What is Eco?

An overview of the Eco Protocol.

Eco is a protocol for stablecoins and the apps that use them. Eco enables apps to unlock stablecoin liquidity from any connected chain and give users the simplest onchain experience. It brings together an Ethereum-based rollup and permissionless liquidity network designed from the ground up for the most capital-efficient transaction execution.

To make transaction costs negligible, minimize the number of necessary user actions, and avoid introducing centralized dependencies, Eco focuses on a singular, opinionated use case: fast, cheap, single-click stablecoin transaction execution anywhere across Ethereum. Eco is designed on the premise that stablecoins are the most intuitive and interoperable asset to bring users onchain. Eco makes it as fast and easy as possible for onchain app developers to attract stablecoin liquidity, price onchain actions in everyday currencies, and enable one-click sends to any supported chain or application.

The Eco rollup integrates native functionality making it easy for app developers to provide users a more intuitive onchain experiences. The cross-chain transaction system provides developers with secure token transfer pathways between any other rollup settling on Ethereum (L2 or L3), with a network of fillers providing on-demand liquidity. The rollup can act as an oracle and settlement pool for cross-chain transactions.

Eco is purpose built to maximize these benefits:

• Flexible for Any App’s Needs: Allows for high configuration flexibility. An app integrating Eco can choose any asset, proving scheme, filler, destination, fee, etc.

• Simplify User Deposits of Stablecoins to One Action: Apps will instantly expand their stablecoin offering for users while maintaining their preferred accepted stablecoin. Apps with Eco integrated can allow seamless, low-cost deposits from any OP Stack blockchain today and most major chains in the future.

• Scalable to More Complex Onchain Actions: The system fully supports more complex, cross-chain actions like depositing into a particular contract, minting a specific NFT on the destination chain, etc.

• Highly Capital Efficient: Fillers settle directly with the user, eliminating capital loss from price volatility and slippage.

• One, Simple Transaction Fee: Apps can easily accept multiple stablecoins across L2s and L3s as easy as one action. Eco is not a router or aggregator.

• Flexible Transfer Options: Provides apps with a fully proven option requiring no message bridges and uses storage proofs to give a trust-minimized design for maximum security and a faster settlement path using message bridges to provide maximum flexibility. Apps built on Eco’s rollup will benefit from further optimized settlement speed and cost.

• Secure, Cross-Chain Stablecoin Settlement: Built on an intent-centric architecture, allowing transfers to be executed before settlement. A user only pays if their transfer executes on the destination chain first, eliminating the risk of losing capital for the user.

• Easy Integration: Use the Eco SDK to easily integrate Eco within your app or appchain.

• Any Ethereum L2/L3 Can Integrate Eco (Permissionless): Supporting new L2s/L3s on Eco is simple. Developers only need to deploy Eco’s contracts and coordinate with fillers to bootstrap liquidity. They do not need to work with specialized operators or governance protocols.

• Seamless Onboarding: The Rollup leverages Account Abstraction features like gas abstraction, transaction batching, and other UX improvements to enable seamless user onboarding.

Unlike most general-purpose protocols, Eco is highly opinionated and designed with a singular purpose in mind, To unify liquidity— making any onchain interaction a simple stablesend — in a way that scales Ethereum and boosts the total addressable market (TAM) for apps by enabling developers and users to easily interact with apps across Ethereum.

You can find more technical detail about the Eco Protocol design and roadmap in these system docs. We'll be releasing more information about the system over the coming weeks and months, so please follow our progress. We invite your collaboration and feedback or, if you are a potential integration partner, please visit eco.com to get in touch with us!