Welcome Back!

Hello all and welcome to the second edition of the Monthly Eco Community digest where we cover the developments, updates and happenings relevant to the Eco Protocol. It’s been an exciting month since our last update! The very first community generated proposal was submitted and passed in the Community Governance flow and the Eco Team is gearing up for an exciting publicity push! (More on that below.) Also, the Trustee group has experienced multiple Monetary Policy cycles and are providing their initial feedback while the broader community is ramping up activities and projects designed to get $ECO and Points moving around our Discord server again!

This month has been all about test driving the primitives of the Eco Protocol to see what works and how they can be improved in the coming months!

Building On Eco

February has been a big month for shipping! In the past weeks we are proud to announce the Beta launch of the following tools built on the primitives of the Eco protocol.

• Tender Wallet

  • Developed by community member @flarcos, this wallet is designed to allow community members in Discord to transfer $ECO between accounts gaslessly and instantly, effectively neutralizing the costly Layer 1 gas fees associated with onchain activity!

• ECO ID

  • The ECO ID Playground platform created by @jeremie and @LinaHello allows Eco protocol participants to create their own reputation attestations based on the ECO ID system.

• Consensus Bot

  • Two of the biggest challenges facing any decentralized community is incentive alignment and consensus building. Enter the Lazy Consensus bot built by @yulston. This bot (which has recently gone live.) is designed to reduce the friction and time spent by Layer 3 members in aligning on point distribution activities.

• Ecollective Governance

  • Voting on Layer 1 is expensive. The introduction of the first Ecollective (ecollective.eth) will allow community members who wish to participate in Eco Governance the ability to do so for free via Snapshot! It’s been in test mode by our Beta Test users this most recent governance cycle but will be introduced to the wider community in the coming weeks. #KYEP

Note: These are all community produced tools and not explicitly recommended or endorsed by the Eco Association. As with everything in Web3 users should do your own research and make sure you are taking every precaution when choosing where to engage with your wallets or funds.

Introducing Eco to the World.

Thanks to Peter Hopkins, Eco Inc Education and Content Lead, for this section of the update.

It’s time to share the story of $ECO with the broader world!

As always, that means meeting people where they are and then blowing their minds one step at a time.

As we gear up to share the $ECO story with the media, podcasts, and crypto/economics influencers, we’re positioning $ECO as the world’s “first decentralized rewards currency”—designed to address the shortcomings of existing rewards programs (random devaluations, complex terms, and arbitrary expirations) while also enabling pro-consumer features like transparency and independent governance.

The wider world isn’t (yet) ready for a new, independent global currency—and that’s okay.

But they can understand the structural problems with rewards programs:

• Worldwide, rewards programs boast a combined market value in the hundreds of billions

• They’ve morphed into a form of private money—managed in the narrow self-interest of their issuers, not the interests of the people who hold them (i.e. us)

• Rewards credit cards have quickly outpaced cash as people’s preferred payment method.

• Reward points—and the fees that sustain them—represent a regressive, unnecessary tax on consumption.

• They enable a wealth transfer on an unprecedented scale from poor to rich—and from all consumers to financial middlemen.

With that in mind, we’re positioning $ECO—and its initial use case as the native rewards program of the Eco app—as a long overdue tool that counters this global-macro “skim from the top.”

This is just the first part of the $ECO narrative. It’s a starting point for a much broader conversation about what money truly is—and what it could be. 
**
**We’re excited to work with the Eco community to advance that grander narrative one chapter at a time.

It’s time for an inclusive, expansive dialogue about what a better, more aligned money could be.

Trustee | Monetary Policy Updates

Thanks to Eco Trustee @Elena for this section of the update.

In the month of February, trustees completed the second and third Eco Monetary Policy Cycles. The fourth monetary policy cycle concludes March 3, 2023.

For the second Eco Monetary Policy Cycle, the Trustees voted to continue the policy set in Cycle 1 - 5% lockup interest for 30 days. 8 proposals submitted, see the summary from @Mikeweb here and here. 19 trustees committed their vote and 14 successfully revealed their votes resulting in 64% “trustee turnout”. Trustees received feedback from the community that the Lockup interest rate wasn’t high enough to cover gas fees, while that was addressed in a few proposals, ultimately the winning policy was the same as the first cycle, as many trustees expressed interest in seeing more data before changing course.

For the third Eco Monetary Policy Cycle, the Trustees voted for 5% lockup interest for 120 days. See a summary from Mikeweb here and here. 9 proposals were submitted, four duplicate submissions for the second highest scored policy: 5% lockup for 30 days, a continuation of the policy set in Cycles 1 and 2. Due to the Borda count voting method, the main finding is that creating more entries for the same proposal actually reduces its chances of winning. Trustees discussed if it makes sense to combine duplicates of identical proposals or keep them separate. Expect an update in future cycles for how Trustees handle duplicate proposals. This policy cycle also included the World's First AI-Generated Monetary Policy proposal, written with the support of ChatGPT. You can read more about it here.

For the fourth Eco Monetary Policy Cycle, there are 9 proposals submitted.

What we’re reading:

• 8 Trends, Corporate Rebels (h/t @yulston),

• Deep Dive into Crypto Asset Ownership, Into the Block

• Up To Four-fifths Of Crypto Trading Could Be Phony, New Research Shows, Forbes

• Federal Reserve Bank’s Research on Bitcoin’s Resilience to Macroeconomic news

Community | Culture

There’s lots going on with the Ecommunity as always! Our Layer 3 group has really come alive in the past few weeks with challenges and bounties rolling out designed to build engagement, entertain and foster culture with our new and existing community members. If your not already in jump into our Discord and check out the #community-activities channel to learn more and participate!

Additionally, the community run @ecolyte Twitter and @ecolytes Instagram accounts have been building engagement on social channels at a rapid pace this month. Huge shoutout to @ihar and @ValeraValera for operating them!

Last but not least, we were very excited to see the first ever instance of real world transactions happening in $ECO! *Eco Generation *was a community run auction organized by @olgateb featuring artwork from some of the children of our parents in the community. This was the first of (hopefully) many more instances of community based, organic use cases of $ECO for the exchange and sale of goods and services natively in our community. A huge thank you to everyone who participated and for making this event a reality, it was a great time and an incredible first for our community!

Crypto | Tradfi Updates

Thanks to Eco Community Manager @Rob | Eco Inc for this section.

Crypto

• The Stablecoins Are Coming, Actually, They’re Already Here! — thread from Patrick Hansen

• G’day Mate!  — Making Crypto Safer for Consumers in Australia

• Dobroye Utro! — Russia’s Sberbank Will Introduce DeFi Platform on Ethereum

• FTX Creditor List Lookin’ Like a CVS Receipt  —  FTX Creditor List Published

• Silvergate Bank Probed Like a Martian Rock Sample — DOJ Probes Silvergate’s Dealings w/ FTX

• Old Guys Yelling at Crypto to Get off Their Lawn — Charlie Munger | Jamie Dimon

• Who Pressed the Pause Button on BUSD? — thread from Paxos

• SEC Pulls the Rug on Kraken’s Staking Service — press release from SEC

• Shiver Me Silvergates! Citadel Reveals Big Stake in Silvergate — report from Reuters

• Robinhood’s Crypto Trading Volume Goes Brrrrr in January — report from The Block

• CoinBASEd: Coinbase Drops New L2 — thread from Coinbase

Recent Hacks/Hack Updates:

• Orion Protocol Exploit — Orion Protocol Loses $3M in Trading Exploit

• Azuki Attack — Azuki Twitter Account Hacked

• Bonq Exploit — BonqDAO Exploited

TradFi

• CPI Declines Year-Over-Year, but comes in higher than expectations — Chart from Lyn Alden

• Treasury Yields ATHs — report from Forbes

• First Time in History, More “Built-for-Rent” Units Started Quarterly than“Built-for-Sale” — data presented by Bill McBride

• China’s PBOC Injects $92bn — thread by tedtalksmacro

Final Words

So many of the projects and tools that we have been working on these past few months were launched (if only in testing) over the month of February. It has been an exciting and challenging month for our builders, our Trustees and our Layer 3 groups as each has encountered similar coordination and consensus building challenges that are the hallmark of any decentralized organization. The process of learning how to work together is a challenge that should not be discounted. I’m very encouraged by the progress that we have made in the month of February the opportunity to build on those successes as we head into March! #themoonisnotenough