Eco Trustees

Current Trustees

The Current Trustees are the set of individuals who are active, today, in determining monetary policy for Eco. This Trustee group was enacted on January 5th, 2024.

To see the Trustees’ recently enacted monetary policy proposals, check out Eco Atlas.

Chris Berg

Co-Director of Blockchain Innovation Hub & Associate Professor at RMIT | Website

• "Eco is an incredibly interesting and ambitious project, and I’m really keen to contribute and participate. It raises complex questions about the nature of money and money as an institutional technology."

Evan Kereiakes

Crypto Operator, formerly at the Federal Reserve | LinkedIn

• "Eco is the first non-USD, demand-driven cryptocurrency with embedded monetary policy controls. This is a powerful evolution in the application of blockchain technology, and the main reason I’m excited to contribute to Eco as a Trustee."

Irene Tse

Macro Investor, formerly at JP Morgan Chase & Goldman Sachs | LinkedIn

• "If we were to design a new monetary system, what should it look like? How should we use technology to make the process more efficient (operation), honest (governance), borderless and inclusive? Eco is the first project that tries to use the crypto technology mobilized by communities to solve these tough questions. It is the most complex, ambitious project I have seen in my career."

Jeff Snider

Host of Eurodollar University, Chief Strategist at Atlas Financial | Twitter

• "While I am highly skeptical about pretty much everything in money, there are good reasons to be very optimistic about this project.
  
  The world has a grave monetary problem, one that is getting worse with time, and though many can feel there’s something wrong they may not know just what it is. The door is wide open for those who can see it, the opportunity to create a useful hopefully elegant solution which definitively answers for what clearly isn’t working. "

ML (pseudonym)

Crypto Operator, Advisor at Light Protocol & Cask Protocol

• "Sometimes, monetary innovation is borne of crises, such as the Great Recession in 2008-2009, where extraordinary measures were taken to bail out banks and the economy. At other times, monetary innovation is born of technological advances, such as blockchain technology.
  
  My interest in Eco stems from being keen to engage in a similar kind of innovation, experimenting with and designing an economic model that puts the power to govern back in the hands of the people."

MikeWeb (pseudonym)

Eco Community Representative, full-time crypto/DeFi contributor

• "Freedom to choose the best way to work with ECO is what makes it different from many others. And that is exactly why we can see so many successful initiatives from different members of Discord."

Peter Dattels

Former Senior Member of the IMF

• "So why ECO? In two words: Integrity and Vision. I have been impressed with the ECO team and the foundations of ECO which aim to build trust through user-based governance, oversight and openness. I believe ECO addresses one of the missing elements in crypto currency models: you cannot have a 'currency' without a 'central bank'."

Pure Macro

Bob Amano: Former Senior Research Director at Bank of Canada | LinkedIn

Marcel Kasumovich: Deputy CIO at Coinbase Asset Management, previously Bank of Canada | LinkedIn

• "We share Eco’s vision, and participation in the project provides us with the opportunity to contribute to the development of a digital ecosystem whose mandate is designed specifically with its community's best interest in mind."

Subspace (pseudonym)

Eco Community Representative, background in research biology, infrastructure threat and risk assessment, and healthcare IT

• "I am here because I believe Eco can change all of our financial situations, and because one of my life goals is to be a part of something that is bigger than myself, that contributes in a positive way to all humanity."

Observers

The Observers are alumni of the Trustee program, having served at least one term. Although they are not currently voting on monetary policy, many Observers remain active with the project.

This forum post describes the Observer role.

Asfi

DeFi Founder | Twitter

• "At a personal level, I have been in search of “good money” from a fairly young age. It started with collecting rupees as an 8 year old that were lying as pocket change around my home to then converting all those rupees to US dollars as 10 year old because I realized that dollars “grow in value”. As the years went by I found great comfort in treating index funds as reliable money, this was until I stumbled upon crypto and realized my money could be composable and rules based.
  
  I think Eco has a shot at creating an open, fair and transparent financial system. And I’d love to be a part of that journey"

Antares Wald (pseudonym)

PhD in Economics & expert in market design

• "Eco is one of the most exciting and ambitious experiments I have heard about in recent years. Why? It seems to understand that inventing a currency is about enabling community which requires equal focus on record-keeping and governance technologies."

Josh Barach

Founder & Managing Partner of Philip Equities | LinkedIn

• "This paradigm of strong global demand for the product of money without any strong money product creates a compelling market opportunity for ECO. It is possible that ECO will provide not only a highly efficient medium of exchange and unit of account through blockchain technology, but also a store of value through trust and the use of monetary tools."

Annika Lewis

Exec Director at Eco Association, formerly at Capital One | Twitter

• "I’m excited about Eco because it’s unique in that it seeks to take the best from both worlds: fiat & crypto. It draws inspiration from elements of traditional central banking that have been highly effective, and layers on improvements made possible by digital tooling. Additionally, crucially, it emphasizes democratic, bottoms-up decision-making to create a system that will work for all – not just those at the top. "

Luca Prosperi

CEO & Co-Founder at M^ZERO Labs | Twitter

• "I am convinced that currencies are actually the most complex mass-adopted product there is, and I am excited to witness how Eco has been trying to boldly innovate, natively, some of the core functionalities of money. Eco, I like to say, is behavioural currency at its core, and in being so it is probably the most ambitious monetary project that we currently have in crypto."

Niall & Lachlan Ferguson

Niall: Financial Historian & Author | Website

Lachlan: Crypto Researcher

• "Eco aims to satisfy all the conditions that we believe are necessary for a currency, namely, stability of purchasing power, utility as a unit of account and convenience as a means of payment. Rather than relying on an algorithm, Eco is managed by the independent monetary policy determined by a group of elected trustees."

Elena

Crypto Operator, formerly contributing to Ethereum, Zcash, Stacks

• "When I first read the Eco whitepaper, I was deeply impressed with the thoughtfulness of the project’s approach not just to cryptocurrencies but to money in general. This sentence in particular -"Cryptocurrency is an experiment not just in our willingness to adopt a new form of money, but also in our ability to construct a monetary system that is more aligned with consumer and producer well-being.""

Jeff Snider

Host of Eurodollar University, Chief Strategist at Atlas Financial | Twitter

• "While I am highly skeptical about pretty much everything in money, there are good reasons to be very optimistic about this project.
  
  The world has a grave monetary problem, one that is getting worse with time, and though many can feel there’s something wrong they may not know just what it is. The door is wide open for those who can see it, the opportunity to create a useful hopefully elegant solution which definitively answers for what clearly isn’t working. "

Manny Rincon-Cruz

DeFI Founder & Financial Historian | LinkedIn

• "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."

Demian Reidel

Former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Argentina | LinkedIn

• "One of the features of Eco that I found particularly attractive was precisely the creation of decentralized monetary authority. This would help Eco respond to the different types of shocks that would affect crypto and the economy as a whole."

Hermann

Senior Researcher at a major blockchain research center

• "Why Eco?
  
  TL;DR: Because everybody says crypto 'is digital money', but digital money should not be what crypto is today. And ECO is the most serious attempt to do it better which I have seen so far."

Bismarck Analysis

Political Risk Consultancy | Website

• "Decentralized currency is a promising area of research. DAOs and DeFi are testing grounds for experimental governance structures, and produce extremely specific data on the dynamics and costs of coordination. Contributing to Eco’s monetary policy lets us study a young economy in real time, and test conclusions about how coordination works in a new context."

Ben Hoffman

Researcher, formerly at Fannie Mae | Website

• "Eco is not just another crypto project, it has something that strongly resonates with my own thoughts and ideas. The world is too much of a compromise. Compromises decay and fail, win-win solutions are scarce. Popular products are unable to change the environment they live in. Fast forward to today, Eco is the first project to set the stage for future macro-system overhauls."

dmititup (pseudonym)

Eco Community Representative, background in Private Equity & Product Management

• "Eco is not just another crypto project, it has something that strongly resonates with my own thoughts and ideas. The world is too much of a compromise. Compromises decay and fail, win-win solutions are scarce. Popular products are unable to change the environment they live in. Fast forward to today, Eco is the first project to set the stage for future macro-system overhauls."