This post outlines a governance proposal that the Eco Association plans to submit onchain during Generation 1040 (Apr 29-May 10).
This proposal represents the first step of a two-step migration that Eco Co-Founder Ryne Saxe recently outlined in this forum post, which contemplates migrating Eco from a two-token currency system to a single-token payment protocol — and moving the project from its ‘Currency’ Era into its ‘Payments’ Era.
This first proposal — one of two proposals associated with the migration — seeks to do two things:
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Implement the ‘v1.5’ technical upgrade to the Eco Protocol
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Remove the currently active Trustee group from their roles within the Protocol, indefinitely pausing monetary governance on the Eco Currency
Summary
The rationale for this specific proposal, and the broader context behind it can be found in Ryne’s forum post.
As outlined at the top of that post, the TL;DR on what Ryne proposed is:
- We would reposition the Eco Protocol as a cross-chain transaction system, with a focus on payments rather than currencies, for the foreseeable future.
- We would migrate the protocol from a two-token currency system to a single-token payment protocol, with ECOx serving as the governance token and having a role to secure the protocol.
- We would accomplish this migration by suspending monetary governance and removing the Trustees; and we would create a mechanism for existing ECO holders to swap their ECO for ECOx at a defined rate.
This specific proposal seeks to accomplish the first half of the third bullet — suspending monetary governance and removing the Trustees — along with implementing the Eco v1.5 technical upgrade.
The details and implications of these two items are described below.
Eco v1.5 Implementation
The Eco v1.5 system upgrade is a redesign of the Eco protocol that makes it simpler to upgrade in the future, but doesn’t appreciably change the way the protocol works for end users. Eco v1.5 has been in development for months, has been audited by Cantina, and is now ready for deployment.
The Eco v1.5 GitHub repo can be found here.
As described in a blog post earlier this year, the impetus behind Eco v1.5 is the protocol’s technical debt that became evident in the year post-launch — which needed to be remedied in order to further build out the protocol and enable great experiences for users and future developers.
Some components of the Eco v1.5 work will go unused in the near-term as a result of the indefinite pause being placed on monetary governance and the Trustee construct, but other important components (e.g., optimizations to Community Governance and simpler protocol upgradeability) remain relevant and will kick into action right away.
As mentioned in the Summary, with this proposal, we propose implementing Eco v1.5 in conjunction with the Trustee winddown due to the natural sequencing and timing of these two changes.
Important Note to Community Members: Current ECO delegations will be undone with this upgrade.
The one implication of the Eco v1.5 upgrade that ECO holders should be aware of is that, if they have any ECO delegated to another address — you can see this in the “Manage Delegation” section at governance.eco.org/account — it will be automatically undelegated with this upgrade. The impact of this undoing is small in scale, given that there are very few wallet addresses delegating ECO today, and also temporary, given the upcoming proposed migration to a single-token protocol governed by ECOx (assuming it passes governance). ECOx delegations will remain unchanged as a result of this upgrade.
Trustee Removal
As mentioned above — and as discussed at length within Ryne’s post — the Trustees and monetary policy would be deactivated from the Eco Currency with the execution of this proposal.
Practically speaking, to be specific, the deactivation of the Trustees would be done in conjunction with technical upgrade: the new version of the protocol, Eco v1.5, would be simply implemented without Trustees or monetary policy enabled.
If this proposal passes, the final monetary policy would be enacted with the start of Generation 1040 on Saturday, April 27th and would be in effect until the upgrade itself is executed by governance, which would be sometime during that Generation (specifically, between May 1st-11th, depending on when the different phases are triggered).
After that, the Eco Currency (ECO) will cease to have active monetary policy — unless and until it is added back at some date in the future.
Next Steps
We’ll host a community call on Wednesday, April 24th at 6:00 pm UTC on Discord to run through Ryne’s forum post and this proposal and answer any questions from the community.
A separate proposal will follow to enable existing ECO holders to swap their ECO for ECOx at a defined rate and complete the shift to the new era.