Uber Co-Founder Plans to Launch Cryptocurrency

After coming back from Africa last November, Garrett Camp, the co-founder of Uber, announced in a Medium post that he will be donating half of his assets to charity. According to the multi-billionaire, his trip to Africa has been “eye-opening” and thus he decided that he “shouldn’t wait to start giving back”.

Today, however, instead of giving away money, Camp is planning to create his own.

Eco

In an interview with Fortune, Camp revealed his plans to invent a brand new cryptocurrency called Eco. The founder of the accelerator/venture fund Expa said that Eco will be a third-generation cryptocurrency that solves the technical and scalability issues that its forefathers like Bitcoin and Ethereum face. Essentially, Camp wishes for Eco to be a digital global currency that can be used as a payment tool around the world for day-to-day transactions.

Source: Medium

Unlike Bitcoin, which is better for larger transactions due to its hefty fees, it is clear that Eco is meant to facilitate both macro- and micro-transactions in today’s world. In his own words, Camp specified the three major pillars in Eco’s vision: “an instant, affordable, and borderless means of payment for the masses”.

In May 2017, Camp made his first investment after speculating the cryptocurrency world for a few years. He purchased his first Bitcoin as well as 10 Ether, the native currency for the Ethereum blockchain. However, as he started using the cryptocurrencies that he bought, he was disappointed by their imperfect infrastructures.

“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.”

Camp believes that a collaborative effort from various experts in the field will help further the development of the cryptocurrency world. And he is probably right. Cryptocurrencies are still a very young technology and it will take years, decades even, for them to be easily accessible by the mainstream public. As this Medium piece cleverly puts it, “This is the early days of Cryptocurrency.” And it’s true – we are nowhere near the early adoption majority phase of the technology adoption curve yet.

Source: Medium

In light of that, Camp decided to name his project “Eco,” a name that he chose because of its simplicity and that it is easy to pronounce in many languages. Furthermore, the world ‘eco’ is also the fundamental of words like “ecosystem,” “economics,” and “ecommerce”, which very aptly describe cryptocurrencies and the world we live in today.

Camp is not the first tech entrepreneur to dip his toes into the cryptocurrency pool. Big names in the tech industry like Pavel Durov and Mark Zuckerberg have expressed their interest in cryptocurrencies, and Durov himself has also launched Telegram’s TON ICO, which is rumored to be one of the largest ICO to date, raking in over $1 billion in revenue.