Protocol Guild: Funding & Incentivising Ethereum's Core Protocol Development / Mário Havel

Transcript

thank you so much can you hear me folks you cannot hear me right do I have it on oh no thank you awesome awesome right protocol guilt thank you so much for joining all of you um yeah it's it's a lovely rain Punk uh day to day right so it's amazing that you made it uh because I have a rather important topic to talk about here and it's about the protocol guilt and uh yeah I'm Marie Harvel I'm from the EF protocol support and um uh the protocol Guild is a project which was also started within uh within this uh this is the group but uh it's its own organization so I'm going to dive into that but before I start is there anybody who already heard who knows about vertical Guild

ah come on why did you even came when you like know about it right so many people okay I'm gonna have an easy job today um yeah so we're going to look at with vertical Guild but first let's ask what is ethereum so uh yeah just to realize here um that ethereum is a public good public good being open accessible to everyone uh ethereum as a network as the blockchain that people use that people develop on is open to everybody for use uh for uh uh deploy your own applications it's uh completely permissionless it's completely open and um and uh it's not just the blockchain itself the network which is running with

which people are using with the transactions and so on uh so actually the whole software stack the infrastructure the clients the the specification the testing and everything around is uh open and uh this this open research and development is also probably good because well uh it contributes to the whole um blockchain ecosystem to the computer science uh domains and uh well there are all the people who just copying passing and creating their own evm chains right um so these are this is the actual ethereum stack and now uh the question is uh uh what is actually ethereum for you what is the ethereum vision I I like to

ask these questions because over time I always get new narratives new new ideas ethereum is the protocol ethereum is love ethereum is do you have come on just tell me any any what is ethereum for you personally I love that it really is a hope cool cool Freedom nice uh well cool cool um it's a coordination Global coordination for people right I heard that often uh it's a it's a global system for empowering individuals uh that's that's kind of my vision but generally we have these these ideas we want to achieve them using ethereum but uh we want to have we want ethereum to have a Maximum Impact in whatever it's

supposed to do and here the problem is that it's not going to happen by itself right uh there is a lot of work to be done ethereum there is a lot of development and research still going on um uh vitalik around I don't know if it was before or after the merge saying that ethereum is like 55 percent done so uh yeah a lot of work in the protocol so how can we actually make sure that the protocol stays maintained and sustainable and help us make the great impact and the um the actual uh fulfilled actual Vision um so the challenge that we are addressing is the mismatch of incentives which are

happening in the protocol development which is completely open and without any direct incentives in a way that uh well there are people uh building building the the software on ethereum itself they are motivated to use it base fees to the validators to minors but the the people building the actual protocol are just doing it right uh there there are multiple organizations over the years different teams which are being funded from different sources but um uh to to make sure that this is sustainable the protocol guilt uh comes in so how many core contributors can you name folks can you tell me name of any core daf you cannot save italic

Alex right yeah he's there Alex three Preston Preston from Prism nice nice okay those are I was expecting dunkrat he's also famous these days right yeah Danny right didn't you Ryan uh cool cool uh very well so there is a lot of them actually right and it's not easy to name all of them so first thing that we do is to create uh the the list so we somehow can count them now okay I mean it might be possible even if we somehow put our minds together but now uh how it's going to look in a few months how it's going to look in few years um this the the people come and go and different people have a different impact and

um that's why we need to create uh the vertical Guild curates a list of the core contributors which is opt in and uh yeah here they are so uh this is this is the current list of the all the protocol Guild names uh Alex Oh Alex is not there I mean he's I would consider him there he uh but but like I was because oh no here he is I'm sorry I thought it's the alphabet yeah here is Alex but all the people many people who are here maybe even in this room uh there is uh Guillaume here met here Andre Pavel yeah many many folks around here so this is the actual this is all of these people contribute to the core ethereum but in a

different way in a different teams so from a different perspective there are around 20 teams in this ecosystem which are uh well the research team the ethereum foundation the research Epsilon team many of them here these days uh Rick uh during the crypto economics research takes RX and uh then people helping with the coordination which is well the protocol support that's my team the cat headers uh helping with the eaps uh EF security team doing um uh making sure that uh we have we have some um some audit some fantastic and then all the actual teams right so this is this is the me this is the stuff it's all the the five five uh or red is missing there it's uh it's good it will get there soon

but it's the five uh execution clients five consensus clients which make the whole ethereum together with people who test it and who run the infrastructure like test Nets and so on um so this is this is these are the actual contributors this is the core of the ethereum which protocol Guild curates but the protocol Guild is not just the list it augments this list with more features with more capabilities and uh it turns it into a kind of a magic list which you can use in different ways so let's let's look into the different different features of it first of all it's on chain that's great right uh it's all the truth is out there uh it's uh all under the protocol Guild dot eat uh this is this is the address

so basically all of these people that you saw on the screen the 128 contributors uh they are behind this one address it's a split contract if you want to make sure that ethereum gets developed just send ten dollars there that's as simple as that so so it's one single point which you can access all of these people because again from to to go through all these teams and actually ask people uh or like make all of these people to sign up for some git coins or that this or that and look in who is contributing what that's not easy so uh vertical Guild is is putting them together also important to mention this is not all all the chord apps right this is just people who opted Guild it might

be twice as many people actually contributing to some clients uh and they're all on chain in the zero X splits contract um it's retractive so it works in a way that um people who are on board who become a member of vertical Guild um uh we uh the broker Guild considers their past contributions right there are people who work on the protocol for six years or six months and uh there is a formula for uh for time weight of the of the their contributions so basically the the long the longer they contribute uh the bigger share of the of the split they get uh it's the formula is uh the square root

so uh basically like the people who are joining now will uh get the the the uh the higher weight faster and um it's like equalizing over time um so so it's attractive and uh also it's forward looking because it's vested so right now the Pilot's finished there have been a one year pilot which I'm going to do uh go uh go around but um uh for the for the long-term goal of vertical Guild it should be vested at least over four years so it creates actually long-term uh incentives for contributors to stay around right to keep uh contributing

um yeah the membership is curated by members because the members as the core contributors can tell the best who should be involved or not so uh it's again it's Upton uh there you you need to be willing to come in you just we just don't force you to be there or anything um but uh you can they have the best contacts and expertise to tell uh who is who is actually uh the valuable contributor uh it's inclusive in a way that uh it includes not just well the contributors from many different areas but also uh the donations are allowed in any tokens but only on mainnet uh right now I'm going to talk about that and the erc20

token is is uh accepted uh you can just so it's just the the single split the single address link to it uh and uh the yeah it's naturally in a way that it accepts membership from all the various teams so it's not just the actual devs but the researchers the people from the uh whether testing or even like the coordination work are done by the support teams and uh this makes the protocol guilt a magic list um pretty because it has all of these features it can be used as a kind of an apy if you think about it you think about it uh kind of a single access point for all of the people all of the various organizations and entities

individuals who would like to contribute to the protocol Guild to the core development why because uh well it's the dependency right the whole ethereum needs to be running needs to be maintained and if you build a protocol on ethereum it's kind of your dependency you were totally dependent on these Technologies so you need to make sure that it will keep running and um yeah ethereum will just keep checking if you if you help us to raise awareness about protocol guilt because there is a bunch of these dials l2s and many people making huge money on ethereum there are dollars with billions of dollars in treasuries and the core devs are working in uh mostly like non-market incentivized environment so

if just some small amount of of the treasuries of the of the actual uh actual profit of all of the ethereum businesses goes to protocol guilt we are able to create a sustainable ethereum so a quick recap of the one-year pilot so everything starts with Danny Ryan mentioned here today uh who is kind of thinking well there is no doubt for just like you know funding Court apps like we need that because there is this bunch of organizations it's kind of fragile somebody the government will come shut down two of them and now half of the people are without work it's it's horrible so we have alternative parallel system for uh funding the core development and the poor the protocol Guild was announced by the end of 2021

uh with the pilot starting a year ago um finishing uh these days um it was it was started by people from the political support team by Trend One apps uh he was the main main contributor who started to curate the list so it started with the 90 members uh in the beginning of the pilot and it grew so people people joined and uh updated the contract happens every uh every quarter uh in the last one the last there is the last update here it's not it's constant because the same people joined as people left so there are people who are not wishing to be on the list as well and uh that's why I'm saying it's obtained

there is not everyone and um uh it's uh the 128 magic number right now yeah uh regarding the funds um so for the pilot uh protocol Guild was able to raise around 10 million dollars in various tokens and you know the tokens are volatile so it is a little bit less a little bit more right now um the main contributors were Lido unisweb ens nouns and malloc uh do you think uh yeah a few Millions each uh and uh it's not just the huge dials it's people you see the median amount is ten dollars because I guess people get props for it or something but um so anybody can contribute there was

like almost 300 contributor donors with almost 5 000 contributions uh yeah and uh regarding the funding uh most of it most of it was distributed 1.7 million added yeah it's few days few weeks old numbers it's still vesting um right and this third is the protocol Guild is the numbers and okay now how do we why do we even give the money there why do we fund these people for well uh because they do all of this right so it was the merge in September which happened during the pilot there was the chapel the withdrawals which happened uh two months ago and there is a lot of research being done these days which uh

which is which is very important the proto-danksha rink for the 4844 uh being worked on right now is the next big step for ethereum the eof Falls somewhere here today as well I've been working hard to make it happen and it I believe it will another important research um so this is all done by the members of the protocol Guild for the betterment of the ethereum for vegetarian's future so what we learned um many positive feedback from well the members from the community uh we see that ecosystem that the community likes it because well we will be we were able to raise the funds we were able to uh spread the word and um uh it seems to it seems to work so far

uh what do we what we also learned is that it needs a lot of improvement uh the smart contract architecture needs to be improved um and uh it needs to be more transparent it needs to be more robust also to be able to scale the fundraising so uh what are what are the plans now we have the V2 right uh so there will be the upgrades with actual smart contracts and more raising and more building the social norms so let's start with the trusted elements right now it's um the the split contract which is mutable by a multisig this is going to be removed and changed for a molok dial of the members who are able to uh curate the list themselves so it will be all

the governance will be properly done on chain and uh ideally we would expand to the l2s to be able to somehow forward the donations from the l2s and also uh use it uh maybe for some for well cheaper uh easier um Adele and yeah again so now the the members will be able to vote to get new members in fully on chain um and I already mentioned this I think it's I think like so we can actually look at all of these organizations and all these people in the budget and protocol guilt is is like paying maybe like a good bonus or maybe for somebody depends on the area even even a good good salary

um but uh it's not it's not uh covering the Justice discovering only small part of the whole Court of open budget so if we imagine that like one percent of all the all the uh all the profits all the tokens all the I don't know uh air drops uh get uh to the vertical Guild uh we can make a sustainable future so here are some Trailblazers these uh these folks who actually did it and uh and um uh donated to Avid also mentioned optimism arbit room who using the retrospective Public Funding also related to protocol Guild um yeah so for the and the raising goals is 100 million dollars which will be

invested over four years so it's uh 2.5 of the uh because it was 10 million for one year so now it will be like 25 per one year because it's four years so uh yeah that's um that's uh the the plan so um again we need to be able to retain the contributions over long term and even maybe enable kind of a competition with the up player with the companies which just have just print their tokens and they can hire the best devs right and uh it's not easy to compete with with this when people are interested in ethereum so this is happening soon I have last few seconds uh thank you so much for for your attention you can find the protocol Guild dot eat on this QR code feel free to donate if you have any

any doubt which is starting if you have any company and you want to show your support if you want to signal that you are thinking about the ethereum feature and the the core layer uh you can you can uh donate and uh hear all the other information all the important links again I want I want to give huge shout out to Trenton apps my colleague from vertical support who've been working hard on this and cheeky gorilla who couldn't come today uh but this presentation is actually from him and he's been contributing completely voluntarily just out of his excitement uh to political guilt so yeah that's that just a quick quick thing uh if you're interested in empirical development the core protocol in general uh check out the block ethereum org or

just or just find me somewhere here tap me on the shoulder uh we we just opened applications for the protocol Fellowship which enables people to easily learn and get on uh become contributors to these core protocol uh software pieces research and yeah one day you can maybe be part of that list as well uh and also uh 5 p.m Sunday there will be uh Bitcoin edif beer here if you are if you want to meet Bitcoin devs or the other uh you can come to the cafe on Sunday evening so yeah that's that uh thank you so much again and uh yeah thanks I guess we don't have time for questions

but just I will be here I'll be in bordel uh Bordeaux is the hackerspace in paraly police right you can go upstairs to The Institute or downstairs to the basement to Burrell so I will be mostly there please visit me and chat about the core protocol work thank you [Music] thank you