Exploring the Protocol Guild: 177 members, more than $100 million in grants, solid backing for Ethereum L1 development and maintenance

Ether.fi, Taiko and other projects have donated to Protocol Guild, and LayerZero’s move to force airdrop users to donate has aroused widespread attention and discussion in the community, as well as some confusion and questions. As a solid backing for the development and maintenance of EthereumL1, ProtocolGuild plays a vital role in the ecosystem. So, what are the membership requirements, grant status, and donation release mechanism behind this mysterious and powerful organization? This article will take you to find out.

What is ProtocolGuild?

ProtocolGuild is an organization established specifically for the development and maintenance of EthereumL1. It is committed to providing financial support to core contributors in the Ethereumecosystem through the native token incentives of Ethereumecological projects to ensure EthereumThe network is thriving and innovating. Since the beginning of 2022, ProtocolGuild has completed the mechanism design and begun recruiting members. In May of the same year, ProtocolGuild launched the ProtocolGuildPilot pilot program. After two years of careful operation and continuous improvement, at the end of January 2024, ProtocolGuild disclosed its official commitment and ended the pilot project, and at the same time launched PGv2, aiming to enable EthereumL1 R&D contributors Directly identifiable on-chain and showing who is currently contributing to the protocol and for how long through the use of time-weighted lists and clear membership criteria.

ProtocolGuild commitment shows that it is recommended that projects based on Ethereum donate 1% of their native tokens to ProtocolGuild. The main reason is to attract and retain high-quality contributors and provide them with more substantial expected potential returns. , and can ensure that these tokens will eventually flow into the hands of valuable contributors. It is worth mentioning that this 1% of native tokens will not be released at once, but will be gradually released over four years.

Why choose the ratio of 1%? ProtocolGuild’s consideration is that if 33% to 66% of projects can adopt this donation standard, then each member can expect to receive an average of US$500,000 to US$1 million per year. Currently, ProtocolGuild has received a total of donations worth US$76 million (current value). In the past year, members received a median donation of $54,000. At the same time, ProtocolGuild's team of members has grown from the original 90 to 177 today.

Who are the current members of ProtocolGuild?

ProtocolGuild has gathered 177 members so far, who are mainly from Ethereumfoundation members and Ethereummainnet clients. Among them, the clients include Geth, EthereumJS, Erigon, HyperledgerBesu, Lighthouse, Lodestar, Nethermind, Prysm, Reth, Nimbus, Teku, etc., and 6 to 15 contributors in each client are included in the Protocol Guild, which allows the client to contribute They account for nearly 60% of the entire Protocol Guild members. In addition, ProtocolGuild members also include the EthereumFoundation Application Research Group (ARG), ethPandaOps (EthereumFoundation sub-group), Ipsilon R&D team (focused on EVM research), Ethereum The foundation's Portal Network (committed to redefining the way resource-constrained devices participate in the Ethereum network), as well as multiple key teams such as Protocol Support, Cryptography, ConsensusR&D, RobustIncentivesGroup, and Testing. Among them, some familiar members include Tim Beiko and Danny Ryan from the Ethereum Foundation Protocol Support team, and Justin Drake from the Consensus Research Team (ConsensusR&D). However, it is worth noting that Vitalik Buterin is not currently listed as a member of ProtocolGuild.

What donations have ProtocolGuild members received?

ProtocolGuild’s flourishing development would not be possible without the generous donations from many projects. What projects have donated to ProtocolGuild? How about donations received by ProtocolGuild members?

ether.fi, as the first project to pledge to donate to ProtocolGuild, committed to donate 1% of the token supply to ProtocolGuild before the ProtocolGuild commitment was disclosed at the end of January this year to support the continued development of Ethereum. Subsequently, DeFi mortgage lending protocol PWN, zkRollup-based EthereumLayer2 project Taiko, decentralized lending pool EthereumCreditGuild, modular decentralized storage Layer2 project EthStorage and several other Meme projects also followed suit, converting 1% of the proxy Coins are allocated to ProtocolGuild.

In addition to the 1% token commitment, Protocol Guild also received various donations during the pilot period, including 500,000 UNI, 200,000 ENS, 2 million LDO, 3 million ARB, etc.

Source: Dune https://dune.com/protocolguild/protocol-guild

Even the US spot Bitcoin ETF issuer Bitwise recently donated 50% of the proceeds from its Ethereumadvertising NFT to ProtocolGuild.

Coincidentally, in September last year, another ETF issuer VanEck announced plans to donate 10% of the profits of its Ethereumfutures ETF to Protocol Guild to thank Ethereumcontributors for their contributions in the past ten years.

In the past few days, the LayerZero Foundation also implemented mandatory donations during the token airdrop claiming process, requiring airdrop users to donate USD 0.1 USDC, USDT or native ETH for each ZRO. This donation will be used directly for Protocol Guild. This will result in a donation of approximately $18.5 million to Protocol Guild.

Additionally, the LayerZero Foundation will match all donations up to $10 million.

According to Dune data, the total donations received by ProtocolGuild are currently worth more than 76 million US dollars, of which donations from ether.fi and Taiko account for 66%. If combined with LayerZero’s mandatory donation, Protocol Guild will receive more than $100 million.

As of this month, the median donation amount per member of ProtocolGuild in the past 12 months was $54,000, and is expected to grow to $81,000 in the next 12 months. Over the next four years, $57 million in donated funds will vest and be released to Protocol Guild members, and this is limited to donations currently received. What are the qualifications to become a member of ProtocolGuild? ProtocolGuild can be seen as a donation and fund distribution mechanism for Ethereum R&D maintainers. So, what qualifications do you need to become one? According to the official documentation of ProtocolGuild, the following are some basic requirements: the project/organization is completely open source; regularly active in the Ethereum specification repository, research forum, functional prototype design, regular Ethereum protocol calls, etc.; focus on researching protocol specifications, Ethereum Core protocol maintenance and development (such as contributing to Ethereum mainnet client implementations such as Erigon, EthereumJS, Geth, HyperledgerBesu, Lighthouse, Lodestar, Nethermind, Nimbus, Prysm, Teku, and Reth, etc.), research related to potential protocol changes, and Implement experiments or ProtocolGuild studies, etc. However, meeting the above conditions is only a basis and is not sufficient to ensure membership in ProtocolGuild. Applicants also need to have worked continuously in the relevant organization/project for at least 6 months and are expected to continue the work, and the period of interruption in contribution shall not exceed one quarter. For non-full-time members, their income weight will be reduced accordingly based on actual circumstances. ProtocolGuild members' share of revenue is proportional to the square root of their contribution time to Ethereum (measured in months), ensuring a fair correspondence between contributions and rewards. Currently, in ProtocolGuild, it seems that the addition of new members requires invitations and nominations from existing members, which will then be reviewed and discussed by all existing members. If there is a conflict of interest between the nominator and nominee, this must be disclosed in advance to ensure a fair and transparent process. How are ProtocolGuild donations released? When it comes to ProtocolGuild’s grant-funded release mechanism, its core lies in its smart contract architecture. ProtocolGuild uses smart contracts created by Splits to manage the ownership, distribution and flow of donated funds. All donations are made through the 4-year vesting contract on the mainnet, which vests the funds in a designated wallet (Pass-ThroughWallet), which then sends the funds to the split contract to be distributed according to members’ contribution shares. Among them, the split contract contains the addresses of all ProtocolGuild members and their respective vested fund shares, and is updated quarterly to reflect changes in membership, additions and subtractions of members, and adjustments to the weight of each member.

In addition, ProtocolGuild uses DAOhaus's MolochV3 contract for on-chain governance, giving each member equal voting rights to approve or veto changes in on-chain membership. Once a decision is reached, ProtocolGuild’s multisig takes care of handling the changes and updating the split contract to reflect the latest membership list and funding allocation. In the vast universe of Ethereum, ProtocolGuild, with its unique donation and fund distribution mechanism, attracts core contributors who are committed to the development and maintenance of Ethereum. As a bridge connecting funds and contributors, ProtocolGuild not only ensures the reasonable allocation of funds, but also injects continuous power into the prosperity and development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

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