Protocol Guild: 1 Year In with Tim Beiko and Cheeky Gorilla

Transcript

foreign [Music] ation how's it going on the Pod today we are talking about protocol Guild one year in with Team Tim Baco and cheeky gorilla so uh if you listen to green pill since the start which you should uh green pill episode 10 was with Trent Van Epps and we talked about the protocol Guild and this is our follow-up episode A year later to talk about how it's going the protocol Guild is a guild of protocol developers in the web3 ecosystem that receives token rewards from different things built on the web3 ecosystem so basically it's a way of allocating rewards to protocol

developers that are working on the ethereum layer one and the protocol that is uh the consensus and execution layer within the ethereum ecosystem and so basically the idea is to align incentives so that protocol developers can work on the public good that is the ethereum network and the ethereum protocol and to align incentives so that people can can work on that and on the Pod we have uh Tim becko who is leading all core devs and is I'm sorry uh organizing all core devs that is a member of the protocol Guild and we have cheeky gorilla who is an Anon that is a protocol Guild contributor on this talk we talk about protocol Guild we talk

about the design of the Wanda protocol Guild we talk about the V2 that's going live very soon we talk about the one-year pilot updates they've raised 10 million dollars is the headline and have hundreds of contributors on there and we talk about how you Anon can get involved in protocol Guild in funding the ethereum public good that is the protocol development in the network so a really great episode of a project for funding public goods that has reached scale and protocol Guild is just super cool so uh coordination if you care about funding public goods this episode is for you without further Ado I give you Tim baiko and cheeky gorilla enjoy hair Dow is here to Route Around the middleman in biomedical research for

hair loss hairdow is an open source investment and operating organization using the coordination tools of ethereum to begin exploring the frontier of biomedical research that bureaucracy and Middleman have previously prevented did you know that 66 percent of men and 50 of women will experience hair loss in their lifetimes hair Dow has already done some crazy cool science stuff like their first research study on the impact of synthetic T3 and T4 thyroid hormones on the human scalp and is also the second doubt ever to Mint an IP nft so if you want to explore the frontier of the decentralized science movement and maybe also You've Lost Your Hair along the way check out hairdow at hairdow.xyz what's up gentlemen thanks for joining me thank you for having us happy to be here

excited to talk about protocol Guild so we did an episode episode 10 of the green pill podcast about a year ago about protocol Guild uh we'll have a link to that one in the show notes but I'm wondering if cheeky gorilla if you could kick us off by answering the question what is protocol guilds yeah I mean I guess uh at the the highest possible level it's essentially a public goods funding mechanism that's uh you know specifically designed to support ethereum's core protocol work um that's an important thing because today I guess most of the funding comes from just a handful of sources and the financial incentives are not quite up to what we think these individuals uh could get elsewhere or necessarily deserve and um so that's why the protocol Guild

essential was created to serve as a funding mechanism right that can be used by ethereum's Community by its ecosystem um to fund core protocol work and uh you know really create strong incentives to retain these contributors over the long term as well Tim anything to add there yeah I think that's 10 cents cool so as I understand it it sort of uh solves the incentive alignment issue where if you're a protocol developer working on the ethereum protocol um you could probably make like double or triple the money by starting it all layer one or going to work for nl2 or something so it kind of creates a financial incentive pool to keep people working on on protocols is is that a

fair take yeah and I think maybe this is your numbers might be off by an order of magnitude right so I think what you see in practice is you know you might be able to make 20 30X uh salary if you want to start your your own L1 um and the way I think about it is like uh risk adjusted reward right like obviously if you go and you start a company from scratch that's you know a riskier thing to do then uh you know working on the client team as an engineer um but even given that like amount of risk for example say you went to work on like an L2 but like maybe you potentially have you know twice the risk give or take but like 5 10x a potential upside and so this this kind of curve of like incentives is very skewed

um and you know in the long run if everybody sort of migrates from protocol work to other things that are just like you know a better payoff for them in like expected value um then there's no one who maintains the protocol and this is bad it's bad for ethereum obviously but it's also bad for all these projects that are built on ethereum because it's like their most critical dependency like the thing from which they get security and you know liquidity and all of that um stop stops being maintained yeah yeah I think that ad there is that you know you know we can't blame these people for being tempted by those kind of financial incentives right I mean at the end of the day you know people are allowed to be you know rational they're allowed to support for their family and that kind of stuff and so I guess the

protocol Guild is all about uh basically you know creating a way to realign those financial incentives in a way that does support the core protocol yeah one of the the values or the sort of the themes that we that we explore a lot in this podcast is how can we align our values with our with our monetary incentives so like what I'm hearing here is that we all love uh ethereum the network state that is ethereum um and it's public good depends on the security of the network which depends on validators of course but the people who are building the protocol um of which by the way there's multiple consensus layer and execution layer teams so there's many people working on the protocol um could wake me make way more money if they defect and they go work it in all

layer one or something that's a little bit more privatized um and so this is like aligning the incentives so that people can pay their mortgage send their kids through school but still work on the protocol um it starts aligning the values of these people with the money and that might be a broad over sweeping statement because not everyone has the same values but I think that one of the parts of the ethereum culture is the public good the security of uh of the ethereum network so is that a fair take yeah I think so and I think uh you know you mentioned validators in passing like when we designed you know the reward schemes for validators um even though there can be altruistic validators you don't want their the security of the network to depend on

that assumption right like the validators are going to do it altruistically um and I think that you know you use well with the maintainers like you know today I'd say most maintainers of ethereum like have a very large altruistic component in the work that they do um which is which is great but it's also not something from like a mechanism design point of view that you want to like lean on to heavily right if it gets you you know your last 10 of like coordination or something like that that's great if like the entire thing is relying on on people's Goodwill um then it's easy to see many cases in which that would break down and especially in the long term as you know the community grows and um yeah things just kind of uh dilute a bit more

right right well um I'd love to talk about the design of protocol Guild I think we uh touched on it a little bit with in the episode with Trent a year ago but uh could we could we uh revisit the design criteria behind the mechanism and what are the most unique and exciting parts of the protocol Guild design that that you want to call out uh maybe I'll start with you Tim yeah maybe we're actually in the process of like changing your entire architecture and cheeky has been like leading that so I can kind of talk you through how it is today and you know sort of the pros and cons of that approach and then cheeky can kind of walk you through what we're calling the protocol Gail 2.0 um yeah so high level

um you can think of protocol Guild as like a router for funds so there's effectively two major contracts the first is a vesting contract uh from Xerox splits um and this is just a vanilla vesting contract which has uh in our case effectively zero governance parameters once it's deployed so our current investing contract is is a one-year duration the next one will be four years but when people send funds to that there's no way that they can be sort of clawed back either by the sender or by protocol Guild itself right there's no like governance where we could just you know take all the funds make them invest quicker anything like that um and you can send any erc20 token or ease doesn't take nfts for now um once those funds have vested they go

to a split contract the idea of what a split contract is that everyone on the contract has the right to a share of like the Assets in the contract um and this is really the main you can think of products that protocol Guild does is we as a collective curate the list of who should be on that split contract and what weights they should have um and so right now there's I believe 128 people on the split and these are people from like you mentioned you know these 10 different client teams some research teams some devops teams a couple random coordination people like me or Trent um and so you know protocol Guild basically is us coming to consensus on like Norms to add and remove people from

this list um and it's nothing you know it's not rocket science effectively people have to work on ethereum L1 um they have to have done so for like you know at least six months so we can know that they're actually you know like gonna stick around and don't just update the list for nothing um and then you know they're nominated by their peers and as long as there's no strong objections uh they typically get added and one kind of noteworthy uh thing with this as well is that protocol Guild is a mechanism designed around like the people so all of the people on the split are there independently of their affiliation like obviously there's people from the EF there's people from consensus there's people from prison from Lighthouse um but the funds go directly to the individual so imagine you know there's like 20 people working at nethermine but

only 10 of them are working on like East L1 those tens would be would be eligible not the others and similarly if those 10 you know quit their job at nevermind and kept working on their protocol they'd still be part of protocol game um so this is like another really powerful thing where you know the funds literally go to the people um and so yeah tldr investing contract sends it to a split split is curated by The Guild itself and that's kind of the entire product and one way I'd like to think about it is you can think of it as like an API to donate the public goods so we've seen a lot of like projects want to like reward you know when they do air drops and stuff like that how do we reward you know core dabs maintainers of ethereum and whatnot some of them

have come up like really complicated schemes you know we're going to analyze all the repos count the commits and whatnot um protocol Guild is literally just like an eighth address you plug it in you can send some money there and have like confidence that um confidence that you know it Not only would it be an accurate view today but like when it finishes investing in four years um The Guild will still be kind of maintaining that membership um yeah so high level this is how it works today um maybe cheeky you can walk us through like what are some of the issues with that and like what are we trying to do next yeah exactly yeah oh I was gonna say you know Tim I wonder if this is too reductionist of a take but it almost reminds me of like a four-year option Grant from when I used

to work in startups like I vest out every month go ahead yeah yeah this is literally I think the same like the sort of mental model I have for this in like the long run is imagine you get like a four-year option Grant but it's like an S P 500 tracker for like all the projects built on ethereum right where you know these people obviously are not going to work for Bitcoin or optimism or whatnot but you can imagine like if each of those projects you know contributed to protocol Guild then you know you're sort of offering this like basket of tokens that are built on ethereum and you provide like upside in the ecosystem that all the people building like the core layer um yeah so yeah that's effectively the similar model yeah

okay cool um uh cheeky go ahead I think you're about to say something yeah exactly so essentially you know uh what Tim just described there that was all part of our our one-year pilot right and I think overall the consensus is that we are very happy with our pilot right we think it was a success um obviously you know given the volume of donations we received about like 10 million dollars in funding which is worth like 14 million dollars a day um from all sorts of different ecosystem tokens I think only like maybe maybe 20 or 25 of it was actually how many is that per contributor it's like a little bit over 100K per contributor if I'm not if I'm doing the math correctly uh so the amount that's actually being distributed so far is like nine and a half million and so it's around about

65k right now or maybe 70k right now and I mean yeah depending on where you live that's either a year's salary or it's a good bonus um and you know for for the pilot again it was kind of limited in scope but what we're seeing now is that we were happy with the results we want to expand this mechanism and uh you know one of the most important things to do there is obviously scale fundraising um but to scale fundraising we will need um some changes to our smart contract architecture right because uh you know some of the mechanisms that Tim described um were mainly handled by a multi-six and so you know we need to get rid of all those uh those multi-sig dependencies we need to make sure everything's as trustless as possible and so you know we're essentially uh taking the

stack that we had before um we're taking the existing contracts um made by the the team at zero X splits those those vesting and distribution uh contracts uh and we're pairing them with kind of three other modules right so uh as I said the first module will be the uh to handle all the finances it's going to be the vesting and distribution of vested funds that's still via these Xerox Blitz contracts um the new component is we're going to implement a Malik V3 Dao um shout out to Deacon and the Dow House crew for helping us with this um obviously the Dow will be for governance decisions you know things related to membership changes and then the final module is this on-chain registry right this this list of members

um and that's you know it's not actually part of the Dao it will sit as kind of like in between it'll set as kind of middleware between the Dow and these vesting contracts and so very high level the way it will work um as you would expect from a dow will contain all of the protocol guilds members one person one vote a member will create a proposal to change the membership uh that will go for an on-chain vote um once that passes it's executed it will basically trigger a function to update this on-chain membership registry once that's done then we will essentially be able to trigger a different function that can essentially feed that membership registry into the the vesting contracts such that the recipients are updated so that the the

vested funds go to the the current active membership and not not the old one right um and so with those three components we basically think will be in a really good spot to essentially get rid of all the multi-cigs um we'll be in a place to basically have this on-chain governance mechanism um we touched a little bit on like the uh the waiting mechanic that will all be on chain so there will be some gas costs with that but we're still trying to trying to iron those out um and then the last part of the mechanism or the the V2 mechanism which we're still trying to figure out um but haven't you know finished analyzing all the trade-offs yet is uh how to handle Layer Two donations um again today this is being handled via multi-sig and so the question that we've kind of been grappling with so far is do

we aim to consolidate all donations from the layer twos onto mainnet right there's some issues there with liquidity of layer two specific tokens um and the alternative would be that we essentially you know deploy our vesting contracts on all the various Layer Two and evm chains um and essentially let those donations live on those chains right and so yeah if anyone's listening to this that has any ideas please reach out to us we're uh we're we're open to suggestions but yeah I think with those with those different components that I just mentioned um we'll have a really robust smart contract architecture um which will I guess give us confidence in basically extending the vesting period from one year to four years and then uh you know hitting that Target as

Tim said of raising 100 million dollars over those four years nice I didn't even know about the million dollar or 100 million dollar Target um that'd be pretty simple yeah and I think on that note like so the pilot you know we mentioned earlier was like uh 10 million um one thing I think is important is we want to scale this thing like sort of gradually in a way because figuring out the Norms about you know who is eligible who isn't like what's like you know the what's the right you know where the line is and and what are like all the weird edge cases that work through um you want to do that with like

increasingly high stakes so the pilot was kind of great because it forced us to Think Through you know things like should somebody who's like on a team that also has a token be part of protocol Guild uh should somebody who's like working on a devops part be it protocol Guild right they're not writing codes for the clients but they run the notes and then you know where do you extend that you know if like the engineer is like in protocol Guild and like the devops person should like the recruiter who hired both of them be in protocol Guild and I think like it's good to have those conversations when the stakes are real but not like insanely High um or another example like I was concerned about before the pilots like well people leave protocol Guild right like they're getting free money for this is there like an incentive to like

pretend that you're still working on ethereum and we've actually seen like a bunch of people leave over the past year so like that's that's quite healthy right that when people you know actually quit their job they like have signals like they wanted to be removed for protocol Guild um and so yeah so I think you know like 10 million over a year if you raise you know 100-ish admitted over four years it's about two and a half times the like yearly amount um so it's like it kind of raises the stakes um and allows us to you know deal with whatever issues will come up you know in terms of like internal governance at that scale and like once we've resolved in the line on those then like you could you can sort of keep scaling this way um and I think that's like just

generally like a good approach like I mean Bitcoin you've all done this with like all the the the rounds right where like you have to deal with different civil attacks every round and like you know you learn a little bit like what went wrong and then you can kind of raise the stakes next time you see this with rpgf as well um so I think yeah I'm a big believer that like you you want to like incrementally get this thing bigger and like have precedent and just like accumulated knowledge um yeah before the stakes are too high yeah iteration is a good solution in general to complex systems I think is the way I would summarize that yeah so um any other updates on the one year pilot uh any anything that you think was

the success or a learning coming up kind of coming out of that um a couple for me just like off the top of my head cheeky wrote a full report so he has like this all the the the details but like um one like yeah the fact that people voluntarily left is like kind of you know good to me that like people like value the mechanism being healthy more than like you know keeping their share of the pie and one thing that's also come up there's like the main thing is like it's come up in like more than a handful of times that people have like reconsidered their career choices based on like current and potential future protocol yield Revenue um and obviously they want to like get

into people's private like situations but like I've seen both people like choose not to move from like ethyl one because of protocol Guild I've seen people wanting to come work on anything one like interviewing people and they're like you know oh if I if I get this job will I be part of protocol guild at some point um and it's sort of like proactively learned about that um and like yeah and I think you've seen also like people who've like moved on to separate roles in the ecosystem kind of like think through you know is it fair is it fair for them to still be there or should they like you know leave the spot that the other people um and not that there's a limited number of spots but obviously it's like a fixed you know fixed sum of money

um so to me like that's that's like basically the main goals we wanted to achieve is like can we retain people can we attract people and can we like gracefully off-board people in a way that like you know they don't feel uh it's not like an adversarial thing you're like you know we have to like hunt the people who are no longer working on the protocol um so I'm super happy about that um yeah cheeky I don't know can you yeah I mean I'll I'll Riff on that one like specifically with the membership changes right so Kevin when when Trent was on um the podcast with you a year ago I think the membership was it just hit 100 or something like this right and I mean we had started with 90 members and today uh on chain there's 128 members off chain there's 131 members we haven't gone

through the uh updating the on-chain stuff yet um and so you know we've added over 50 members we've removed around 15 members and I think this is a very powerful indication that you know this this self-curation mechanism is is working and you know Tim touch on it before but I think really this the self-curation aspect of the protocol Guild is really worth kind of drilling down on because it's it's quite unique compared to um different you know funding mechanisms out there um and uh you know from my perspective um the only reason why the protocol Guild has legitimacy is because this list right this this membership registry is is accurate right and I feel like uh with all the changes that have gone

through during the pilots to this membership registry without you know without any drama without any scandals we can look at this list and say hey this represents the the current set of contributors quite well um and I think that's a big win for the protocol Guild um from like the Pilot's perspective that member curation uh seems to be working um it works well enough to the point where obviously we want to keep it for protocol Guild V2 um but yeah that was really good to see that there wasn't really any uh any strong disagreements uh on that point so cool to see the membership you know kind of plateau now where it is around the 130 level um and it'll be interesting to see over the next four years um how it changes I have one last thing that I think was

cool is um core devs tend to be very skeptical of what happens on ethereum like they have like a very negative perception of like stuff like defy and whatnot in general which is very funny um and so when we when we told them like we're gonna start protocol Guild there was definitely like a number of them who were just like skeptical of the whole thing um not for any particular reason but I think they just have like this this like high skepticism of like anything moving tokens on ethereum um and then I'd say like again I'm not sure of the exact number but like at least like a couple of them over the like year of the pilot you know like we asked them to join you know we asked all

all the contributors to join on day one like some of them just said no and we didn't like force them to do it but like we've seen a few people over here they're like okay like now I think I get protocol Gail that like this thing is not a scam and like it seems to make sense and you know like I like to join it um so I think that was really cool as well like just seeing people who are like initially skeptical and you know like have a very high bar for what they consider legitimate in terms of what gets built on ethereum um sort of changed their mind and end up joining so yeah that was that was neat um it's kind of building cultural interrupt between the protocols built on ethereum and the ethereum protocol developers yeah there's something

beautiful about that go ahead cheeky I think you're about to say something yeah I mean we're talking about like the pilot results right it's it's uh it would be a shame not to talk more about the funding that we've received so as I mentioned it was 10 million dollars that I had a 40 million dollars today and I mean that came from over 4 000 different donations right and so you know when I mentioned before about we've seen like buy-in from the ecosystem you know it's because of that right because of the volume of donations that we've seen um but uh I mean one thing that is worth calling out is that you know a lot of that funding actually came from five governance grants from uh Lido uniswap ens uh nouns and malikdao and so I mean they essentially helped seed this pilot in its infancy when you know we had the

the 90 uh members when uh when this was still very much highly experimental so you know a big shout out to them thank you for so much for seeing uh the pilot at that time yeah it's almost like a barbell right like we have like these projects who like obviously contributed like a lot of funds but then you also see this massive long tail of people wanting to contribute and like both of those are great like sometimes you know Trends tracks this like super closely and they'll send me there's somebody who's like doing physical like wood frames for something I forget and they were like I'll donate like one percent or ten percent of the revenue the protocol Guild and this is just like some crypto Enthusiast with like a random like business on the side and like it's wanting to donate to that and

then you know there were like uh a couple like homesteakers who like you know donated part of their earnings to protocol Guild and so it's kind of really neat to see people like at a smaller scale as well like contribute to this um and and yeah see like larger projects actually you know put a meaningful chunk of their treasury towards um towards maintaining the the protocol yeah the wooden frame thing shout out to nand nand mountains yeah they donated 20 of their revenue to the protocol build shout out for doing it a creative creative way so if I'm a listener and I'm working at a dow or a web3 project that's interested in contributing to protocol skills how do I get in touch with you hey how do I how do I build momentum

within my dowel around doing it yeah so first I'll say like what's really neat is you don't even need to get in touch with us and shout out to arbitrum right um protocol Guild it's like it's just an eth address you can send tokens to it so we arbitrary actually included us uh in their airdrop as the only non-arbitrum doubt that they like sent tokens to and they didn't ask you know they were like oh you know we'll just send the money to protocol Guild um so like Step One is like you literally don't have to reach out you can just you know go on the docks and take the address send the tokens there if you do want to uh you know Trent me and cheeky are all on Twitter there's a protocol Gail Twitter we have a Discord as well and we can put you know those

links in the show notes um we're pretty responsive um yeah just just pin yes um and then in terms of like you know the how do you sell this within a dow um I think I think if you want to take the most pragmatic point of view like imagine you're not you know aligned with like the vision of like public goods or like you know like all of that um think of it as just dependency funding like you're building your project on ethereum and it's like a critical dependency for your stack and you know would like a relatively modest contribution you can help make sure that this thing is funded um and you know bring security to your project um so I'd say this is like the most pragmatic argument

um I do think that like look if if you are trying to build something and kind of shape how we think like public goods should be funded how we think coordination should happen in the ecosystem like those are arguably more powerful reasons you know to contribute to protocol Guild um but you know even if you don't believe any of that then just from Purity pragmatic perspective like think of this as like a core dependency in your stack um that you can if you're effectively launching your token especially you know you're kind of creating money alistinaire in a way and you can like take this like you know new money that you've created and literally magically send it to like protocol contributors which is which is kind of wild when you think about it

yeah I'll have two other reasons there to to to to donate I guess if I can be so direct um you know obviously the first one is just just to kind of show that you are you know you want to Signal support of ethereum's values right because um you know the protocol Guild directly inherits those values but it's also probably worth clarifying real quick that uh you know the protocol Guild and ethereum's development roadmap are two entirely different things right the protocol Guild absolutely takes no uh responsibility for you know either the the planning or the execution of ethereum's roadmap right the protocol Guild is a fundraising mechanism for the people who are doing that work right um nevertheless we still you know support the same values of ethereum so

you know donate as a signal of that support and then the last reason I'll call out is also because I want to say this phrase if I'm if I'm on you know the green pill podcast public goods are good right and uh the work that these members are doing is a public good right and so you know show your support for public goods by a donation to The protocol Guild nice you know um just hearing you you talk about the value proposition for um for protocol Guild reminds me of this uh XKCD comic about dependencies in open source software yes if you know the comic I'm talking about yes yeah yeah it's just like everything

relying on this tiny bit that's you know underfunded uh and has two people yes yeah I mean I can't share my screen and uh swap just talk through it for the audio listeners but it's uh it's a bunch of like building blocks like imagine like kids kids blocks and then they're all kind of like tilted against each other and at the top it says all modern digital infrastructure and they're all sort of like hinged on some random person maintaining an open source Library uh so I think it's just like this classic XKCD comic showing the dependencies and the uh underfunded under maintained uh thankless work the Open Source software developers have but in web 3 it's like 10 times more

existential because it's not just the digital infrastructure that's relying on it's like your bags like all your tokens all your nfts and everything the security of everything yeah and you can I think it's even worse for another reason that when you like launch a token on ethereum you sort of contribute to like the incentive misalignment so it's almost like you're not only are you like making the pile like bigger on top of that thing but you maybe like shipping your way at the little block as well because of like you know you've like now created this new sort of you know thing they could go work on rather than the protocol um so yeah yeah basically protocol Guild helps to like hopes to make this like tiny thing maintaining the whole pile

you know relatively proportional in size to the pile so that um yeah ethereum could be like a secure base layer for projects to depend on for like a very long time right like obviously it's secure today but it's like you know there is like continued maintenance to to assure that mm-hmm yep well um I I guess I'm wondering uh if you want to talk about any of uh the specific dials or the recent funding from arbitrum and optimism um I see that in our notes as something that we wanted to cover uh so um yeah I I touched on Arboretum a bit

already so I'll like expand on that then we can maybe cover our rpgf and optimism and all of that after um but yeah shout out to arbitrum I think you know definitely the biggest uh like donation that we did not have to like explicitly you know write a governance Forum post for um so you know them proactively contributing to this is amazing and I think the thing that like yeah I was even even cooler is effectively the Arbitrage airdrop the air drop to like all of the dowels built on arbitrum um and the only dial that was not like an arbitrary native dial was protocol Guild and I forget I forget how high it was in allocation but it was like you

know within like the top five or ten like largest down comparison so they sort of like treated protocol Guild as you know they treated one of the top projects in their ecosystem um so that was that was like I think you know a a very like great thing for them to do um and you know uh yeah and I think sort of sets the stage where like you know you don't have to ask us to do this like obviously you know we're happy to help we're happy to talk about protocol Guild all day with anyone who wants to hear about it um but you can just you know take the youth address and like send some tokens to it and you know that that's great as well um so yeah shout out to arbitrub optimism as well so uh optimism has rpgf I'm sure you've covered it extensively

on this podcast and your listeners are familiar with it um but they just ran uh they just ran a new round of rpgf uh the third one they had 10 million op tokens uh to donate and protocol Guild was actually the single largest recipient from this and the thing that's kind of neat uh with the rpgf round is uh optimism has like these badge holders so basically people in their Community who vote on the projects so it's not necessarily just like the op Labs or optimism Foundation that shows this it's really like all the delegates and you know the other set of badge holders in the optimism Community who each make like an independent decision and then they're I think they're like one person one vote

um so it's kind of wild to see that like you know all of this aggregated over like about a hundred uh voters like let the protocol Guild being the number one uh funded uh funded project and the other thing that was interesting is I mentioned earlier that protocol Guild you know sends the money directly to the people um rather than the companies obviously you still need the companies to like support uh you know support these people so optimism's rpgfront actually sent twice as War to client teams than to like protocol Guild itself I don't have the exact number in front of me but like you can think of protocol Guild as being the biggest recipients and then like the nine-ish client teams being twice as big as that

um so I think this is like a pretty massive uh like a pretty massive like show from like the optimism Collective that you know they truly like support this stuff and want to fund it and want to see it Thrive um so yeah shout out to them as well like I yeah I did not expect uh protocol Guild to end up being the number one and then you know for like all of the client teams aggregated to be even larger than that yeah it's cool um well I was in optimism batch holder for rpgf round two and uh I voted for protocol Guild so I'm uh thank you give it a shout out for sure yeah yeah cheeky anything to add about that no I mean I can just Echo what uh what

Tim said we're incredibly grateful like Layer Two Season has officially begun for the protocol Guild and we're stoked yeah for sure well um you know I'm wondering what the post-pilot plans are so so what's the plan from here I think we heard about the technical re-architecture but uh so we we know the technical re-architecture is coming with mullet V3 the shot is for 100 million dollars into protocol Guild anything else to say about future plans yeah you know building the norms and so you know the protocol Guild was at least in part inspired by uh a tweet from Danny Ryan back in October 2021 um where he said and I'm paraphrasing

here sorry if I if I'm miscotting you Danny um about you know making making it a social Norm to allocate a percent of tokens to core protocol work right uh and obviously um the protocol Guild represents uh the best instantiation of that um and uh so we we want to build that Norm right if we want protocol Guild as a funding mechanism to truly be sustainable over the long term um the way to get there is by really convincing ethereum's ecosystem to basically by default donate one percent of their token their revenue their their profit uh to the protocol Guild right um so we need to raise awareness about the protocol Guild there's a lot of marketing work that we have to do um but we're we're still early and

obviously yeah being uh being on podcasts like this helps tremendously with that so thank you for for your partner Kevin yeah and maybe I'll add one more thing at all of this and he briefly mentioned this you know like uh it's you know Genesis allocation for tokens is probably the easiest thing for a project to do it you know it it really works well with protocol Guild how just like how it's structured um but then you know I think we've been talking with projects who for whatever reason they'll fit that or you know they'll want to do that but like what are other ways that you can you know contribute and I think that's like some open area where like if you have a funky idea for like you know uh for example I'll give a few like uh some layer twos you know have mentioned you know it

might make more sense for them to like send part of their sequencer fees to protocol Guild um if say they don't want to have a governance token or something like that um or um shout out to Tetra note actually who's been like a funding protocol Guild like since I think the beginning he literally puts like his yield farming money part of it back at the protocol Guild so it's like I think every week he sends us something like pennies or something um and he so you know coming up with like funky mechanisms like that um like that just kind of show people like what are different ways that work um and we had like this call with each taker as well where you know if you if you run a validator there's ways you can use a Xerox split contract and you could

do something like send you know uh 19 like one percent of the transaction fees you get the protocol Guild right you just you know create a spitter contract you put your address at 99 you put protocol guild at one percent and it just all sort of happens on chain and you don't have to think about it anymore so like yeah things like that I think is something that's like worth exploring like you know what are different ways that just work with basically how do you make protocol Guild the easiest API to just like be coupled to any like flow of funds in the ecosystem um yeah I think it's like the general question and yeah so interrupt is the thing uh I think we're focused on yeah yeah

yeah I think it's important like we want the protocol Guild to be something that's you know opt in like not just for members but also for donations right for the same reason um you know the ethereum protocol is is burning fees and not redirecting it to public goods you know um we want the protocol Guild to be a mechanism that people can choose to donate to if they want to right and so um you know uh I it's not probably a good idea to like shatter all the different uh funders that we that we have had but you know a shout out to for example Anthony sassano who was committing all of his Oda rewards from to from rocker pool to the protocol Guild and so you know to Echo what Tim said there's like so many different ways that both ethereum's ecosystem and its Community can help you

know fund the protocol that they either depend on or they love um and I mean it's heartwarming to see every single donation that we get um and you know the more we build this meme where we're excited to see where it takes us yeah I wonder if you could pay me a picture of what protocol Guild looks like in 10 years so say I have you back in uh 2033 and I know maybe we're on you know dank starting is live and all of the things in The Purge the merge The Surge are are live you know what what is the final resting state of this or what does it look like 10 years in yeah I'd say my like optimistic base case if you want to call it that you know like that's gonna

happen by default but also doesn't seem insane is like most of the good projects on ethereum by default donate either you know one percent of their tokens or one percent of their fees or whatnot uh to the guild this has helped build like some basket of tokens that represent the entire ecosystem so one thing I'm particularly concerned about and you know my day job is running the governance calls for ethereum I don't want like just unit swap to fund the protocol Guild that it becomes like the uniswap bribing Guild right they're just slido or you know or just layer twos or just Define so like I think it's like extremely important that there's like diversification um and I'm really happy with the pilot because you know we got like lighter we

got molok we got nouns we got uniswap we've got ens it feels like it's you know a good like representation of the ecosystem and we were pretty mindful about like who we reached out to to reach out um so yeah end State you have like basically a snapshot of like all the stuff that's built on ethereum part of it you know donated to protocol Guild investing periodically you know over like a four-ish your time Horizon and one thing that's it is like you know like project starts they're not worth a lot some of them end up being valuable so like they make up you know most of the treasury and then those tokens vest out and then you know there's some new thing that comes along and kind of fills in that Gap um and and kind of replenishes the the thing

um and then I think again this is like what I said the very beginning but like their risk adjusted rewards of working on like L1 like makes sense and almost the way I think about this is like imagine some mercenary comes and they want to work on ethereum like they should almost be like agnostic between how they get to work on L1 or something else you know on a risk-adjusted basis um so it's like a very hard hypothetical to like you know if you think of an actual person uh because you know people tend to have strong preferences of what they want to do but like the rational Observer should like look at the ethereum L1 work versus anything else and feel that it's like yeah you know well compensated on a

risk-adjusted basis um yeah and I actually and one more thing I'll say um I don't know if this is an end state but it's like something I care deeply about as well is um that it stays focused on individuals right like I I think like incentives can really shift in the space um and not that like any of the not like any of the teams right now are you know at risk of that but there is like some value where imagine I don't know you worked I'll take the EF as an example because I worked there but like the EF turns evil tomorrow right like for whatever reason um if I have protocol Guild I might be able to make a choice between like do I want to stay at the EF and work on you

know evil EF or do I want to just you know quit my job and work on like ethereum the protocol and you know potentially not be as affiliated with like a company or org and I think that is like really powerful if you think imagine you know 10 20 years from now the the maintainers aren't just like a bunch of blockchain companies but it's like you know think of like the the like Linux maintainers right it's a smashed set of people a bunch of random interests like protocol Guild is like the thing that's like advocating for ethereum's interests um and again you know a lot of the times they're aligned with companies but in the case that they're not making it easier for people to literally quit their job and just keep working on ethereum is like a super valuable

property um so yeah that's something I I I think it's important yeah well if you hit your uh your goal of 100 million dollars in funding over the next couple years just doing the math at the current number of contributors that's like 600k per per contributor I mean of course that's a reductionist example because there's going to be more contributors over time uh but y'all might also exceed your fundraising targets of 100 million so it's just a guess yeah yeah that doesn't seem insane you know like I mean and for you know it's 600k in like tokens right nothing like Fiat um and you know that's not like far from like what an engineer at like some you

know defy or ltu or or you know like start up a gap um so yeah I I think it's like yeah trying to yeah trying to bring it like somewhat in line in terms of like the competition package that like the industries can offer and especially in terms of tokens um yeah yeah yeah I think uh Tim covered sort of the uh the dream end state for protocol Guild uh pretty well from like a holistic perspective I think for me more anecdotally um like coming from my perspective which is like I am I am not a court Dev right I I am not a giga brain I am simply like a volunteer to the protocol Guild I am a full-time contributor

um and as of right now it really does take up uh my full time and you know the way I see it if protocol Guild V2 if the new mechanism that we have if the memes that we build are so effective at the point where someone like me doesn't need to contribute full time to this or if I can go contribute to something like ethereum cat herders instead um then I will be very happy with uh with the work that we've done but then obviously as Tim said there are there are bigger goals than that with becoming like uh you know a counterbalance or funder of Last Resort for all of ethereum's core protocol work yeah um one of the ideas that came up while uh we were at a meet up recently together

and I know that uh one of the ideas that that we discussed is um people forking protocol Guild and using it for their own ecosystems public goods so say I'm in like a Dao um and I want to make sure that contributors to the dollar long-term aligned and uh working for the Dow and so like in companies we have a four-year stock option plan where you you get your not only your base salary and your benefits but you also earn a portion of the company over time um you know what would you say to to anyone who'd be interested in forking protocol Guild either the the pilot version or the new version and creating like a stock option plan for their for their Dow or for their organization um is that a is that a friendly Fork to you and is that something that you all

would be open to oh yeah yeah like you know and first of all it's like you know it's all permission this you know even if I did like the idea can't stop you from doing it but like and one thing I'll say is um we thought about this like with funders right like how how big should the protocol Guild be right like should it just be ethyl one maintainers but you know that's not all that's needed for ethereum to thrive and succeed you know there's devtools there's a bunch of things but when we were talking with like projects to fund this um I think specificity is important for them so like imagine that there's like a protocol Guild there's like a devtools guild there's like some other guild and whatnot I think from like a donor's perspective they'd rather be able to

like pick and choose um rather than saying like I'm sending all this money into a pot and I'm not actually sure what's in the pot um so I yeah I think it's very healthy if there's like you know imagine you know there was like a git coin Guild and people want to reward the work that like the git coin you know like uh like contribute is due to like actually build all this public goods infrastructure and I I would suggest you know making like a narrow Bitcoin Guild more than like you know some public goods Guild because then it becomes like really hard to um to know where the funds are going um so yeah I I think it totally makes sense the fork it that I think like yeah just my experience talking with people

donating to this stuff like legibility to them is really important yeah yeah from my perspective I think you know obviously if uh projects want to Fork the protocol Guild and and you know kick some some funds back to the protocol Guild for that then that's that's great but you know for the same reason that death doesn't ask for a fee you know neither will the protocol get in that regard um but I think you know the more sort of forks that we have the more it is like an endorsement of this self-curation mechanism and and we're all for that we think it's very powerful yeah it it kind of brings to mind for me um you know like in the old world we have like I'm just going to use the United States because that's where I live but

like Federal public goods and then Statewide public goods and then like local Town public goods and I'm almost seeing like this ecosystem develop in the web 3 ecosystem where we've got like ethereum public goods and then we've got like the protocol Guild protocol Guild uh contributors and that's their self-curation and then you've got uh molok Dao as a coordination mechanism and rpgf as a coordination mechanism and within each of these there's like RPA GF round one and rpgf round two same thing with Git coin you've got rounds one two three four like up to 15 and then you've got like the climate rounds and the DSi rounds and um and then you've got giveth and like it feels like there's like a plurality of of coordination or sorry uh like public goods curation mechanisms in the

web3 ecosystem and uh protocol Guild is definitely like the most legit uh one of the most legit with respect to how we fund like the ethereum security protocol public Goods but I'm wondering if if there's anything this brings up for you about like the plurality of public goods curation mechanisms in web3 and and just sort of like the wider story of of web3 for public goods if that brings up anything for either of you yeah yeah uh 100 like I I the same way I think you know you can Fork protocol Guild if you want I don't think it's like a solution to every problem right like I think you know the the things where it works for ethereum is it's like some large set of contributors across many orgs it's changing over time so

like you know there's a bunch of reasons why like we ended up with this because it made sense with us but like I wouldn't you know force feed it to anyone and the the sort of mental model I've been trying to think about is like uh you know defy Legos right when people sort of like plug in all these D5 Primitives together and have them interact I think we're starting to see a bit of that with like the public good space and that's very cool like the fact that you know literally protocol Guild is like one of the larger recipients of like optimism rpgf rounds um like yeah to me that shows it's like the API working right like these two things can like interrupt you know smoothly um so I yeah and and I I agree you want different mechanisms to address

different biases and different like focuses um and for example you know one of the reasons why protocol Guild is focused on people and not companies is just that there are a ton of mechanisms that focus on companies today like I work at the EF I give out grants to client teams and it's just like it's a thing that's already like done and exists and so it's not that like it's bad to give money to companies but we saw like that spot of like the I don't know like incentive space was just like empty and so it made sense to create something with protocol guilt to fill it but for sure there's like there's many niches that are empty and filling those and making sure it sort of interrupts together I think that's yeah that's super important

I mean for me it like it brings up we have like a market for public goods and then like you know I'm imagining that I want to launch a dow one day and like I'm like oh the constituencies I need to reach are like the get coin round 15 climate contributors and the rpgf round two tooling and infrastructure contributors and the protocol Guild uh contributors and like you can almost like add them to cart and there's a Marketplace for which public goods get funded and yeah and I think like protocol guilds is obviously a legit one in that Marketplace so it'll get chosen a lot but to me I just get really excited about the plurality of of like each of those is a curation mechanism for which public goods are good and um I just get excited about about that diversity uh when I think about it yeah

100 percent yeah I think for us to be successful we need to be complementary right we cannot compete with all the others and so yeah to your point Kevin we need to we want to live in this pluralistic world where you know everyone you know the git coins the optimisms CLR funds you know everyone is working together to fund public goods in their own effective way yeah I think there's like no one there's no one like Global value set there's a diversity of value sets and so you can choose the public goods that that you care about it's like a multi-vector space I think is what someone said at the Meetup yeah yeah well is there anything I didn't ask that you all want to say

um my call to action we talked about contributing to the protocol Guild uh and there's obviously the financial aspect of that um but there's also the non-financial aspect and so um if you like me would just like to volunteer to help the protocol Guild right if you want to contribute in any way that you can with some Manpower um then please check out our Discord we just uh launched a uh contribute channel in there we have a a link to a a public task list and uh you know check that out if you see something in there that you think you could help with then uh I mean we would be thrilled to have you help with that so uh yeah memes as well you know yeah if you ought to make some good protocol Guild memes just send them to me I'll Retreat them

yeah there we go well um I've got a link to your Discord to the protocol Guild Twitter and then I'll have y'all's twitters in the show notes so if you're listening thanks for listening uh click the links in the show notes to get more involved with protocol Guild all right any any final words Gents no thank you so much for having us this was a fun conversation yeah congrats on all the traction um really excited to have you and keep up the good work I've been I've been a listener since episode one of the green pill Kevin so I'm I'm absolutely thrilled to be here it's an honor thank you nice hey set this guy up sweet uh well we will keep green pill in

the world and um you know there's a loop between talking about this stuff and actually doing this stuff and then learning and iterating and so we'll just keep spinning that flywheel until until we're exporting public goods to the world so that's the goal sounds great all right peace and love [Music]