In November, Garrett Camp had just returned from his first trip to Africa—an “eye-opening” experience, he said—when he informed the world that he would donate half his riches to charity.
What Uber’s cofounder and chairman didn’t mention was that he intended to do more than just give away money. Indeed, he had resolved to invent his own.
Over the past five months, Camp has been sketching out plans for a brand new cryptocurrency that aims to fix technical and other challenges plaguing existing projects, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. His hope, he told Fortune, is to resuscitate virtual currency’s original promise: an instant, affordable, and borderless means of payment for the masses.
Almost a year ago in May, Camp bought his first Bitcoin along with 10 Ether, Ethereum’s native token, on Coinbase, a popular online exchange in the U.S. But as he looked to invest further in the ballooning field of digital tokens and alternative cryptocurrencies, he was let down.
“The more research I did, the more I was not really wanting to buy a large amount of any one of them,” Camp told Fortune. “I realized it might be better to release a new project from a different philosophical standpoint with cooperation from a lot of universities, scientists, and research institutes—like the Internet,” he said, in terms of its path to development.
Camp has christened his rival project “Eco,” a name he settled on because it is short, easy to pronounce in many languages, and evokes concepts like “ecosystem,” “economics,” and “ecommerce.”
Camp is one of a number of entrepreneurs who have thrown their hats into the cryptocurrency ring in recent months. Pavel Durav, the CEO and founder of chat app Telegram, has been building buzz around a billion-dollar “initial coin offering.” Other businesses like Overstock, Kodak, and chat app Kik have either held or intend to hold ICOs. Even Mark Zuckerburg, Facebook’s CEO, said that he planned to focus this year on fixing Facebook, a goal that included exploring “encryption and cryptocurrency.”
“Eco seeks to create the most usable digital currency platform to date, offering users an alternative to bitcoin, gold and at currency at Eco.com,” says Eco’s white paper, a draft of which Fortune reviewed. “New payment systems are needed which are not controlled by a central institution, and provide better user experiences using mobile devices.”
A few differentiators set the Eco protocol apart from the tech underlying other cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin. First off, Eco’s blockchain, or shared ledger system, is designed to run on “verified nodes,” rather than on the machines of an anonymous network of volunteers.
What the system loses in resilience and security, it gains in efficiency and coordinated governance, Camp said. The trade-off strikes “more of a middle ground,” as Camp puts it, between decentralization (like Bitcoin) and centralization (Visa).
Camp says he’s initially seeking to partner with the top 5% universities and research institutes around the world, which number in the couple thousands, to run these early nodes.
Another difference from Bitcoin is Eco’s incentive structure. Instead of having cryptocurrency “miners” compete against one another for the entire crypto-lottery prize, in his proposed system, every time an Eco node confirms a block of financial transactions, the cryptocurrency reward gets dispensed across the network’ to all its nodes and users.
In this scenario, the people running nodes—also known as token generators—are incentivized to do just do the bare minimum to confirm the next block, so that everyone makes money. This economic switch means that miners won’t be motivated to throw as much computing resources at these problems, thereby reducing the energy consumed.
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