Garrett Camp, who co-founded ride sharing giant Uber, is behind a new cryptocurrency dubbed Eco, a decentralized global currency protocol, and he's looking to the world's top universities to run a verified node network.

e chose Eco for its connotation of "ecosystem, economics and e-commerce," according to an article in Fortune. Eco is in it to win it and is designed to go head-to-head with bitcoin, gold and fiat money for daily global payment transactions. 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."

Eco versus Bitcoin

In its white paper, Eco slams bitcoin as a "speculative investment" rather than a "medium of exchange," the latter of which it is trying to achieve. The three key issues that Eco takes up with bitcoin are the following –

its high concentration among a handful of holders

energy-intensive mining process

perception of a propensity for fraud