Eco Crowd Liquidity: Solving for Stablecoins
A programmable liquidity layer for stablecoin intents.
At Eco, we are building the most powerful platform for using stablecoins across web3 — for the fastest stablecoin movement, the simplest stablecoin UX, and the deepest stablecoin liquidity.
Eco is not a “stablecoin chain.” Rather, Eco moves stablecoins between different chains where they’re most in demand, with a single-click user experience for sending stables across the network and using them to accomplish the thing you want to do.
Earlier this spring, we previewed the roadmap and design for Eco — with Routes, Accounts, and Crowd Liquidity coming together to power the network. Since then, Routes has scaled to a nine-figure monthly transaction volume, paving the way for Accounts and Crowd Liquidity this summer.
This post provides a deeper dive into Eco’s Crowd Liquidity protocol, exploring its motivation, unique design, and how you can participate as an early adopter. Crowd Liquidity is a novel, powerful solution for allocating stablecoin liquidity across chains, ensuring that the most in-demand stablecoin routes and use cases remain well-capitalized. Crowd Liquidity also opens a new yield source to retail and institutional capital alike — creating a new incentive for dollars to flow into stablecoins onchain, and to stay there.
What is Crowd Liquidity?
You can think of Crowd Liquidity as a massive onchain order book for stablecoin liquidity, where participants pool stablecoin capital to serve cross-chain order flow and execute various onchain actions using stablecoins. Crowd Liquidity incentivizes idle capital to move when and where it’s most in demand — and therefore most profitable — creating a market layer for stablecoin liquidity that’s user-supplied, owned, and governed.
Crowd Liquidity is designed for an “intent-driven” market where onchain transaction execution increasingly relies upon efficient capital allocation by third-party actors, often called solvers or relayers. Ideally, this paradigm — which pays solvers to quickly fulfill user requests and abstracts away multiple transaction steps — should result in significantly improved performance and UX for many on-chain actions, especially those occurring across chains. However, the current market structure is far from efficient. A proliferation of chains and assets is outstripping solver capacity. At scale, a “good” solver must have the resources and sophistication to monitor fast-paced order flow and rapidly rebalance asset inventory across chains.
This overhead creates a high barrier to entry for potential solvers and reduces their margins, ultimately limiting capital competition and liquidity available to various intent networks. Less competition and lower liquidity often result in poorer execution for users and developers. This dynamic also keeps a new yield source — intent solving — closed to retail stablecoin holders and most DeFi LPs, even though stablecoin liquidity often remains underutilized in user wallets, protocol treasuries, and redundant liquidity pools.
Without sufficient liquidity, intent markets will remain unnecessarily constrained, and onchain UX will remain unnecessarily complex. But without new incentives for capital providers and solvers to participate, there won’t be sufficient liquidity. Crowd Liquidity is designed to address this gap.
Crowd Liquidity incentivizes participants — whether active LPs or passive retail stablecoin holders — to contribute capacity to a shared stablecoin liquidity layer, which the protocol then utilizes to serve order flow for multiple intent networks routing transactions between the most in-demand chains and DeFi products. In doing so, Crowd Liquidity reduces the barrier to entry for both capital providers and potential solvers, exposing solver yield to the broadest base of participants while separating execution ability from the overhead of asset management.
The idea of pooling LP capital to serve order flow is not a new one. This basic insight underlies Hyperliquid’s HLP and LayerZero’s Stargate protocol, and more recently Nomial, Sprinter, and Bungee’s Open Liquidity Network, among others. Crowd Liquidity incorporates elements of these designs and can integrate with some of these other protocols, but to its own end, enabling broader participation by retail stablecoin holders and enhanced programmability for stablecoin transactions.
System Design
Crowd Liquidity is designed to be permissionless for deployment and utilization, programmable across multiple intent networks, and collateral-free for solvers. It’s also designed to be highly intuitive for stablecoin holders to participate in. We expand on each of these benefits below.
Programmable and Permissionless to Access. Anyone can utilize Crowd Liquidity by verifiably running an EcoScript, executable code that has been reviewed and approved via protocol governance, to access Crowd Liquidity safely and profitably. Various EcoScripts can be programmed to support multiple solver strategies, including solving for other intent protocols beyond Eco Routes. EcoScripts run inside TEEs, and a solver verifiably running an EcoScript (via remote attestation from a provider such as Lit Protocol) will be granted a session key to borrow from Crowd Liquidity to fulfill a transaction, provided their request passes programmable rules set by the protocol. Crowd Liquidity charges a base pool fee and manages the overhead of rebalancing and inventory management across the network. The end outcome is a permissionless liquidity layer that can be used by anyone and unifies stablecoin liquidity for all major intent protocols.
Through EcoScripts, solver logic, rebalancing logic, validation logic, and auction logic can all run in TEEs and operate the same way: run approved code, attest, receive access, and utilize protocol liquidity. They can even be leveraged to protect against unexpected slippage or depeg events, as verifiable real-time profitability is a prerequisite for access.
Truly Unified Liquidity. Crowd Liquidity offers a global LP model, allowing participants to deposit and withdraw any supported token from any connected chain. This contributes to a meta-pool which serves intents across all connected chains. This means liquidity providers don’t have to manage inventory on each chain to maximize yield; instead, the protocol orchestrates their liquidity across chains automatically (accounting for both local liquidity incentives as well as real-time demand for solving). This makes Crowd Liquidity far easier for the passive retail stablecoin holder to participate in. Crowd Liquidity participants receive a stable LP token that reflects the dollars they have contributed. This token rebases interest income across all participants, effectively acting as its own sort of yield-bearing stablecoin, which may also be composable with various DeFi protocols.
Greater Capital Efficiency with Accounts. Besides directly depositing via an interface, users with an Eco Account (currently in private beta 👀) can opt into Crowd Liquidity participation seamlessly to earn passive yield. Their funds remain liquid and available from any connected chain; because the user can be truly stablecoin- or chain-agnostic, they can permit the protocol to utilize their funds as additional rebalancing or solving capacity until they next need them. The protocol leverages pooled retail and LP liquidity as the most capital-efficient sources for both solving and internal rebalancing (hence “Crowd Liquidity”).
In the end, the economic and strategic implications for Crowd Liquidity are immense, but deceptively simple:
- 10x Capital Efficiency: Shared liquidity and chain-agnostic accounts enable near-instant, net-settled rebalancing, minimizing the overhead of internal bridging.
- Open Participation and Yield Distribution: A developer anywhere can compete with major firms if they build better execution code. A user anywhere can capture solving yield and MEV, instead of relying on unnecessary or opaque intermediaries.
- Composable Infrastructure: With EcoScripts, Crowd Liquidity is effectively a programmable stablecoin liquidity platform that can be utilized by multiple cross-chain protocols (e.g., Across, Socket), thereby establishing a universal intent capital base.
Crowd Liquidity is more than a liquidity network — it’s a fundamentally new market and protocol for managing liquidity underlying the best multichain user experiences. Builders focus on product and UX; solvers compete on performance; retail end users earn yield for enabling efficiency; protocol governance maintains code integrity, not operational control.
Crowd Liquidity transforms the cross-chain solving market from a fragmented, capital-gated system into a unified, programmable, and permissionless network — an open, efficient, and antifragile liquidity foundation for the entire stablecoin ecosystem.
The earliest partners for Crowd Liquidity include major chains, stablecoin issuers, and DeFi protocols. For chains and issuers, Crowd Liquidity ensures sufficient capacity to process intent-based transactions, allowing them to earn a higher margin on the demand they generate for inbound order flow. For DeFi protocols, Crowd Liquidity is a new, composable yield source for stablecoin holders.
If you’re a chain, issuer, or protocol interested in leveraging Crowd Liquidity for your own stablecoin strategy, contact us!
And if you’re a stablecoin holder who wants to participate, there are ways to get in early 🧢, with more info coming soon…
About Eco
Eco enables any onchain action to be a simple, one-click stablesend. With Eco, apps can easily accept anyone’s preferred stablecoin, regardless of the network — unlocking stablecoin liquidity from any connected chain and giving users the simplest onchain experience. To make this possible, the Eco Protocol brings together Routes, Accounts, and Crowd Liquidity (coming soon) to give app developers the ultimate flexibility while prioritizing speed, cost, and security.
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About Eco Inc.
Eco Inc. is a blockchain company building software that maximizes money’s value. The company is a founding contributor to the Eco Protocol and the builder of Bend. We expect better from our money, and we want you to as well. That’s what drives us every day.