Credibly Neutral Public Goods Funding w/ Trent Van Epps (Protocol Guild)

Transcript

[Music] thank you welcome back to the strangewater podcast thank you for joining us for another great episode you may have heard me say this a few times before and you'll definitely hear me say it again during this conversation but I believe that one of the most exciting and promising reasons to be involved with ethereum is because I believe that ethereum is perhaps the final manifestation of the open source software movement now that's a huge statement that deserves unpacking at some later time but let me sum up most of it by pointing

out that ethereum allows everyone to directly financially benefit from the use of the incredible things built on top of it the culmination of eip1559 the reduced issuance of eth post merge and many other of these pieces of ethereum's History have created a new kind of public good that distributes its profit to the vast majority of etholders but these are Big Ideas meant to paint a picture across an entire digital economy to put it frankly the eath burn is too esoteric and indirect to provide for competent development and stewardship of ethereum

the reality is is that real humans need to develop the software needed to operate upgrade and maintain any of the technology that makes any of this work and those real humans eat real food and have real bills so here's the problem space we're about to enter how do you ensure that there is sufficient funding for the public infrastructure that underlies the entire ethereum ecosystem lots of people have very strong opinions on this matter but there are few that I respect more than today's guests Trent Van Epps during this episode we'll cover all things public goods funding from the

current mechanisms that support public infrastructure today how other chains and ecosystems have decided to support their public goods and will eventually land on the protocol Guild a public goods funding concept that Trent has been building since early 2022. the idea behind protocol Guild is simple tokens are donated by successful Dows protocols or other ecosystems that are built on top of ethereum and then they're split between a curated list of ethereum protocol contributors this is a fantastic episode for anyone that believes in the ethereum that we have today and wants to see it continue to mature and to grow

and next time you're getting an itch to write a doubt proposal consider a contribution to the protocol Guild one more thing before we begin please do not take Financial advice from this or any other podcast ethereum will change the world one day but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then all right time to bring on Trent foreign thank you so much for joining us for the strangewater podcast great to have you on thank you for having me of course so um before we start talking public goods at all Let's uh you know I'm a big

believer that the most important uh part of any conversation are the people in it so let's start with you what is your background in like really specifically how did you go from just like normal regular person out there to like someone who's dedicated their life to this like very bizarre world we call crypto sure um so uh like a lot of people I started completely outside of crypto um maybe over time that'll that'll become less and less normal as as people I don't know get degrees in it and come out of school learning how to do a blockchain development and things like that but for now that's that's pretty common um but I started in architecture and

design that's what I went to school for um I did that for a few years professionally and then uh found crypto on specifically ethereum on Reddit and just kind of Dove deep into the community there and was um really consumed and really excited by the things I was seeing I saw an early Mist demo um I think in 2015 or 2016 missed was this uh today is something like the gnosis safe app inner interface where you have like this way of interacting with different projects all through a single application interface but back in the day that was you know 2015 or 2016

these were just like ideas and things that we hope to build in the future so yeah when I saw that demo I was hooked and just over the years following that got deeper and deeper eventually quit architecture and started working part-time here and there this is about 2018 part-time for a few different crypto projects then I joined full-time working a company called white block and then I also worked at youth Global which does hackathons people are maybe familiar with that and then I joined the EF uh maybe two and a half years ago and just over that entire um time frame I started off just by you know I'm not I'm not a developer I'm not

technical to a large degree I have an understanding of the concepts that people are talking about but I'm not um not working with code really so I started with what I knew uh on the edges of the ethereum community showing up to core Dev calls trying to understand the people and the structures that make this community come to consensus to be able to build things so um yeah I started off like taking notes on community calls transcribing podcasts like these are things that were very easy for me to do and within my skill set um and then just over time got deeper and deeper more accustomed to the way the community operated and um just started doing my own projects

some of them related to public goods funding and uh yeah so that's all in parallel to sort of the work that I was getting paid for and then eventually ended up at the ethereum foundation and um I couldn't I couldn't be happier I really enjoyed the work that I'm doing there awesome well we'll talk in a minute about like kind of the it's very funny like everyone has a different journey into crypto but it's all kind of smells the same where it's like you you just encounter it somewhere on the internet and then like realize that there's something crazy here and then we all like kind of bootstrap our way into the industry by like essentially creating content like whether it's transcribing other people's content or me I was literally just writing threads

on like basic computer science and basic like ethereum but um yeah so anyway we'll get to the the content pipeline into crypto in a second but let's go back to 2015 or ish when you start to see ethereum on like Reddit or on the forums or whatever like as an architect someone who is not like deep deep into you know Financial stuff like political stuff like you know there's so much that draws people in crypto everything from like wild speculative profits to this like really hardcore libertarianism like there should be no borders like what in that moment when you stumbled upon it in Reddit was like interesting to you yeah that's a good question

so I think one of the things that got me into architecture was um the the idea that something that your your output of your work I mean this is why a lot of people do things the output of your work can shape the world in some way and in architecture that's literally the physical or the built environment you're designing a space that people will inhabit and you can shape their interactions or the way that they inhabit space By the way you design it the materials you use certain features that are included or not included and so that impulse to design or shape the world was very strong and I think it's strong for a lot of Architects and designers

however what I experienced going from school to the the practice of the profession is that it's quite different um it's uh you know you're you're going from the the abstract ideas and the concepts to effectively running a business it's very different um so there's there was a big discrepancy between what I was expecting with the profession and uh the actual practice of it which is fine like the the real world is very different from the academic study of something uh that that's sort of um goes without saying uh and maybe I was a little naive going into it but that that desire to shape the world or engage with

forming something was still there even if I wasn't so in love with architecture anymore so when I found um ethereum it was uh kind of an opportunity to or at least at the time my perspective was that it's a way to engage with shaping the internet and different technologies that might be very widespread in the future and um I I grew up after sort of the first wave of the internet coming into being I know it's been developed for many many decades but really in the 90s is when it started the late 80s and 90s is when it started to take off in a consumer facing way and

yeah that was that was before my time I was born in 1992 um and so I didn't really have exposure to all that I also grew up completely without internet and only got it later in life so uh when I found ethereum I was very curious about oh you know this I always um heard early stories of of how the internet had developed and this sort of romantic notion of web one and the ways that you had these tight-knit communities and maybe this was an opportunity for me to sort of participate in a new rebirth or a new development of a technology that's going to maybe one day be crucial to the internet as we use it so

yeah that's sort of the the context around architecture and and does the desire the desire to shape things and how that transferred no for sure I mean that resonates so much with me I was born in 91. so like I very much understand just uh you know I I in retrospect got the internet like early you know all of my memories like definitely like the internet was slow and dial up and like terrible but it was there and I just you know I grew up into this world like kind of thinking that the internet was something that you know as part of like the end of History like we were done with everything everything interesting had already happened like I very vividly remember opening my first uh like stock account when I was in

college and like the thing I was interested in purchasing was Apple and like by that time like just things are done you know and I think for me part of what is so exciting about ethereum is you know like you don't need me to tell you this but like for people who who don't really get it yet like ethereum is part of the history of the internet and you know like I think of ethereum as just like the first and like the last way that we're going to express property on the internet and so um you know to understand it in that context it really is about you know building the internet shaping the internet and realizing that the 90s or the 2000s were not the end of History um that was like a very

um naive comment by people who survived the Cold War but um I can also go back to you sorry but there was also you also touched on like the political aspect of things and so like shaping the world is pretty generic and like at every uh every political ideology wants to shaping the world in some way so it's not very informed but uh I I definitely one of the things that ties into um politics I guess would be um I grew up pretty conservative and then went away to college and found that there are other ways of interpreting the world uh and then just growing up in in

the United States and observing the Electoral politics presidential races it um yeah like from my teens to early adulthood just came pretty became pretty disenchanted with um democracy at scale um just because it's it's very hard to um effect change within a system that just it's structured the way it is um so in some sense this was both like crypto I think represents for me and maybe some other um people who are politically inclined like this is a way to affect um both small and large scale change because the technology can be used at

many different scales right it's a it's a global technology in that it's used uh can be accessed by anyone in the world anybody can run a node but you can also construct you can construct tiny instances of the technology and like a Dao for example but you can create very large examples of this as well and I think we're going to see larger and larger um examples of the scale of coordination that is possible with crypto and so I mean obviously I didn't I didn't know that then but I I think it at least had an instinct towards this thing this technology this infrastructure is one way that I can uh give greater agency outside of the like build Agency for people self-determination sovereignty

for people outside of the traditional political system um hopefully it plays out as I'm ex I'm expecting but um yeah that's definitely and I've gotten probably more left-leaning over the years and um now I'm definitely very interested in Commons based production as a way of viewing or framing how I'm building things and maybe we'll get into that later with talking about protocol Guild but I think crypto is incredible for for doing a lot of this like peer-to-peer organization uh at a scale and with certain affordances that weren't possible in the previous Technology Center yeah so I think we can go all day

on you know why crypto is amazing and what you what it allows in this world that is becoming more closed off and dangerous and um we can go all day on ethereum but let's kind of uh progress forward on your story and get us eventually to protocol Guild so again we briefly mentioned and I don't know how the only thing I'll say about the content pipeline into working in crypto is like it's not just trying it's not just me like that's a vitalik story too just like go look up Bitcoin magazine right like I I think there's something like so cool and profound that um that is how you get into crypto at least before there's University programs or professional training programs it's

literally go find something interesting and then write content on it um asphetallic but but um with with that is like the background can you talk to me a little bit about how you found public goods and like why you became more and more interested in that and and maybe touch on a little bit about what public goods means in the context of crypto that is um you know just just like more specific than like this generic term of public goods that we think of everything from like a freeway overpass to um you know Public Health Care to you know something like funding a guest client like what is public goods to you and then why did you find yourself uh

resonating and like and moving closer towards it sure so yeah public is this term that everybody throws around um and often there's disagreeing uh definitions which conflict with each other um but if you take the traditional definition of public goods or um Commons Goods it's things that are um non-excludable and non-rival risk so like you can't prevent somebody from using it and your consumption of it doesn't um impact them necessarily obviously if we're thinking about physical public goods like a subway station used or sorry a like a a train you standing in

the train takes up someone else's space so there are some limits on some things that people would call public goods when you get into the Physical Realm but because we're dealing with software and digital Goods it's you can't prevent somebody from looking at code like the marginal cost to reproduce that code is just looking at an interface or looking at a website on GitHub or something so there's no there's some different restrictions when it comes to or there are fewer restrictions when it comes to digital public goods so that's like the the high level definition but when it comes to ethereum um these are things that uh sometimes people frame it as they don't

have a profit mechanism built in um which is useful in some ways in that you know that they're not going to construct a mechanism or product that is aligned towards extraction um other ways to think about it is what would be really hard for um uh a market to produce this thing so if it's um you know something that's more user-facing like a wallet for example these are things this is something that um is typically created by or there are many many different kinds of wallets and they have different features and it's relatively easy for users to switch

between them if they want certain features um and you know maybe someday there will be business models for these wallets like they charge a fee on swaps or something uh however if you look so that's at like the user layer but if you go down down down the stack all the way to the infrastructure layer uh what would it look like for a core client to charge a fee that went to the op the maintainers of the software when you start to do things like this it becomes strange for not just the users but like the political uh orientation of how the software is produced are all the different versions of are like are all the client teams charging a fee is only

one charging a fee um what do they do with that money are there possible um uh ways in which this can degrade over time like it can fall out of equilibrium so once you start to maybe that's like one way to look at it is like when you introduce a fee could is that even possible or desirable and if the answer is no like you end up with some really unfortunate um degraded State that's maybe a case where a public would be possible now that's not to say that um you know this condition always persists or it will always play out like that but it's one way to frame it um so yeah my path was like you said

writing and and just making content around specifically core Dev stuff layer twos when they were first starting um in in 2019 I was always fascinated with like the political and social dynamics for things like mining uh when it was still around um I was involved in the Prague pow debates back in the day and um just got deeper and deeper in thinking about how these um how these software Goods these these common goods created by the input of many hundreds of people over time and you know coming to consensus disagreeing the political and social process that went into creating this thing which uh

you know is very painful at times to to create this but in reality it's the only way that it could be created through the consensus of many many people and so just by exposure to the awkwardev's calls and the many different teams and individuals that are working on these things uh I first this is how I first became aware of like what are public goods in this sense and then later on the The Commons framing um yeah so yeah just over time became more and more exposed to the concept and uh yeah hopefully that covers all the little bits of your question no no for sure so I think the quintessential example of like ethereum and public goods at least in my mind feel free to

push back is on the actual clients of ethereum right whether and things are getting more complicated now but we'll just pretend like there's only one client uh you know there's not like a consensus client an execution client but um can you maybe walk us through very briefly the history of like first like we have just the cons we just have ethereum right like the first consensus client and that maybe doesn't need to be thought that strongly about um you know incentives in maintaining the software because you know the software is the product it's everything but as we move further and further away from that we realize that we need more clients for security reasons we need

them for um for for a lot of reasons and we need to start thinking like how do we incentivize people to essentially create duplicate pieces of software that like Buy definition or at least by our like highest Ambitions will never form a fee like can you maybe walk us through that story and like help us understand like why public goods is so important in this space specifically in this credibly neutral space yeah so if we go back in time um Geth was one of several early clients I don't know if they started exactly at launch or a little bit after um and if any of the early guest team hears this and you can come and yell at

me later for not knowing but there were a number of clients at the beginning I think three um I think parody was one of them there may have been another client but uh this is different from something like Linux which has just the kernel and then people build on top of it um Linus has famously said like there's no need for a spec uh it's just like we have the kernel but in ethereum it's different for a number of reasons one it's a distributed system and um hopefully I'm not putting my foot in my mouth because I'm not a distributed systems engineer but with with these systems once you you introduce a bug let's say we had a single client like

Bitcoin for example the client is the specification uh in in to boil it down um whereas in ethereum there's this today we have the yellow paper we have the consensus and execution specifications and these are what clients interpret into a different form so we have this this this Central version the the specification clients create an interpretation and then they produce instances of the state which are then merged into mainnet or the blockchain as we interact with it so it's this Divergence and then reconvergence which makes it so important that we have many different

implementations uh from a technical perspective because then it's much less likely that you will have a bug that makes it into the canonical set or you end up like for let's say forking out a minority client so technically this is super important but politically and socially so politically you don't want to have any single team that's overweight in terms of uh coming to consensus or or how they engage with the how the protocol is governed and stewarded over time [Music] um and so like I said early on there were a couple clients already it wasn't that it just started with one and over time we've seen more and more clients today I

think there are 10 to 12 at varying levels of sort of mainnet Readiness um this is both execution and consensus layer because there are two different layers now um yeah and and socially right you have once you have exposure to more languages you can bring more people into ethereum it's a way of like scaling up the the number of developers who can engage with the the core evm the core specification and so this is this is another good thing so we have social benefit and then we have as many people as possible bringing their context and their experiences into ethereum to build a

client or just interact with an existing one politically um the the production of the protocol is not constrained or dictated by a single organization or a single team and then like I said technically um we don't end up producing a bug that ends up in the canonical chain if you have many clients that must agree over time over this distributed consensus for sure and I think we can talk all day about why it's so important to have multiple clients and um that you know that's everything from like the the attackability of ethereum to just like the the brittleness or as you keep saying like our exposure to

bugs I think all that is like super important but within the scope of public goods like I think it's like really worth it to drill down on like how you know now we'll fast forward to 2023 where we are today like how do these like incredible pieces of software that form the backbone of ethereum like how do they get formed like who is paying for and so I think like we can look at a couple different examples we can look at um I'll let you kind of like give us the taxonomy but there's everything from um I believe was it oops one of the clients was just purchased by off-chain labs and like that is a way that we believe that uh

you know it can be supported in the long term because now there's a business entity there's things coming out of like groups that are supported by Paradigm so you know there's Deep Pockets there and we're sure that there's going to be like some sort of support um can you just kind of talk through the taxonomy of like all the different clients and how they are supported and so that we can kind of understand like really at the base layer like how is ethereum like moving the ball forward yeah the so yeah we can go back in time again the main way that it all started was the ethereum foundation just giving grants to people um I believe they were usually longer term grants of a couple years uh and

that's probably still the norm today so you kind of have this group of people um I know prism started this way just they're they're really interested in doing something they were early on to what was called eth2 then the beacon chain now um they were just really passionate and wanted to build something and be engaged in the process and so once you have a group of people together they can get a grant and distribute it amongst themselves oftentimes they will create a commercial entity and this is typically the form that we see client teams hosted within that there's some there's some legal entity that

hosts the the software or at least a host the people that are working on the software of course these are open source projects so they have many external contributions but typically the majority of the teams will be hosted by a commercial team and then they can take these grants from the ethereum foundation and distribute it distribute them uh to to fund the operations um so that was the the main way early on a couple years after that we started to see git coin grants sort of take shape and this was I think one of the first main ways that client teams or the at least the commercial entity that hosted the clients and you're going to hear me make this

distinction quite often because I think it's important to note there's the commercial entity which is like the rapper which may include more than just the client project itself so like um Lighthouse For example is a software project it's a team of people working on it but they're housed within the sigma Prime legal entity which is I believe in Australia they have some legal entity that that also has um other projects so they have an auditing arm uh that's at least one that I know of but so it's a larger company and then the the lighthouse project is moving within it um

so grants is the main thing and then yeah to to my point I just made oftentimes these client teams will have uh adjacent services that they can offer and then fund the client in that way uh so some will do auditing some will do Consulting with either Legacy Industries or Trad Tech whatever you want to call it web 2 or they will do Consulting with other l2s there's a couple different ways in which they can make money uh and oh I skipped around a little bit so I was talking about get coin get coin emerged yeah a couple years after the start of the network and you know that was one way for a client team

to have exposure or a a way for the ecosystem to fund them but again this goes to the commercial entity not the individuals um and and I think for the scale that client teams need to operate at Bitcoin grants was usually like a nice bonus but it's not doing the main bit of funding so um grants get coin grants that variant uh and then even more recently we've seen things like optimism to rpgf which is like same thing Bitcoin grants you apply with a profile and then there are some deliberation process and then they will get funding in some way um

those are the main ones that come to mind I know some client teams or or the the commercial entities which house the client teams have gotten VC funding uh or like you said have been purchased by arbitrum uh sorry off-chain Labs the company that that works on arbitrum um so yeah there's there's a handful of different ways in which these these core clients are maintained financially and then of course protocol Guild is another way that we target the individuals working on this stuff and um those are probably the main ones I know actually a few client teams also had I mentioned Consulting but they will do

Consulting for other l1s like um gnosis chain or I know Aragon for a little bit was working with Finance smart chain I don't think that's the case anymore but um yeah so there's a number of ways in which client teams can get funding uh but maybe what we'll get into is yeah it's it's this is actually quite important and nuanced how this funding comes in and um uh the yeah the context in which it comes in is really important yeah so I think um you you brought my attention to something we need to um hit a little bit later which is the landscape of all the different entities that are offering public goods funding whether from

Bitcoin to this new optimism program protocol Guild and just maybe like the EF directly but before we get there while we're still talking about how clients but let's like generalize it a little bit more to all core ethereum infrastructure when we're thinking about how these things are first like funded uh at Genesis and then maintain funding long term what are the types of funding that are like really positive and like contribute to a sense of public goods like let's say small donor amounts from the community and what are the types of funding that are like very scary and like lead us to think that um like there

might be like some sort of capture of public goods and in this case I'm thinking of like you know what if a very predatory Bank uh like goes and purchases a uh like a client team like outright or something like that like when you're just thinking broad Strokes like what are the types of funding that you really want to Foster encourage and what are the types of funding that um we need to just make sure stay within a guard rail that doesn't you know like taint the whole thing that we're doing yeah so I guess I should have started with a disclaimer of like I am a protocol guild member and an employee of ethereum foundation however none of this is representative of you know these organizations or the other people that

work for them were with them um so my opinions are are my opinions and maybe mine alone um um one thing I forgot to mention is um so you're asking about um the the spectrum of funding and sort of the characteristics or qualities that they bring along with them one that I forgot to mention which is interesting is uh the client incentive program that the ethereum foundation runs so it's sort of like a grant I don't know if you're familiar with it or you're part of it but basically the EF will give um a chunk of uh ether to um

these client entities that are producing the software that the client actually produces uh they will give them ether to run the client that they're producing and then in that way uh then they receive the rewards from it and the access to those keys unlocks over time so it's a really interesting way to one you can it's an incentive to create good software that doesn't have bugs and then you can also do like a long-term incentive alignment because it's not a full unlock they have to I think it's over two years or or something and it's a significant amount of money I don't recall off the top of my head and it might be different for each team but

it's not you know it's not 50k it's it's the other end of the Spectrum in order of magnitude the other way so this is a great way for client teams to get exposure to to their work and uh also be funded by the the product of their efforts um so in terms of in it so in an Ideal World I think um you know it'd be it'd be great if we had individual donors who were just altruistic and really appreciated the work of client teams and they were able to sustain themselves through this you know Grassroots bottom up small scale donors however that's not

the case get coin like I said I mentioned earlier is it's a nice bonus but it's not sustaining these uh the end the entities that are producing the the client software uh just because it's it's really hard to do this at scale the like the the amount of individuals you'd have to motivate and help help understand the why it's important to have so many clients um becomes challenging after a while and one of one of my criticisms of Bitcoin and rpgf and in maybe in a little different ways is that it's sort of um it pits these groups against each other because it uh it constrains

everything to a two-week window and so you're forced to compete for everyone's time and every dollar is basically something that you are uh pulling from someone else's Grant so it becomes this this sort of attention game and um yeah it requires a lot of uh effort on the on the part of these client teams and the people who would probably rather be just developing the software than doing this sort of quarterly quarterly raise every time um and so yeah like I said ideally it'd be it'd be all Grassroots that's not probably not going to happen and so we see things like get coin emerge as sort

of an intermediary that can coordinate these these funding rounds and the same thing with optimism's rpgf like it's this larger entity with a pool of capital that they can help to um coordinate they don't do it on a quarterly bit maybe it's like uh every six months at this point but you know they're doing it semi-regularly and this is sort of the way that we've seen um funding get get allocated in the space uh yeah so bottom up is great and then we have these sort of intermediary entities that help to structure some funding rounds you can also think of the ethereum foundation as a an intermediate entity that directs funding to these different

organizations and one of your questions or one part of your question was like What are some uh ways that wouldn't be great um so yeah like you said um a large multinational coming in with millions of dollars and purchasing an existing client team that would be not great um just because there's this there's this political and social network of relationships and Norms that have been built up over the past almost 10 years at this point and if you all of a sudden uh have the company or the the labor of the employees is purchased and it's pulled out of that uh or not really

pulled out it's being um housed within another commercial entity it you know it in the in the near term it might not change things but in the long term it does change the assumptions of how these individuals might be interacting with um the consensus uh how these individuals recommended consensus what they think is important to include in the protocol specific features what priorities are how to scale things like that so I think that's definitely like the far end of the the bad the quote unquote bad Spectrum in terms of funding these entities um

and then sort maybe more towards the middle we have things like arbitrum or sorry off-chain Labs purchasing prism I don't think it's uh immediately clear what this sort of what this is and uh it's sort of funny like when it happened last fall it's um I haven't heard a ton of people talking about like the the deeper implications um and maybe now we're almost a year on from that maybe some people will talk about it again but um generally like another disclaimer I love the people at prism I really enjoy talking to the off chain Labs teams um they're all really great people and I don't think they would ever do anything

intentionally to subvert uh the ethereum protocol governance or core development anything like that um however as is just the reality that now they're encumbered or contained within a larger organization a larger commercial organization that over time uh May it's always possible that you know the founding team or the the core cultural values of something that that existed in the past these things may not carry forward to the future and now that it's been acquired you have these individuals which are diverting their attention between uh the L2 and the L1 work and there may be some unexpected

uh externalities or Dynamics which emerge which we're not really aware of yet or it's really hard to anticipate these things long term yeah and like I think both of us very much agree that it's like this is not Doom and Gloom like it's totally like realistic to think that this is only a net positive for the industry and like a great example would be just like go look at Google and how much like the amount of head count and resources they put towards just like full-on open source projects and you know we think about like Google is this like search and like maybe email entity but you know I I have a lot of friends that work there and like some of them are like directors of

like 30 person team that like solely all they do is like contribute to the react framework or or something to that effect and so you know there there's totally a world where private companies like really like really understand the vision and like are able to contribute back to it because they know that like the more credibly neutral that ethereum is the more valuable that their products are and so it's not all doom and gloom and it just does um introduce new risk yeah one one thing uh one thing I will maybe I'll take like just a step closer to Doom than you um because yes totally there there are ways that private companies can like contribute in a pro-social way to open

source software and uh I mean I've been studying Linux for the past few months and I gave a talk at protocolberg specifically about the parallels between Linux and ethereum and how these ecosystems have developed and what we can learn from the Linux ecosystem given it has uh in a 25-year Head Start and one of the things you see is yes there are these private companies these corporate entities so red hat for is a great example of a company that's built it's it's my model its business model around exclusively working on open source software but what you see over time is like we touched on at the beginning these are digital Goods you can't you can't enclose them in the same way you couldn't close like a field that

you're sharing with other Farmers you can't kick them off but what you can do is sort of claim uh enclose influence manipulate the relationships of the employees that you pay and um so we've started if you're if anybody listening is familiar or not with with Linux it's very much um supported by and or funded and um and supported by these commercial entities that are really really deeply intertwined with the production process or the this the production of the software itself

um and so like yes they can't enclose the digital software what they can do is insert themselves into the social and political Frameworks that are used to produce this software and um that does have potential if we're thinking about potential for capture or potential for negative influence like that's where it's going to happen is by these individuals who are you know they have one foot in the commercial entity which may have many many other like Google massive company it it it it is primarily concerned with profit or at least not losing money um and then these open source projects

or software it's a it's a it's a very very small side effect it's a small side concern and so you have employees which are have a foot in this this profit uh seeking entity and also these open source projects and at the end of the day their allegiance is going to be towards the profit seeking entity because that's what that's what pays them and then otherwise you know maybe they can leave um so I do think it's important to also like just be very clear-eyed about it like yes commercial entities private entities they're going to come and like basically what we have now is is uh you know this is basically um

it's today's I think it's very uncomplicated um as kind of absurd as that may sound like ethereum development in the production process is relatively uncomplicated relative to where I think it will be in a few years I think there will be dozens of ethereum clients and some of them will be maintained by Coca-Cola or whatever there's going to be it's going to get broader and broader and more people will want to have a say in the political and social production of the software and so I think it's really important to one prepare for this future and you know like you like you you touched on maybe I'm just like rehashing the same bits

but um yeah they can produce great software they can be great people but it's important to really really keep this in mind that at the end of the day um they may have different objectives than just producing the core ethereum Network for sure for sure I mean point taken and yeah I mean it's it's like very naive to look at like Google and say like they're really here contributing to open source when that's like essentially their like corporate green washing for people like me right yeah so so I think like I love how much you're just talking about open source and ethereum like Linux and ethereum all these things because like to me what what is incredible about ethereum and

like why I'm not Financial advice but like why I'm willing to like put a significant portion of my net worth into that asset is because and again not Financial advice is um because like I very much believe that like for the first time ever we have the ability to have like Financial exposure directly to open source like not specific pieces of Open Source software but like open source as a concept like that's kind of what I see ethereum as like the final manifestation of Open Source and this thing that we can all contribute to and unlike Google where you contribute to it and then the profit gets sucked into the entity what ethereum does is like

through eip1559 and all these like interesting mechanism like spits it right back out to etholders and so I think like what we have here is incredibly cool and like a full-on like step change from what open source was before and so one of the opportunities we have here that that um open source generically doesn't have is uh like protocol enshrine funding right and um I would love for you to talk like maybe using you know alt l1's like Kanto or as an example or maybe just like talking hypothetically about a world where let's say like point five percent of each staking profits go into

something like the protocol Guild or some sort of pool that gets distributed like can you little maybe first reflect on if you think that um that's a good idea and if so yes why yes or no and then two like do you think that if it's a good idea or not is it realistically possible for something like ethereum to add that in after we've like you know done a lot of our development even though there's still a lot to go wow yeah I feel like we could this could be like three or four questions even about like the the trade-offs of having financializations embedded within the the core DNA of what the the software is um and yeah like going back to Linux and

some of these some of these other projects and how they developed early on um but yeah so the reality is we're here today with a substrate that has a native token it has these certain capabilities that are baked right into it and yeah the each token is used in consensus it um I guess in some sense yeah gives you exposure to the software or like this Collective belief in this alternative vision for digital infrastructure um globally accessible so in some sense it is um it is when you when you're if you purchase book eth you probably believe in the capabilities uh of this the

people making the software and their um like the stated aims of the people who are thinking ahead to the Future um and I guess yeah one of the things that we completely glossed over is like the history of of public goods funding and you mentioned one of them is like uh a percent of the block reward like this is used by um some other chains I don't I don't have like a list off the top of my head but I think the majority of proof-of-stake chains today and a lot of the proof of work chains today have some um block like percent of the the reward of the Native currency produced each block that goes to a shared treasury that is then managed by a bunch of

different there's a bunch of different governance processes there's foundations some of them have um on-chain governance where you use the native token to vote on allocations uh or or like smaller grants around things like that ethereum does not have this and never did and um maybe I'm forced to argue this because uh I'm I'm yoked to ethereum but I think this is I think this is really great in hindsight and a lot of people would probably agree um because it when you don't have a native block reward you remove a lot of contention around what's going on with that so there's one this native funding mechanism

it's really hard to allocate funding properly uh because it needs to be managed when something needs to be managed there's political there's a political process around it and this is even assuming like a foundation is is managing it uh once you get into things like Unchained governance it becomes a hundred times more complex because you have so many more voices to incorporate into your consensus process so I think ethereum saved itself a lot of Heartache by not doing these two things um again maybe I'm just this is just cope and in reality like these these two systems are great and we just don't have them and I'm lying to myself but um yeah ethereum doesn't have a native block reward and so we rely on these

altruistic mechanisms uh to kind of prove which one is going to be the best and the answer is probably a mix of all of them and one of the the things you mentioned was uh these sort of in protocol rewards and they take they take a couple different forms you mentioned Kanto is looking into this but near and Phantom also have some other version where this is more focused on in my understanding this is more focused on the application layer where you can it's much easier to monetize uh the way that they they've set up these protocols is that uh they take some measure of the transaction fees which go through a contract and then the some percent of

that goes to the deployer of the contract so yeah like I said near has a version of this Phantom has a version of this there might be others I know Kanto is looking into it and maybe even PGN which is this public goods chain that git coin is affiliated with so a lot of people are interested in this but typically it flows to the application developer not necessarily the core protocol so that would have to be again relying for ethereum it's relying on this these altruistic incentives of people who you know I really love the the client that I'm using I'm going to donate directly to these individuals that that produce the software that allow me to receive an income by participating in validation

things like that but um yeah I'm curious what you like do you think there's a world where ethereum ever adds a block reward percent I I mean I think there's the I is there a world wherever happens I think no like just I think like we're too ossified like but the goal for ethereum is for us to finish the development and for it to ossify and we're obviously not there yet but I do think that some of our core principles are and like one of those core principles are like don't put a giant pot of money at um like the base the base layer and like for the reasons that you're saying like that that makes

a lot of sense to me right like we shouldn't basically put like a giant giant pot of like of like literal cash that says hey if you capture this protocol not only like do you get to control it but there's a literal prize right yes not only do you you don't you not only get the the social and political access but you literally get paid to capture it yeah yeah yeah and and so like not so so I very much understand that but part of me is also like look like okay let's let's take that as a given and let's remove enshrine protocol but you know funding and then just like talk about the world we have now and like it's totally

awesome that somehow like we convinced enough people with like vested interest that like whether it's like you know vitalik himself to like people who have become like incredibly wealthy from this casino like Tetra note to like anyone in between like we've just basically like convinced them that they need to fund this and we're essentially like hoping the that lot lasts long enough that I mean essentially that like the eat price is so large that all these problems just kind of solve themselves right and so it it does seem to be working so far and like I'm really excited about that but to me this is like feels a little bit just like the entire history of crypto

like hoping that it's gonna work out without like a real understanding of like why we have corporations in big business and and like why the the world is the way the world is you know like Google isn't Like Larry and Sergey just aren't like uniquely evil greedy men like they are a product of this world and so um you know there's just something like a little bit uncomfortable for me for being like with ethereum we're gonna run things different because like it's it's not arbitrary the way things are for sure yeah and uh maybe we'll get into this in a little bit but like one of the main reasons why I'm happy that we don't have this in protocol funding

is that there was no uh suitable mechanism to receive and distribute that so yes it could go to the ethereum foundation and then the ethereum foundation Parcels this block reward out uh it could go to a new mechanism um yeah there's there's a number of concerns around like just what actually happens with this sure it's one thing to think about yeah we should have this pot of money but the whole governance process is not trivial to think about like the ways in which it could get abused and effective governance how does it get turned off things like this um and no surprise yeah I think that protocol Guild is the mechanism that's

closest to this so far I don't think it's near it today but it's in my opinion it's the closest we've gotten to having a um some sort of mechanism that could accept this type of funding in the future yeah so I guess we've already been going for 55 minutes here so with our last uh few minutes let's let's just get to what we're supposed to talk about 50 minutes ago which is what is protocol Guild and um since we're running out of time here can you tell us like first what it is and second of all like what you guys like need today in order to like continue the mission and like what is support and contribution look like today sure I'll give the the lightning quick pitch

um so protocol Guild is a collective of core ethereum contributors started in 2021 you know there's this recurring conversation just like we've been having about how is the core protocol funded um where does the funding come from who does it go to how does it manage things like this this has been a part of ethereum's history and every couple years it bubbles back up and in 2021 this this conversation came back up again in one of the outputs from it was Danny Ryan suggesting okay let's just make a dial with a list an Unchained list and convince all these unchain entities or Dows that have a token to contribute one percent of their token that way you know there's this sustainable uh Revenue stream from projects that are successful to ethereum

they if they're successful long term then the membership has exposure to the broader Network and we get this vested funding which can go can be spread out over time so this is the initial idea in 2021 October uh 2021 and then sort of I worked with a number of core contributors to refine the idea and we launched it in May 2022 uh for a one year what's that not a great time to launch anything oh yeah yeah I mean yeah we couldn't we can't really be choosy with our timings here but we launched right in um right around yeah the Terra collapse I think was right around then

um and yeah so launch this uh got enough core contributors on board and said look we don't have any funding but here's an idea we're just going to publish this registry on chain with a vesting contract attached to it um and we'll see what happens so we ended up raising around 13 million some of it solicited some of it not solicited and this vests for one year directly to today we have 152 core contributors so this is people who are working on client teams as expected but also the researchers who are thinking about things like eip4844 uh dank sharding in the future ways to make the protocol

more censorship resistant secure things like this then we have people like myself and Tim who focus on coordination for Network upgrades engaging the community talking figuring out what the schedule is going to be making sure uh the people who anyone who's impacted is actually participating in the the governance process and then people are even more outside of the behind the scenes like people doing devops for test Nets or people who are helping to test these Network upgrades so it's a pretty wide array of people that and a lot of them uh I I during presentations I usually like to do like raise your hand how many core devs can you name and you know people will do like three or four but there's there's

quite a few that you don't have awareness of so what protocol Guild does is it surfaces that uh that social and political uh set of of people into a single registry we update it quarterly and it allows both this Grassroots contribution so anybody can send to the contract and uh also significantly protocols can can support it so we had many large organizations and that's what made up the folk of the the 13 million including the most recent one from the arbitrum community uh included protocol Guild in the airdrop so uh that that pilot lasted a year and now we are taking everything we learned writing it

up implementing it in the organization and then we hope to launch the next version of the contracts within the next few months um hopefully but that's that's the basic pitch of what protocol Guild is it allows it it produces this crystallization of social and political relationships that actually produce ethereum today and uh in the in the future because it's we make a commitment to update this set every quarter and so funders know that their their assets or whatever value they're altruistically giving they know for sure it's going to go to the individuals that are actually creating the software so would you say like this secret sauce or or like the thing that you guys are doing different is focusing like everyone raises money

in the same way but like what you guys are doing different is focusing instead of on like specific um pieces of infrastructure or pieces of software or like project objects you're focusing on the individual Builders who are contributing to these projects and like really trying to foster a community of people that know if you're contributing to ethereum you're going to be supported even if you're part of an entity that like isn't really about you know Gathering their resources to support you directly right it's Pro it's about providing an alternative mechanism so that maybe in the future when the the level of funding going through it is large enough people they don't they're not forced to be employed by a client team again these are these are my

um radical opinions and probably not all members share this belief but that's what I'm working towards is to provide a credible alternative to people having to work on these commercial client entities they will continue to be engaged in the core protocol process uh that's fine and I don't expect that to change long term but at least I hope that we can provide a credible mechanism for people to actually do this long term so in some sense it's both larger the the protocol Guild is different in that it it zooms out and also Zooms in different relative to other funding mechanisms so a lot of them

atomize the core protocol into specific projects like you mentioned was it client teams some software repo but in reality we know that ethereum as a as a a body of software and also a network it's not produced by any single client right if they were a single client it wouldn't be the distributed system today that has you know credible neutrality fault tolerance uh it would be centralized around this single team that's working on it um so we have these many different contributors many different projects that constitute the ethereum political social technical process of constructing the protocol and so what protocol Guild

does is that it recognizes that it's all of these individuals that are contributing to the whole the broader Collective project it's not these uh isolated individuals and so um it recognizes it at a higher level that there are um there's this Collective good being produced at a large scale but and at the the more micro scale it's produced by individuals not necessarily the companies that are employing them so it's a labor of individuals that go into maintaining these relationships that go into the production process that is then uh useful in producing this this Global Collective good

um so that's that's one way in which it protocol Guild is unique uh in that it tries to address the holistic development process of you know many hundreds of people many different interests but at the end of the day it's um produced by individuals towards a a large Collective output yeah man I love that and I think that like that beautifully ties together what we were saying earlier about how um what what ethereum is is this if not the final this next manifestation of Open Source and like look like we don't need to figure out how to like get Capital to like form into entities to chase more Capital right like

we figure that out in like whatever 1600 and we've been doing it well since like what what we do need to figure out and like what is special about ethereum is it's always about like breaking power down and breaking Authority down from these like huge entities into individuals and I just love that like protocol Guild is doing that kind of with the approach to public goods fundings because look it's like super incredibly easy for any one of us to say somebody needs to fund the clients and then to develop like institutions or pots of money or whatever that are essentially like let me pay for more clients right but I I love just to to like take a step back and say like it's not really about clients it's not really

even about infrastructure it's about making sure that the people that are contributing are able to maintain the like the ethos that we care about as opposed to like the the ethos that like we are building towards right which is like it isn't going to be amazing when you know the Global Financial system runs on ethereum but like the flip side of that is like the the world is going to look more like ethereum and ethereum is going to look more like the world and like it's really important for you guys to be a counteracting force in that so again we've been going on too long already we should have got to the protocol a long time before this but um with our last couple of minutes like obviously always uh like protocol Guild

can when appreciate more donations and like direct contributions but for those of us who um maybe can't contribute or want to look to like contribute more than just you know dollars or ether tokens like what are the types of things that like you guys could really use right now as you're like entering into this you know second year or second phase or um how can we help yeah in much the same way that you and I got started it's just like showing up and engaging with things that you find interesting so we always appreciate people looking through our docs even simple stuff like that like read through it tell us what doesn't make sense what's unclear what could be structured better

um because if we're not capable of writing out how the project should exist or properly describing it that probably means like we don't have a good conception of what this thing is either so we'd love to have more people review the docs and then externally we'd also love more projects to um obviously one day we'll hopefully in the near future we'll start fundraising up again and that'll be a great way for large projects and individuals to just connect us with organizations or individuals that you think are good funding candidates we we're happy to talk to anyone and everyone about you know the guarantees of the mechanism how we curate over time um how we Define the core protocol

things like this so if there are even even just like helping spread awareness like at the in the most basic form tweeting about it sharing it with people when they're asking about what what public goods mechanisms are out there what can I help fund through um sharing protocol Guild is huge because again it's you know we've been here for doing this for two years now and I've been Amazed by the the reception from people but still uh still relatively unknown so any sort of awareness can help so yeah check out the docs tell us where things don't make sense and then help us reach more people just by um sharing it around we'll be engaging in the next rpgf round for optimism so if

you're a badge holder or just like part of that Community uh keep an eye out for our application and hopefully our pitch as to why we should receive more funding from op yeah for sure and just to hammer that home and build on it right like what like the this is all Grassroots right and I think that if you're looking to support the protocol Guild Mission but you know in a way that's within your own Community like one like look for people that like are are good um recipients of grants that are like building core or public goods but like perhaps more importantly if you're really involved in your Dow or in a community like maybe you should be making a pitch to why that Community

should be contributing to protocol Guild right and maybe think about like you walked up to ethereum and built something on here because it existed and that's amazing but like it didn't just get it didn't just exist it was not put here by God it was like created by the Blood Sweat and Tears of people that you know still need to be working on it and so um you know if you've ever achieved anything on ethereum like it's important to think about how to make sure the next guy has that opportunity and by the way how to make sure that the chains still exists for your success to continue in the future so um you know if you're in this space you're part of a community and if you're part of a community that means you either know someone who's building core

public goods or you know someone who has benefited from them and so either way like this right here if you believe in ethereum um whether it's through protocol Guild or through git coin or any public goods like this is really like what is special about the space and like what we need to protect so try it man thank you so much thank you for um just your time and like everything that you're doing and like for really helping us like understand like how this is gonna work and how we can like really focus on like the things and and the people that like need support in order to continue like I love the world computer metaphor I will live or die on

that like continue to boot up the world computer so try and thank you so much um before I let you go can you let the audience know where to find you where to find protocol Guild like how to stay uh up to date for sure yeah first thanks for having me um I don't do too many podcasts but I always appreciate when there's just free-flowing conversation and it's not just like a list of questions for so great job on that thank you um yeah so on Twitter it's Trent underscore van apps not as active there but also uh forecaster um at Trent also not Super Active there but you can if you want to come engage with me where I might be super active is come ask me questions about protocol Guild that uh we have a Discord you

could find it on the the protocol Guild Twitter uh which is just the name of the project at protocol Guild um yeah thank you again I appreciate it of course yeah man and I think we'll all become more active once we figure out what social network we're supposed to be on but yeah at this point I'm not really sure where I'm supposed to grow my following so for now it's all of them yeah yeah every single one yeah yeah uh this is the the cost of decentralization right yeah for sure all right man Trent thank you so much and uh let's stay in touch I hope to talk to you soon likewise thank you thank you