The Protocol Guild - The Daily Gwei #481
Hey readers - today’s edition of the newsletter is a guest piece put together by Trent Van Epps going over an initiative he’s working on to fund public goods called ‘The Protocol Guild’. A big thank you to Trent for putting this piece together and I’m honored to be able to share it with you all - enjoy! Introducing the Protocol GuildAn autonomous value routing mechanism to incentivise protocol contributions and maintain important Public Goods like the core Ethereum protocol. Key LinksPublic Goods and how we fund themYou don’t have to be an Ethereum community member for long before coming across the term “Public Goods.” These are economic goods that are non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Meaning: a user cannot be prevented from accessing them for free, and use by one person doesn’t prevent others from accessing them. Typically, people will use it to refer to things like Ethereum client implementations (eg. Nethermind, Prysm), or the protocol research that people contribute to make Ethereum more scalable. These are things that the entire community benefits from seeing funded, whereas a specific DeFi application releasing a new feature only benefits their specific users. Today, base layer Ethereum isn’t a pure public good (hello gas fees!), but we hope that the combo of its continued evolution + L2s will move us much closer to something that is ubiquitously accessible for anyone around the world. Over the years, the Ethereum community has experimented with a number of mechanisms to direct funding to public goods contributors. The expressivity of our base layer and the norms embracing experimentation means we’re fortunate to have a rich diversity of approaches:
…and many more! This existing suite of protocol funding mechanisms have so far adequately supported the ecosystem, but come with their own tradeoffs:
Rationale
What is the Protocol GuildThe Protocol Guild aims to address the challenges mentioned above with a simple tool: a weighted split contract that includes vesting. Members will solicit sponsorships in the form of tokens from applications & protocols that build on Ethereum, which gives core contributors the possibility of upside exposure:
To date, the membership includes over 110 Ethereum protocol contributors, including researchers, client maintainers, upgrade coordinators, and more, all self-curated (member list here). This is a broad-based ecosystem effort: members come from 22 different teams and 9 organizations. Only 30% of members are directly employed by the EF. The Guild contracts will act as an autonomous value routing mechanism, operated independently from any existing institution, purpose-built for incentivizing long-term core protocol work. At no point does PG take custody of funds on behalf of members, it is all handled trustlessly. Pilot ProgramSince announcing the project in Dec 2022, we’ve onboarded members, refined the mechanism itself, and described how we think it could be operated. At this point, we’re ready to test the mechanism’s efficacy with a 1 year / $10-20mm Pilot. We want to make sure the mechanism operates smoothly before graduating to a full-scale fundraising round. The funds for the Pilot would be vested directly to Guild members over one year: see the Pilot vesting contract here. ConclusionPublic Goods are something incredibly important in the Ethereum community. We’re excited to bring this new experiment to life and directly fund the people around the world that make this ecosystem possible. Beyond upside exposure to the tokenized application layer, this might be a tool for general funding of core contributors. Thanks to Sassal for the opportunity to publish this piece in The Daily Gwei newsletter! If anyone wants to help out with broader awareness, feedback on the project, or fundraising for the Pilot - please reach out. Have a great weekend everyone, Enjoyed today’s piece? I send out a fresh one every week day - be sure to subscribe to receive it in your inbox! Join the Daily Gwei EcosystemAll information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. If you liked this post from The Daily Gwei, why not share it? |
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