Eco Coin Is Being Developed By Uber Co-Founder
Garrett Camp , co-founder of web discovery platform StumbleUpon and the Uber transportation network, recently announced plans to launch his own cryptocurrency. The digital currency will be called Eco coin, and Camp would like for it to be used as a convenient way to pay for everyday expenses. To start, the Canadian businessman and investor wants to issue 1 trillion tokens.
According to Camp, half, or 50%, of the tokens will be given to the first 1 billion verified users. 20% (200 billion) of the remaining tokens will be disseminated to universities and researchers operating trusted/verified nodes. 10% will be offered to advisors, another 10% will be given to strategic global partners, and the final 10% will be issued to the Eco foundation. Notably, Camp has set up the Eco foundation to develop and manage the Eco coin's network.
Privately Funded Crypto Project
In order to provide his crypto-project a solid foundation, the Uber co-founder and a few of his close business partners have decided to donate $10 million. These funds will reportedly be used to pay for the project's initial operating costs. Typically, crypto ventures of this type have involved the launch of an ICO. However, the Eco coin will not be funded through an ICO.
There could be several benefits to this approach. Perhaps the most obvious one is not having to deal with all the legal issues that ICOs usually face. Moreover, people have become increasingly wary of ICOs due to the large number of scams that have been orchestrated through them. In response, regulatory authorities have begun to closely monitor and scrutinize crypto-related startups seeking funding through coin offerings. Therefore, if the Eco coin project can manage to fund itself privately, then it could avoid a lot of potential problems.
Eco Coin's Whitepaper
Eco coin's whitepaper notes that there are currently some serious issues associated with major cryptocurrencies. For instance, Camp doesn't like the idea of allowing anonymous nodes to operate on a crypto's blockchain, which is basically what the Bitcoin network has. Instead, he wants all the nodes on Eco coin's platform to be verified.
Although this type of implementation eliminates the risk of 51% attacks, it does so at the expense of not being completely decentralized. Additionally, having 1 trillion tokens, as Camp proposes, could make the Eco token more appealing to users. That's because the USD to Eco token conversion rate would be significantly lower than that of Bitcoin. Furthermore, the Uber co-founder might even be planning to make Eco coin more accessible to users who are not very tech-savvy.
Another key feature that this coin could have is being more energy efficient. This would be, as Camp points out, due to the absence of nodes (miners) that consume vast amounts of electricity just to confirm transactions and generate tokens.
Ambitious Goals Set By Eco Coin Developers
If the electricity consumption can be minimized, then this could translate into long-term success for the Eco coin project. The reason for this is that major cryptocurrencies consume way too much energy. In fact, the Bitcoin network uses over 32TWh every year. This is approximately equivalent to the electricity consumption of an entire country, such as Denmark. Some researchers estimate that, by 2020, the Bitcoin network alone could consume as much energy as the whole world combined. Clearly, this doesn't sound sustainable.
Based on what Camp has proposed for the Eco coin project, it's certainly a very ambitious initiative. However, if and when it's successful remains to be seen. Even though Camp has achieved phenomenal success with Uber, that doesn't mean that this project will also follow in the same direction. After all, both of them are totally different concepts.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://cryptocoremedia.com/eco-coin-garrett-camp/