Protocol Guild: Funding and Incentivising Ethereum's Core Protocol Development

Transcript

next speaker is uh Mario hav he'll be talking about the protocol Guild funding and incentivizing ethereum's core protocol development so give a round of applause for Mario H thank you thank you um anyway thank you so much for being here I'm Mario hav I'm from EF protocol support and today I have a very important topic to speak about and it's more of a it's more of a solar Punk topic no it's here it's more of a solar Punk topic and I they put me in the lunar Punk stage but what can I do right it was also kind of a r rain Punk day today uh not really the solar

Punk and yeah I'm waiting for a clicker because I'm in the like middle of my slides um however so I'm not going to talk about the protocol guilt and incen incentivizing work of the core development uh there we go go so um I'll just get back to the start and we start with the basics actually I want to start with a discussion about public goods because we are talking about public goods a lot here um and um so the the first thing to the Baseline I want to set is just to realize that ethereum is a public good right uh I believe that I don't need to explain what public good is in E Barcelona uh but ethereum being uh the network which is open to everyone right anybody can permissionless use it

develop on it create their own contracts and it's there it's sitting there uh as the blockchain and now talking about the main net or maybe the test Nets or the networks itself that people can use freely and then um we have uh uh the actual ethereum stack which is also public good what I mean by this is the actual code the specification behind it the research around it uh all of the people working creating open source tools which enable us to actually use ethereum and to run it uh are also creating public goods um so all of the infrastructure and research is is open and um the people are building this towards some ethereum Vision yeah I

wanted to I wanted to put oh come on what was that okay thanks so yeah I wanted to ask what is ethereum what is ethereum's vision for you I like to put this question I want I like to give this question in in conferences because I always hear something new ethereum is love ethereum is future ethereum is a protocol some opinions what is ethereum folks come on don't be shy computer a big computer I love that world computer okay cool something else uh because like everybody has some different Vision right everybody sees ethereum a bit differently I would say that it's some sort of uh Global permissionless coordination mechanism or maybe um some tool for empowering

individual and so on and so forth but like we might we might have a bit different ideas what ethereum is for us but we agree on one thing that we want to have ethereum the Maximum Impact we want ethereum to succeed in our vision whatever it is and uh to do this uh it's not going to happen by itself right there is a lot of work to be done on ethereum itself specifically speaking the ethereum core or the ethereum itself uh is just partially finished we have so much research and development to do uh after the merge vitalic says that uh ethereum is only like 55% down so that's still a enough work and um my idea

is that we need some talented people to be able to come to ethereum contribute to it and um yeah right we have there are so many great people in the world like Geniuses who are working for these corporates getting paid to I don't know create a better algorithms for uh targeting advertisements or something so why don't we attract these people to actually build something revolutionary some tools which can Empower us and create a create a revolution and this is what protocol Guild is trying to achieve CRA crafting a purpose-built mechanism to uh bring people to to to give option to talented people to come to ethereum and work on its core development easier but let's take a step back to to

understand what's we what we are addressing here um because uh what I'm talking about is this uh mismatch of incentives right uh the eum uh can be very profitable if you are building on it if you are building dabs of chain layer TOS whatnot uh but now there is the the ethereum itself where people are building the platform where you buy the fancy cars on to to ride on and um uh the the actual uh infrastructure is is then uh lacking some sort of incentives and uh the idea is that we have this ambition we are building here Cutting Edge Technologies like the the the latest BL blockchain research in different computer science domains and

uh we should have this bleeding edge approach also to the community also to the incentivization of the work so uh the question is how to do it right and first point is if you want to do this how do we support core developers how do we how do we uh uh help them financially so first of all we need to somehow know who it is can you name any Corda anybody knows any Cav I'm sure you know at least one name come on guys Tim boo Tim is Tim Tim is cool but Tim is not a dab right he does the coordination yeah sorry yeah cool cool uh yeah you might say I don't know Denny Ryan everybody

says vitalic first but I mean he also doesn't do much much de development recently however like I believe that if we put the minds together we would be able to put together a list of names who are contributing to the protocol but the thing is that it's hard to curate this right this is how it looks now but how it's going to look in few months how it's going to look in few years uh who can tell who are all these contributors so the protocol Guild is creating this list a registry of all or like people who want to be part of it and uh it's enumerating the core contributors to ethereum so here you can see the four 142 names which are part of the protocol Guild as of now and uh these are the contributors to uh different parts of ethereum and they are not like a single

team or anything they come from different teams they're maybe independent so to be more specific it's almost 20 teams represented here in protocol Guild uh researchers from EF ipsilon team doing the evm research uh cryptoeconomic research done by barnabi and a robust incentive group txrx research uh the security and coordination which is uh Tim right uh in protocol support which is my team uh etherum caders Puja doing the EIP IP uh and then infrastructure itself the actual clients the actual testing the meat of it where all the development is so this is these all teams are part of the protocol Guild are represented in protocol Guild because this is all the the core that we need however uh peral Guild is not just this list it's

actually uh kind of a magical list because it arguments it with specific features and capabilities so let's look into them first of all the whole list is onchain not what my t-shirt sets but but it's onchain it's there uh so it's it's uh for everyone to see it's easily easily auditable you see all the all the all the addresses registered to protocol Guild on chain under one split contract under a single address it makes it as simple and as accessible as possible because this ens the protocol guild. e resolving to this address uh splits the funds to 142 cord devs out there that means that like all the support for core

development is now like one address away and you don't need to like you know talk to the people individually or anything so it's here it's Stressless and accessible but uh the the split contract doesn't uh doesn't uh distribute the money equally to 142 people it's actually uh time weighted retrospectively so it takes uh into account how long people contributed because for somebody it's half a year for somebody it's six years right so there is a Formula which is uh square root so the square root of how much time have you been contributing times 1 or times5 if you've been only parttime and this means uh if you imagine the curve that the people who are joining now are going to gain uh the uh the higher time the

weight uh faster so it's getting equalized somewhat equalized over time and not just the past but it's also forward looking uh because it's vested it's not going to be paid out immediately it's vested during the pilot which I'm going to talk about soon it was one year and now we are uh going to uh do it four years vested which means that they are uh the people are getting paid um the amount over the the time period uh the curation of this list is done by the members themselves because the devs the cevs the people who are in the list know the best how to uh who who are the contributors who are helping uh with the the development it's inclusive so it supports any token you don't need

to donate just eat but literally any erc20 token and this helps us to actually get uh benefit from all of the parts of the ecosystem different Dows who want to contribute and so on and uh also what I mentioned before so it's neutral in a way that it accepts people from different parts of the protocol not just the devs not just the this and that but the research the coordination people the support people are there as well so this makes protocol guil the magic list with all of these features and it makes it I would say sort of an API to supporting the development because it's the single access point where you can just uh send your money and make sure that ethereum will just keep chugging as as we know uh because uh the idea is

that if you are building on ethereum if you if you are some uh defi project whatever Staker you are using the ethereum itself right ethereum becomes your dependency literally so if you want your dependency to work that means make your project work you need to make sure that it's going to it's going to keep uh being maintained and it's going to keep uh secure having more features and uh I would I would um um like to motivate you to uh consider contributing or especially if you have a dow if you have some people who uh if you know some people who are starting maybe Dow or some project on ethereum they should really consider contributing not just to make sure ethereum is there but it's

just a great signaling you show people that you are interested in the protocol that you understand why it's needed uh because I mean that's the ultimate thing like I mean we have these people the whole ethereum wouldn't be here right so we so that's that's that's way how to show your support and um spread a word um now I want to talk quickly about the pilot uh about the one year of protocol Guild which uh was like the testing phase and uh everything starts with Denny Ryan of course uh Denny in October 21 came up with an idea and some discussion like why there is no like Dow for paying Cavs right I mean we we have so many organizations on ethereum for this and that but I mean this is the

most important thing so why there is no some organization uh doing this because there are as we saw there are various teams in different organizations but what if Government comes and now shuts down few of them and half of the people lose their funding lose their jobs so it's a parallel perm missional system for for uh helping the core developers the protocol Guild uh work started later that year the uh in the first part of 2022 there was the fun raising and the pilot started in May finished few weeks ago uh in this may so how it went the it started on 90 members and grew over time to 128 it's updated every quarter every 3 months uh and here uh you don't see

the latest update just because the same people joined as left so some people actually so it's optin these are not all the Cavs right these are just people who want to be there and who uh the members agreed to be there um I would say that like the full number of contrib would be twice as many uh but and was during the pilot right now is 142 there was another update in June uh speaking about the funding uh coming in so the goal for the pilot was to raise $10 million which was uh done a year ago thanks to mostly Lio Unis NS and Moc uh after the pilot finished uh now in June arbitrum as it became Dow donated another more than $3 million so at the time of the donation purle guil raised 13.7 $7 million with

the current like something under the 16 million because the crypto is volatile and there are different tokens but it's not just the whales it's not just like the big do contributing because you can see that there is actually almost 300 unique donors with media amount of $10 which I guess because people get pups for that or something but uh there is um just uh anybody can can send the 10 bucks there and uh contribute so uh these are the funding coming in funding coming out uh which means the vesting the the distribution to the people uh what was out of the out of the almost 16 million 11.5 was already distributed to the members you can see that yeah 4.4 is still investing in the contract it's

mostly the arbitr money after the the pilot and uh the average distribution was $70,000 almost 70k which is I mean nice bonus for some like uh Dev working in a western country I guess but for some people in different countries it might be a whole year of salary right right so we are already at a level where we can actually support the developers to to work by themselves uh with the highest distribution 171 um okay why do we pay so much money for these people like what what is it for well all of this right uh the first first slide so um what happened during the pilot most importantly was the merge right you heard about it the whole proof of stake we shut down the miners we saved like uh

3% of the world electricity uh and so these people contributed their years of their life towards the merge we shipped chaella or the withdrawals in uh in April and now the work on the Proto D sharding the 4844 the scalability uh feature for layer 2os is being uh the main goal also research on eof single SL finality uh things like sightlessness PBS and bunch of other research on ethereum road map which is still to be shipped um so what we learned uh we see that Community Buys in that people uh gave us positive feedback uh we were able to raise the money nervous um also not just from the

community but from the inside the members really get used to it and uh and uh uh see it positively what we also Lear learned on the negative side maybe that the smarture needs to be updated we need to remove some trusted parts and uh the governance uh is completely offchain right now it has to move on chain under the proper Dow and uh this needs to be done also to grow the funding properly because like the 10 million is is like just a uh small fraction of the money needed for the core development so what are the current plans when the pilot finished uh first of all we are upgrading the the smart contract infrastructure where there is right now

there is a m which is which can update a mutable contract but now inad of a m is going to be a m style d of the members who can uh who can um uh approve new members do the the governance also going to be all on chain everything is going to be right now is not on the lay so that's another thing that we have to have to do to more available talking about different things a littleit the idea like we would like to create this sort of a social Norm actually you know you don't need to form of a taxation or

anything but just like spear pressure you know like oh you built on ethereum why don't you give 1% of your treasury towards towards uh the protocol Guild and here are some Pioneers some TR Blazers whove already contributed who show their support um by supporting uh the protocol guilt and um yeah uh the the idea is that like come on if you look at like the biggest treasuries like Unis whatnot there are billions of dollars and even 1% of that can fund the whole core development for a year so um it can become a social Norm uh yeah uh and the next goal is to raise $100 million which will be vested over four years so uh right now it was $10 million

for one year so that's 25 uh 25 per year uh like 2.5 the current value and uh yeah with longer vesting so there are incentives for people to uh you know stay longer uh distribute their knowledge uh retain contributors over time and actually enable the competition with the up player of the Dows or maybe Forks of ethereum which are paying just you know printed out tokens and and pulling great deps from the core layer and um we can actually become uh more competitive there because uh because yeah the the core development is mostly not Market driven uh yeah and so the V2 is in progress as we speak yeah I have one minute and I would like

to tell you about protocol Fellowship so this is outside of protoc gu it's a it's a project by protocol support theum foundation and our goal is to just make it make onboarding Cordes easier so if you are interested in a core development maybe you would like to see yourself on this list one time in the future you should check out the EPF this is on blog. ethereum org on the EF blog uh or you can uh join a program where uh you start we help you to start contributing to various core projects already and uh you might be able to receive a stipend or at least some mentorship support from the community to learn about the core and and dive into it because I know it it sounds like super complicated and and important all these core devs but like

if you are uh at least bit talented and if you're motivated enough you you will be able to uh dive into it so we would like to help you with that so check the EPF cohort 4 and yeah that's it uh you can use the protocol guild. eat to uh actually donate to protocol Guild and uh here's the documentation and all the important links I think that's it thank you so much I have last few seconds uh I'm not sure if I have time for questions no one question what yeah there might be one on the screen yeah yeah if you check on the screen I think there's some questions that people have down at your at your feet yeah I don't see any oh right now I see uh change arbitrum optimism overtaking e chain um I don't think they are overtaking each chain I mean they

they are scaling it right and with a 4844 it's going to be even more bearable for for so the question is what is your opinion on chains like arbit optimism overthinking echain like it's supposed to right that we need the rollups to have bigger TPS than ethereum itself so that's the ultimate goal I already also mention it like with the retrospective public G funding optimism donated also to protocol Guild um arbitrum as well they care about what is happening on ethereum they are aligned so uh I'm really looking forward to arbit optimism especially under the Proto dun sharting Freud 44 to have more transactions than ethereum itself yeah a fouryear vested and then do you have a cback mechanism for four years so

so the the fouryear vesting it seems like an optimal a number for now we did a one-ear vesting and it means that it's being paid out you know uh over those four years so people actually have the motivation to stay in or transfer knowledge if they are going to get a new colleagues and so on so it's basically like long-term motivation for people to oh yeah if they if they stop working they are out right it's the the update is happening every three months so if somebody drops out he's he's as you see there are already 15 people have been removed because maybe they want it or maybe they stopped working somebody takes sabatical and then he can come back as well uh but like uh what they are your member only while you are contributing

yeah so yeah um I think that's it thank thank you so much for attention please spread the mem support the core development thank you so [Applause] much