Uber Founder Creating a Cryptocurrency
Garrett Camp, co-founder of Uber and founder of the venture fund Expa, is launching his cryptocurrency — ECO.
People like the word eco, because it reminds them of words like the economy, e-commerce, and a green, healthy ecosystem. Digital currency intended for anyone, Eco is a new type of global currency not controlled by any single individual, organization, or nation.
Uber’s philosophy is simple — they are using the technology to give the people what they want.
They connect the people who want to make money driving their car, with people who need a ride. Soon, they’re planning to make driverless cars with food home delivery — what a time to be alive.
That is the exact kind of big-picture thinking we need in the crypto space right now.
/ ECO ECOSYSTEM
Eco is run by a network of credible organizations across the world, which ensures that the platform is safe and reliable for everyone.
“Our mission is to distribute the majority of the economic value generated by the Eco platform to our community to create a more equitable distribution of resources.”
Their original whitepaper says they only want to use verified nodes for network support and transaction confirmations on their blockchain. It means that someone anonymous couldn’t run a node and confirm transactions like they can do on Bitcoin’s network, reducing chances of hacker attacks or acts of fraud by 51%.
It also means it won’t be genuinely decentralized, which is what crypto is all about.
Camp has plans to overtake the global market with Eco as a payment tool used for instant, affordable and borderless transactions, fixing technical challenges that Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchains are having a hard time with.
There will be one trillion tokens issued initially (yes, that is a trillion), of which 50% will go to the first billion users (and yes, that is a billion). 20% percent will go to the universities which will run their network, 10% will go to advisors, 10% to strategic partners, and 10% will go to the new Eco Foundation, which will create and maintain the network.
Camp, with his partners at Expa, plans to donate $10M of his own money for the operational costs of the project. Now, this is where this project is different from the grand majority of cryptocurrency projects out there.
There will be no ICO — which means no money will be raised for the project, and also lets the project avoid any potential legal issues.
ICO is the most prominent way to crowdfund in the history of crowdfunding. It was never as easy as today to put your idea out there on a piece of paper, with a little bit of code, and get millions of dollars in ETH or BTC to kickstart your project. The best part? Nobody is regulating it. Or is it the worst part?
Nowadays, the regulations and the legalese have started to kick in, and we can naturally expect more and more control over our actions each day. Without the ICO, they will avoid the legal hassle that every major ICO is going through right now, and will have time to focus on their product and its actual implementation. It also means that they believe in the technology, and are here to stay.
Eco is a solid project, but not a ground-breaking one. Many new projects are coming every day, like Telegram, and with some of the already established projects out there that come to mind, such as Litecoin, Ethereum, NEO, or Ripple, it is hard picking winners.
They plan for more than 15% of the world’s population to use it, yet just a few years ago, more than 60% of the population didn’t have internet access.
I am not saying that it’s impossible, but it’s probably not going to be easy. What we need is a developed ecosystem which supports real-life, everyday use cases for these blockchains. It is easy to launch a cryptocurrency and get funded today, but it is hard to implement it and make it worth our time.
Ultimately, it is us — the people — who will make the choice which cryptocurrency will sit on the blockchain throne, by using it and supporting its technology.
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