 Hey everyone. Oops. Can I think I left my water over there. Can somebody grab that? Thank you everybody who's here to listen to this talk Honored to be speaking at DevCon. I never really imagined I would be doing that a couple years ago when I first got into Ethereum. So Honored to be here and Happy to educate or communicate what we've been working on here with the protocol guild So the title of the talk is funding a theory with the protocol guild I can't take mention. My name is Trent Van apps. I am a member of this guild however, I do also work for the EF on the protocol support team, which is We we work on network upgrades and Generally coordinating the ecosystem around where the protocol is going and how we can improve this coordination process So brief intro, I'm assuming most of you are aware of this But never hurts to step back and think about what we're what this topic is So Ethereum generally is a globally distributed computer that anyone can use anyone can access People can deploy contracts to it they can send transactions and interact with it anywhere around the world This means that Ethereum the network so main net is a screenshot from ether scan there And this is a public good that users of the network Can depend on and Use throughout their lives they can trust that it's going to be a resource for them Nobody can stop them from using it. This is stretching into the definition of public good a little bit because we have transaction fees but generally We can we can understand it to be this and if we take a step back looking at the yellow paper This is the Ethereum virtual machine. This is a another public good that Ethereum developers core contributors they maintain and many other chains Besides Ethereum also use the EVM so these are two fundamental public goods infrastructure that people depend on they build companies on They store their finances on and they're really important for people to actually have access to and If we're thinking about the different categories these can include You know the research about where the protocol is going The client developers who are implementing the protocol as it currently is the coordination like I mentioned the work that I do along with many others to Shape network coordination and then there's tooling so what developers actually use to interact with the chain and Then that bring this is the question of how are these? These areas of public goods funded a big one is the Ethereum foundation You are probably aware of what the Ethereum foundation is and what it does It funds a huge number of initiatives in the space sometimes through direct contributions sometimes Delegating funding to specific ecosystem groups Or things like the client incentive program where it gives ETH directly to client teams to run validators And it unlocks over a specific period of time And then outside of the Ethereum foundation. There's groups like Optimism, Giveth, Gitcoin, CLR Fund who run Matching rounds quadratic matching rounds where the community can Participate in actually funding these important public goods things that people depend on and then another smaller project We should may not be aware of is called Open Grants, which does vested ETH to specific groups. There's a Some projects that are using this to fund public goods So yeah, there's there's quite a diversity and I think this is One of the strengths of Ethereum is that it has a diversity of approaches Kevin O'Walkie formerly the founder of Gitcoin had a talk earlier that I was on about practical pluralism and how important it is that we have these Many overlapping approaches to how to fund these important initiatives How to get funding to people who are working on infrastructure and this is a great visualization of I'm sure I'm leaving out some projects So I apologize, but there are these projects on the on the slide and many more who do the important work of Getting money to public goods infrastructure the developers who are actually building the things that we depend on and I'll echo that by saying many community funding mechanisms are good. It decentralizes power and influence away from Single entities it celebrates pluralism like I mentioned Prevents influence from being siloed with individual allocators and it strengths and strengthens the intra community relationships however Especially the quadratic funding mechanisms. They often use similar curation techniques for example It waits The matching pool division according to how many people donate to a specific grant And this is not to say this bad thing it just It's it can have a challenge when it comes to Delegating funding or getting funding to areas of the protocol that may not be a fit for quadratic funding So this is the question is how can we curate better? Specifically related to the core protocol and then even more broadly How can we incentivize long-term core protocol to contributions? So this is a big question. That's you know been around as long as open source Software has has been worked on and it's not a new problem for Ethereum People have talked about it over the years, you know, people join core development. They leave core development It's something that will be with us as long as we're producing software and Modifying the protocol. So these are these are the big questions that came to mind over the years they've been a recurring set of concerns and especially last year November the discussion in the community began again about how can we properly incentivize contributors to stick around While also making sure that they're financially compensated So when this discussion came up last year there were My perspective of being around core development for a few years now and then working with core developers directly Some researchers we started to think about what sort of challenges We're most important to address when thinking about what sort of mechanism would be best to Design and the I'll go through the the first three here just an overview and then the next slides Detail out what these challenges are so the first challenge curation is hard the second the incentives are imbalanced and the third Contributor churn is bad. So the first challenge about curation The ecosystem is very interested in sponsoring This guy the princess and the magician the ecosystem broader individuals dows Protocols L2s. They're interested in funding the core protocol, but they don't have a single mechanism to send funds to there's Sometimes projects will publicize their you know, Ethereum address that you can send donations to but it's not necessarily Easy to find all of them in this single location Similarly protocol contributors are interested in Receiving funding some of them may not be directly working for a team, but they're doing important infrastructure work they're interested in receiving some form of financial compensation for the work that they're doing but there's no single mechanism for them to plug Into and be recognized for their work And then on top of that some of the existing solutions favor teams due to the difficulty of curation like I mentioned The solutions favor teams and it's really hard for them to surface many individual contributors, for example in a grants round And we can't expect a single organization to That's outside of this core development of this core infrastructure to effectively curate the work that these people are doing You know, it's very deep technically It requires you to sort of be embedded within that work And it's it's not reasonable to expect a single organization like get coin to Really effectively curate who's doing the work at the core protocol and and how they should receive the funding so the the response to how to address this question is we should Designate a contract on on chain that is regularly updated by the members themselves So people who are doing core contributor work They're updating this membership registry. The second problem is that the incentives aren't balanced So this is maybe a little self-explanatory, but I'll go into it L2s DeFi projects token projects things that have equity. There's a stronger incentive for People to go work on them rather than the core protocol and this is completely rational You know if you're weighing your options here Ethereum just doesn't have token incentives or equity or anything that can similarly be offered by Applications or L2s. However, it still needs to attract and retain talent to evolve the protocol, you know, Ethereum is An infrastructure influx. There's a lot of changes that we'd like to make to better scale to become more secure And we need we need really smart people working on these problems, but we should be compensating the fairly it's sort of irrational to pursue something with You know greater financial upside and I don't fault people for that or for other protocols Leveraging these these incentives. However, as the broader ecosystem continues to grow Competition for these talented individuals is really gonna only increase Of course financial motivations aren't the only or best motivator for people. We just want to recognize that It's just one tool in our tool set that's being under leveraged. So the problem of imbalance we can address this by Tapping into the Financial value that all of these amazing projects are building on top of the Ethereum and getting them to contribute some of them back To the people who are working on the core protocol the third challenge Excuse my rushed graphics here But the contributor churn is a challenge when it comes to the core protocol It can take, you know six to twelve months for somebody joining a client team to really start to Understand how that they can contribute to the client effectively and start making Meaningful impact on the work. So there's a steep learning curve for new contributors to deliver value However, the contributor value does grow over time if you stick around But there's less incentive to stick around if you're once you're an expert you sort of reach a certain level of Expertise with a client code base for example So one of the things we thought about how to address this contributor churn is that membership eligibility to any sort of Public goods funding mechanism it should only be after six months of regular contributions and that asset should vest over time in order to incentivize this To incentivize this knowledge transfer between different cohorts different Generations of people working on the core protocol, you know There are some amazing people doing work today that maintain clients and make Ethereum infrastructure in the protocol possible But eventually they're gonna move on or retire if we're still around in so many years And we need to make sure that the next generation of people that are gonna be maintaining this software are ready and Incentivized to stick around similarly. So as you may have guessed I'm describing the protocol guild which Started as an idea last November and we've been building it since then we worked with a team called zero X splits to Design well, they already had a split contract, but we worked with them to design a vesting contract And it's a collective of today a hundred and nineteen Ethereum contributors and we're working to Rebalance the incentive address all those challenges like I laid out in those previous slides and here's a very simple diagram the sponsors These can be anybody in the ecosystem Individuals projects large-scale small doesn't matter anybody who's interested in giving back to a really highly curated Set of core protocol contributors They send funds and whatever form they are to invest in contract Over a certain amount of time and then it goes to this weighted registry Which is regularly updated by the the membership itself And that's the key that itself curated because you know you have a really high signal for The membership and the fact that you know that these are people who are doing really crucial work I'll dive in a little bit into eligibility self-curation like I mentioned to be part of the protocol guild it it has to be you know Something beyond a typo in a client code base or something and beyond six months We want to make sure there's a there's a high threshold for people who are actually really committed to this infrastructure work And touching on self-curation again The reason this is super important is because it avoids intermediation Between external curating entities which may or may not be really close to the work that people are doing so like I said You get a really high signal curation and you can be assured that this is going to be consistently updated over time with Membership that's really contributing to the core protocol and it's incentive compatible because adding new members dilutes existing ones, so You don't have to worry about new members Just adding anybody in the ecosystem. There's a cost to Properly curating however if eligible contributors are not being added then it removes any legitimacy that's built up over time and External funders won't continue Funding this mechanism, so we hope that these are Sufficiently balanced against each other, but this this next year is sort of a learning period Over yeah, it's a learning period So we've launched a one-year pilot to test out the assumptions about the challenges that we wanted to address as well as The assumptions about what the best ways to approach them are How long should vesting be things like this? So we're working on that we launched the the protocol itself in May of this year and it'll run until May of next year and so far We've raised 11 million in sponsoring assets and like I said These will vest for one year over time again to incentivize long-term contributions knowledge transfer between different cohorts of core contributors And it's it's been very awesome to plug into existing funding infrastructure to touch on this idea of pluralism in funding There's a kid coin grants. We've tapped into some Dow treasuries who fund back in their native token So shout out to the people that have funded including Uniswap Lido E&s now in style to name a few as well as it's this norm that we want to pursue of One way to scale the incentive the Treasury Sorry To build the norm around allocating a percent of the initial supply or annual revenue So again another shout out to true freeze noses safe and texture punks and NFT project They've committed to contributing some some of their revenue and over time we want to build this more and more We're not saying that this is the only or best way to Fund through you know initial token allocation, but we're very excited to explore this with the broader ecosystem We're already starting some discussions with L2 is about how they can directly fund this this incentive mechanism and one thing we really want to be intentional about is Documenting the outcomes to see you know does this really work does this increase the incentive to contribute to the core protocol? And we hope it will but we want to make sure that The community holds us accountable, and we really iterate and improve the mechanism over time One of the cool things is because this is all on chain anybody can track it. So if you go to do an analytics and search protocol guild or Something monkey. Sorry. I can't remember the name of the contributor But we've been working with someone to put together this dashboard and anybody can track the finances of this on chain Protocol incentivization mechanism, which is pretty amazing. You can see the membership the total weighting of their share of the proceeds who has contributed really great data source and Awesome for transparency if anybody's interested in tracking that so I'm ending a little early if there are any questions I'd love to talk with anybody who wants to learn more about the mechanism if you're part of a d5 project or something That's planning to launch a token Please do come talk to me or any of the members. There's a ton of core developers here who are part of this project that QR code I think takes you to the docs or somewhere else relevant So yeah, and then there's some bitly links if anybody's curious to explore more That's my handle and then you can follow the the organization itself at protocol guild on Twitter Yeah, so thank you for the time again to DevCon organizers for giving me space to talk about this public goods funding is incredibly important and It's it's important to have also a variety of approaches different curators different mechanisms so that we can make sure that the incentives to contributing back to the Ethereum protocol In the context of amazing application layer projects is maintained over time So thank you, and I'm happy to take questions if there aren't any we have a question here We'll give the mic to the gentleman over there if you have more questions Please just raise your hand or get to the end of the line so we can quickly give you the mic and I'll let's begin with the question Hey, Trent. Thanks amazing initiative. Thank you for giving the speech. I had a question about the recent acquisition of prism I'm curious if you could comment on that like obviously on one hand that means that there's I guess less pressure on the protocol Guilt to fund those developers on the other hand, is that the kind of outcome that we strive for now? Obviously Arbitrum there. They're a good actor. I think they have a great reputation But one could think of some potential downsides So I'm just wondering how does the protocol guild feel about those kind of outcomes? What sort of downsides do you see undo influence? I mean obviously we have like nine teams in total who are contributing to this if I'm not mistaken and so, you know We trust Arbitrum if If they start doing some weird stuff, you know, there's other options for people to choose a different clients And obviously if we have many more clients their influence, you know, they won't really have an influence But nevertheless, you know, they have certain interests They might like they're probably gonna launch a token tokenomics. How do they pump their token? You know these kind of questions. Yeah, you definitely picked the hardest question It's given they announced yesterday. So, yeah, this is this is really interesting and digs into it touches a lot of different areas about protocol governance incentivization Funding the core protocol work and like you said, I don't I know them all personally So I do have a bias here, but I do expect that they will maintain their neutrality I can't comment super deeply on it again because it just happened and I'm still digesting still understanding the mechanics of it But I don't expect that there would be any Undue influence exerted by the L2 and like you said, if there were Red flags starting to appear. I'm pretty sure the community would call it out pretty fast and either Arbitrum or the prismatic team would adjust course pretty quickly, but yeah, that's the short answer It's on other hand. Do we have more questions? What's the like what's let's say someone's leaving the protocol guild? What's like the process for the operating like do they have an amount of time or Has that been thought through much leaving or joining leaving if they're leaving? So they can they can claim any assets from vesting at any point, but there are windows in the contract So once they leave contributing core protocol work, they can they won't receive future vesting But they they can claim it anytime. It's permissionless like that. Does that answer? Yes anybody else? I have one sure. How do you think about? Deciding what should be funded and how do you sort of in a way prevent or get ahead of not having favoritism kind of coming to play? Yeah This is something that we've been trying to iterate on through the pilot and one of the reasons we wanted to start really small I mean 10 million is It may seem like a large number, but split between 120 different core contributors It's not not that massive But we were very intentional about the amount of money that we're raising and and that's one of the main reasons Because the eligibility framework isn't going to be exactly right the first time and we're going to need to iterate on it And so that's part of this pilot is figuring out What sort of scope we want to take on and I think what we've learned over the past six months since May is that? it's probably better for a more narrow scope and To be as explicit as possible So if you're working on a research team if you contribute to a client code base or doing coordination We want to make sure that it's it's very clear that these are people who are contributing value because if you aren't explicit or don't maintain rigor in the eligibility process again the mechanism will lose its value it'll become a Lossy signal for people who are interested in contributing to something. That's that's Gonna get their money to go to the right place so Make sure that we're iterating and starting small is is how we've approached it That's great and just out of curiosity Did you kind of compare this thing with the retroactive funding model and sort of what was kind of the? The pros and cons list that you made made you kind of pick this model sure so retroactive funding is great in that we can also plug into that however These individual teams they don't have to apply on their own or the because protocol guild is biased towards the individual it's you can imagine it's sort of like a collective or a union that represents them and Makes it very very straightforward for people interested in funding like like optimisms retroactive funding program They can just point it to a single address and scale it accordingly. However much they'd like to give back rather than Possibly missing somebody who did crucial work over the past two years They can rest assured that this is this is a mechanism that's going to be very very tightly curated But yeah, I am super excited to plug into retroactive funding continue to have a good coin grant things like that is All possible and I'm sure there will be even more mechanisms in the future that are a good fit for these types of things awesome Do any other last questions great? Well, please give Trent a big round of applause. Thank you