Have you noticed?
Money doesn't work the way it should.
We all know traditional money & payments platforms need an internet-age refresh. Crypto promises that, but hasn’t yet delivered on a usable, independent payment system.
Eco enables real-world use cases with better payments — from better products to better rails to better money itself.
Traditional payments
barely work
They’re geographically-constrained, fee-ridden, prone to censorship and limits, barely interoperable, and high friction. What good is your money if you can’t send it to your friend? If you can’t send it on the weekend? If you can only send so much each week?
Crypto payments
aren't much better
They’re expensive, even higher friction, and impossible for the mass market to use. Why do you need “gas” in a currency you aren’t even sending? Why do the fees vary so much? Why are the interfaces so technical, when most of the world isn’t?
But now,
better payment
products
can exist.
It’s only now possible to build products that combine the best parts of traditional payments with the best of crypto — and improve on them both. Censorship-resistant and permissionless, but also easy and intuitive for anyone to use.
We believe it’s time to bring payments onchain.
Try out great payments.
Eco community members built Beam, a payment product that simply works. Fixed, low fees charged in the same asset being sent; dead-simple instant onboarding; no need for users to worry about addresses or chains.
Connect your Twitter to get some ECO currency to test it with. You’ll experience the first wallet product that everyone in the world can use.
A new payments
Eco
system
Only thanks to recent bleeding-edge technical developments are true crypto payments possible. Smart contract wallets and account abstraction with ERC-4337; rollups like Optimism, Base, and PGN; and more.
Leveraging these developments, the Eco community is building products enabling real-world use cases (finally!), including:
- Tender POS is an internet-age point-of-sale system meant to enable instant, seamless, in-person crypto payments for merchants.
- The Beam wallet is the most cash-like digital payment experience ever — an opinionated payment wallet usable by the mainstream.
But it's not just payments that are broken and can now be fixed...
Money
itself
is broken.
Every year, we see more evidence that the global fiat currency regime has room for competition. The financial system is suffering under the weight of political capture. Currency governance — monetary policy — is not aligned with the people using the money every day.
Given better economic data and a more transparent incentive structure for governance, it is possible to govern and grow a currency that is digitally-native and more clearly aligned with its users’ best interests — a global money independent of the monetary policies of any nation.
The Eco Currency, in brief
To date, cryptoassets have fallen into one of two categories: stablecoins like USDC and DAI (useful as transactional money, but not independently governed) or coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum (independent from fiat currencies, but not useful as transactional money). Either “usable but not independent,” or “independent but not usable.”
The Eco Currency is a monetary experiment: an effort to create a new currency with the independence of Bitcoin and Ethereum combined with the usability of stablecoins. A currency with diminishing volatility over time that protects the purchasing power of holders — independent of the policies of any geopolitical entity.
ECO
the currency and payment token — governed by a transparent, representative, and democratically elected group of “Trustees.”
ECOx
a deflationary-supply token serving as a governance asset and used to secure applications on the Eco network.
Want more?
Read the Eco Manual (short) and the Eco Whitepaper (longer).
Eco's aligned incentives
Unlike the misaligned and opaque incentives underpinning existing fiat currencies, the Eco Currency protocol’s incentives are transparent and aligned — fulfilling Hayek’s dream : “A money deliberately controlled in supply by an agency whose self-interest forces it to satisfy the wishes of users...”
Everyone wins when we all win together.