Eco Association is a Swiss entity established to promote the independent development and growth of the Eco-system—the Eco protocol and the network and community that develop around it.

Currently the members of the association focus on community development and technical support. As the Eco-system grows, it is likely that the scope of the Association’s work will grow with it, to sponsor research, organize grant-making and otherwise support the independent efforts of the Eco community. The Association manages an independent treasury for those purposes, but is a non-profit entity.

There are a number of early market participants who purchased ECOx to support the Eco protocol's early development. They include:

a16z Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital, Founders Fund, L Catterton, Activant Capital, 1kx, Expa, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Collab+Currency, Slow Ventures, LionTree, and more.

Note: These are investors in the Eco protocol vision through ECOx only. Eco Association is an independent entity that exists to support the growth of the Eco protocol and community.

In the Eco community, Trustees fulfill the role of monetary policymakers. They source feedback from the community, monitor crypto and traditional finance markets, conduct economic research, and vote on system monetary policy every two weeks.

Trustees are elected by the community. Most often, highly eligible candidates bring deep and demonstrated experience in economic research, financial market analysis, and/or active involvement in crypto community governance.

Eco, Inc. is a U.S. based company (and a Delaware corporation) developing the Beam wallet—a non-custodial payments wallet. Eco, Inc. will continue to develop Beam to promote adoption and use of the Eco protocol, and will continue to be a core contributor to the open Eco community.

Eco, Inc. sponsored the development of the Eco protocol (along with several independent contributors) as well as the formation of the Eco community in Discord. As part of these efforts, Eco, Inc. developed v1 of the Eco protocol as well as the interfaces for interacting with it.

The Eco protocol is designed to evolve and be upgraded through community governance. Each proposed update must be adopted and executed through governance. The community maintains its roadmap and continues to recruit new contributors and partners to further its reach.

Currently contributors are working on a series of upgrades to make the Eco protocol faster, cheaper and more intuitive to use and interact with. Some of these upgrades will include: moving more transaction activity to on-chain scaling solutions, improving community governance and monetary governance processes, refining the implementation of certain policy functions and expanding ECOx functionality to support novel staking and collateralization use cases.

In numerous ways!

Whether you are a product building, contributing coder, research analyst, shop owner, economist, linguist … or just trying to find your way around, there are many ways to learn more about Eco and match the Eco mission to your skills and interests. Start by reading the resources above! And check out Get Involved for more information.