of the upcoming changes but the direction and focus seems to be reasonable and timely which would definitely help us to succeed.
Generally I understand the need of these changes and support it. Would be great to get more specific details and options in the upcoming weeks to discuss further if possible.
Ryne’s post covers many of my thoughts, and so I won’t reiterate all of them. But I would suggest you re-read his conclusion, which encapsulates it well:
It’s a shift that I am excited about, and that I feel we are well equipped to accomplish — one which aligns Eco (perhaps for the first time) with several timely and valuable market themes in this cycle, while focusing our roadmap with a stronger sense of near-term direction. Crucially, this keeps us on the path to our original and ultimate vision. As always, we seek to all win together.
I believe this is the crux of the proposal. With these suggested changes:
Eco’s roadmap and messaging can be aligned to relevant market themes in this current cycle
Eco can have a clear path to near-term impact and increased usage
and we can remain collectively on the path to the original & ultimate vision
Beyond that, in some sense, this is about simplification — making Eco as a project more legible to the broader market. By narrowing in to a single token system and focusing on necessary infrastructure, Eco has the best opportunity to win this year.
I’m excited about the direction forward, and strongly in support of Ryne’s outlined proposal. I look forward to moving towards implementation details with the community.
I agree with many of the points already made and I support the changes.
I’ll add from my most recent experience. Being in Europe at the moment I started actively using various cryptocards like crypto.com card, or wirex or I can name gnosis-safe card which launched recently and we all know there are some exchanges cards like Kucoin card or Bybit card and so on. There are a lot of startups emerging that are trying to implement cryptocurrency for payments in a more web2-like, but still very end-user friendly way. I mean for quite some time now, I’ve been using crypto for daily payments in a way thanks to the above stuff. And I make no more than a couple clicks to make it all work in the end and the commissions are no more than 2% (only for the initial conversion) and there are cashback and various promotions that give a +boost to the whole scheme for me.
My point is that we don’t want to strive to become just another off-ramp platform for the end user. I see the most promise in bringing defi to payments to give a user like me even more bonuses and incentives to pay with our solution by adding things unique to crypto that are not possible in web2.
By becoming a cross-chain payment protocol that is likely to be very much tied to the superchain ecosystem and will utilize all of its new-age features - we have a great chance of succeeding in this competition with the plethora of web2-alike crypto solutions.
It’s all traditional, like everything else, bonuses, promotions, it’s all clear. The most interesting thing is when there is an opportunity to create your own merchants via the Eco protocol, providing merchants with a share of EcoX. This way, you can expand a whole franchise, with support for businesses. Such a thing doesn’t exist in crypto yet.
Just a quick note to thank the Ecommunity for including me in the first cohort of Trustees. I had a lot of fun but, more importantly, I learned a lot. Indeed, I certainly think very differently about the cryptocurrency space now than when I initially started as a Trustee. While everyone contributed to my learning, special thanks are due to Ryne for including me in this project, and to Saulo and Stefan for their time and patience in answering all my (often naïve) questions and helping me gain a better understanding of the crypto landscape.
I wish everyone the best going forward and I will be keeping an eye the progress of Beam into the future. Cheers!
Many of my thoughts are already encapsulated in the Eco Association’s reply, which I co-wrote — but I wanted to weigh in on a personal level as well.
I first discovered Eco in 2022 and joined the project, initially as a Trustee, because it was the most interesting currency experiment I’d ever seen. I got into crypto because I saw cracks in the existing fiat monetary system and I believed in crypto’s potential to usher in new money. When I discovered Eco, it was the first place I’d ever seen trying ‘new money’ in a way that I thought had the potential to work.
I’ve come to believe, over the past couple of years, that ‘new money’ is perhaps further out than I’d thought. Currencies, historically, have had hundreds-years-long lifespans — and while old ones die and new ones emerge, inevitably and consistently throughout history, this happens on very long time horizons.
New money’s time is coming. It’s just not quite here yet. In spite of that, today, new (and better) payment rails are undoubtedly already emerging with crypto. I believe this proposal best positions Eco to play a key role within those emerging payment rails — rails that, in due time, will ultimately serve as the backbone for a new financial system & new money itself, when its time comes.
As Ryne suggests, the original and ultimate vision isn’t changing. And I’m confident the path proposed in this post maximizes our odds of fulfilling it, collectively, as Eco.
Now that the first proposed governance action just passed, we are evaluating the time and scope of the second action, in particular the migration path from ECO to ECOx. We’ve also been hard at work on the MVP of the new system. I expect we will post more information about these details within the next two weeks. That will be in a separate thread to invite further discussion. Please keep watching the Forum!
