ETHDay - Trent Van Epps - Protocol Guild

all set thank you um yeah so i'm going to be talking about funding ethereum public goods with the protocol guild my name is trent van apps and today i'm presenting in my capacity as a member of the protocol guild but i also work for the ethereum foundation with tim and working with the all-core devs call and a lot of ecosystem projects helping to coordinate upgrades things like that thanks to the organizers for inviting me and i really appreciate it um excited to talk about this project so let's start with what are ethereum public goods this is a term you've probably heard many many times thrown around here and there it's a really consistent topic but let's let's refresh our definition and i want to make sure we're all on the same page so there are two main characteristics uh what ethereum public goods are or what what defines public goods the first is that they're non-excludable this means a user cannot be prevented from accessing it for free and the second main characteristic of a public good is that it's non-rivalrous meaning um use by one person doesn't prevent anybody else from using it so these are the two big characteristics and we can consider ethereum as a technology or the evm as a public good for the people that use it probably a lot of us you know using the chain this is something that we depend on and it's really important to us as users and underneath that there's also you know the research that evolves the protocol the clients that implement it uh and the coordination for upgrades that take that research and bring it to users actually interacting with it these are things that all the users of the protocol benefit from now today there's there's obviously gas fees as a congestion pricing mechanism these are necessary which means it's not quite a globally accessible you know ubiquitous public good but we hope that scaling and layer two systems are going to bring us closer on the spectrum towards a global public good as we hope it will be so now that we've defined what they are um how are they generally funded um i want to say we're really it's quite amazing we're fortunate in the community that there is a an amazingly rich history of funding experiments for ethereum public goods the biggest one you're probably aware of is the ethereum foundation does a ton of work throughout the entire ecosystem funding client teams and different research projects tons of great work there there's a couple other i'm going to go through just to just to illustrate the the amount of experiments that are happening uh all the time so there's git coin many of you may have contributed to it bitcoin and clr fund they do matching rounds every quarter which uses quadratic funding mechanisms to distribute to different grants um [Music] this is probably something you've interacted with or at least heard of then there's some other ones which may be less well-known optimism the layer 2 ran retroactive public goods funding round last year where they have a selection process and then distribute funding to some projects through a public process there's also open grants which streams 4 000 ether to a bunch of researchers over time it's a vested stream last year there was large grants to execution layer clients taken from the application layer i had the pleasure of being involved with projects like the beacon book and 1559 nfts which again take uh like make create something artistic and then redirect that ease to the people who actually produce these things uh there's also the daily guay one year anniversary nfts there are many many examples of this and i'm i apologize if i missed yours or you're watching this stream but i just want to emphasize like this is a great thing and we're really fortunate to have such a variety of experiments in the community however these all run into some similar limitations who curates the beneficiaries who ends up being curated who ultimately gets funds and how these funds are distributed in what form you know they all approach the problem in different ways but they all have their own limitations uh to expand on that uh kevin owaki from git coin has almost trademarked the phrase uh public goods are good uh i don't know if he can actually trademark it but he's trying to for sure so i'll add to it with community funding of public goods is good i think it reminds us of our agency as community members it makes relationships stronger throughout the community when we have a diversity of approaches you know all those examples i listed in the other slide we get better coverage of things that may not be visible to different people working in different parts of the ecosystem use cases that are better fit for some purposes may not be best fit for others um and it also decentralizes power and influence throughout the ecosystem so these are all really good things um you know you can have domain experts funding what needs to be funded where they have that intimate perspective into it so the big question that this is all leading to is uh listed on the slide how should we retain talent and reward protocol core protocol contributors this has been a pretty consistent conversation over the years you know since the beginning of ethereum the genesis block up into last year in november and even if a few weeks ago this is a very consistent conversation in the community and it's uh something that's definitely worth considering so since november of last year a group of core contributors people who do research work on clients work on coordination for upgrades have been collaborating to start thinking about what would an incentive mechanism for the core protocol look like and so we came to these three challenges uh that are specifically unique to core protocol work um or at least have a uh specific importance to the work that people are doing on the core protocol so the first one is curation is hard the second incentives are imbalanced the third contributor churn is bad these are pretty basic challenges but i'm gonna go through them in the next next few slides as well as how did each challenge influence the the eventual design of the protocol guild the first one curation is hard uh the big challenge the first one uh applications and l2s want to sponsor core development but curation of the contributor set is is really challenging unless you're intimately involved with it uh um and then on the inverse protocol contributors are interested in token upside and financial benefit but self-organizing is is challenging there's no single solution that collects people working on all these client teams and doing the work throughout the ecosystem there's no single solution that uh brings them all into one place and is actively updated um and even if if you were if somebody were to try to do this expecting a single organization like coin or something to curate and maintain this list themselves it's it's pretty challenging uh again unless you're intimately involved with the the work that's going on already uh so the design objective we took from that is that the the members themselves should just self-curate this list the second challenge is that existing solutions usually favor teams again because curation is hard uh it's much easier to find a team get an ethereum address that people can send donations to rather than the 15 to 30 odd contributors that a client team might have for example one of them one of the sort of medicals we decided to use as a guide for the work that we were doing with with this project is uh to avoid governance and intermediate intermediation wherever we could uh giving as much agency to independent contributors as possible so the the design objective we took from that is individuals should be the base unit not teams uh the second big challenge financial incentives are skewed towards protocols built on top of the protocol this this is probably something people are really aware of or at least have experience in some way when they're considering how to get into this base you know as a credibly neutral infrastructure with no block reward ethereum doesn't offer the same token incentives that an application or layer 2 would be able to provide however it still needs to attract and retain talent to continue to evolve the protocol and we think as the ecosystem continues to grow it's probably only going to get more and more competitive i want to say this isn't to fault any individuals for weighting these incentives this is a pretty rational thing to do or or to fault protocols for using tokens to incentivize you know contributor sets this is just kind of the reality of the context uh and obviously final caveat is financial motivations aren't the only motivation i know every single core contributor is here for the bigger purpose of what we're building it's not the only motivator our financial motivations aren't the only thing but it's one that we think is under leverage so the design objective is that we will nudge the balance the incentive balance back to the protocol by getting sponsors to share some upside from the application or l2 layer then the final challenge is that contributor turn is bad you know there's a steep learning curve for contributors to actually start delivering value and by value i mean understanding uh how the team operates um comprehending the the work that's already been in progress and making meaningful contributions so the design objective we wanted to consider here is that you your membership uh has a cliff of six months you have to be contributing at least for six months before you're actually added to this mechanism um the second challenge uh contributor value grows over time but there is less incentive for someone who's been here for six years to stick around and continue contributing once they're experts there might be other opportunities so the two design objectives we took from that is first that assets going to this mechanism should vest to reduce churn in the contributor set help transfer knowledge between cohorts as a really key concept as well as you should weight contributor allocations according to to time so if somebody's been here twice as long as me they should have it should be reflected in how the mechanism is actually weighted so as as you've probably guessed i've been describing what the protocol guild is and and how it operates and so i'll summarize it really quickly here it's a smart contract um if you're familiar with xerox splits we're working with this team to they have a split protocol and we've worked with them to design a vesting component that gets added to it so it vest assets which are sent from sponsors these are applications or layer twos any project that's building on ethereum um and these assets can be governance tokens layer two sequencer fees uh recurring protocol fee revenue fractionalized nfts whatever you can think of this could this can accept erc20s and eth and so these assets go to a weighted list of ethereum protocol contributors and again these are the weights are directly related to how long you've been contributing and it's self-curated and self-managed by its membership so we get the benefit of domain experts the people who are working on clients they have the intimate perspective uh who's doing this work on a daily basis or a regular basis um and then broadly it's it's a mechanism for voluntary sponsors to share value back to the people who are doing the important work um sharing the value generated by applications um what we hope is that it will incentivize growth stability and reward for people who are here long term who are interested in making ethereum uh again a globally accessible public good because we're not there yet and there's still a lot of work to do to get us there and we think we've we've used or we've designed this framework which is politically and operationally tailored to specifically fit this use case so since november of last year it's grown to over 100 members which is it still blows my mind that that there are these many this many people even working um on on core protocol stuff from 21 different teams and nine different independent orgs uh it literally wouldn't exist without their collaborative efforts and continued membership so shout out to any core contributors if you're in the room um and so what we're gonna do is we're taking this this mechanism the the way we intend to operate it and we're uh running a pilot this year um [Music] the sponsoring assets anything that's sent to this smart contract will vest for one year so we're in the process of reaching out to interested sponsors who want to give back to people who are working on the core protocol targeting 20 million in sponsorships for this first year um and i'll say shout out to lydo they're the first project who's commit to a contribution um yeah [Applause] but if you're if you're part of a project and you're also interested in contributing in any way uh i'd be more than happy to talk to you and guide you explain the project guide you through what it is and and the expectations we have um yeah and so this pilot will will probably do quarterly updates for the membership and the weights as people leave or join core protocol work um we're really excited to finally get this out you know we've been working on it for many months uh but we're really excited to get it in the wild see how it's useful whether it can be abused and how it can be improved and then once we have a solid idea on how to operate it we're comfortable with it we'll probably scale it up to a higher dollar amount and a longer vesting period maybe four years and as i'm wrapping up here uh i have two quotes from current members uh one from an anonymous core contributor and i'll just read them off uh the whole is greater than the sum of the parts without the parts there is no hole this project addresses the parts without diminishing the hole and then from michael sproul of the lighthouse team sigma prime they create the lighthouse client for the consensus layer he says i love that protocol guild centers individual contributors ahead of organizations and in doing so grants autonomy to all of the people working on ethereum's base layer we have an opportunity to prove the viability of an alternative funding model for public goods which i hope will inspire many more experiments in radical economic coordination and that's it this qr code [Applause] this qr code will take you to the docs if you want to read more we've tried to write up you know different scenarios for how this thing can operate how it can fail uh we're especially interested in in trying to anticipate ways that it can fail in in many ways but yeah so protocol guild read the docs follow that qr code if you're interested in following along uh statefulworks is the organization that will be doing public communications through if you're interested in learning more contributing in any way please reach out more than happy to explain the project so we're in the process of getting the vesting contract in audit that will hopefully be deployed in the next few weeks and then yeah we'll see where it goes from there thank you again to the organizers i appreciate it thank you thank you [Applause] i do have a question for you what motivated you specifically personally to work on ethereum why ethereum sure i'm gonna steal something from piper merriam he's a a member of the guild and um he's been working on ethereum for a long time but the way he phrased it was really uh really well really well said and i'll just use his phrasing but he he said ethereum is uh the greatest lever he can use to influence change in the world and i think that's a really great way to frame it because as an individual what what can a single person do to affect change you could maybe become a politician not not many people are cut out for that you could you know start a non-profit [Music] there there are challenges associated with that you can work individually in your own community but working in ethereum specifically um as i imagine many of you are working in uh it's it's a way to be a part of shaping the future and like like piper said it's the way that you can [Music] the greatest way to leverage your personal actions into global change which is pretty wild if you think about it so that's why i'm here uh i think it's i couldn't be working on anything else do you have any tips for developers that are starting that are that want to get involved what what should what should they do yeah sure so again piper runs this uh thing called the core developer apprenticeship program um we're finishing up the the second cohort and unclear when we'll run the next one but i recommend people either check that out in the ethereum r d discord that would be the core developer apprenticeship program we'll probably run or hopefully run something later this year but it's a great way if you're you know you've been curious about core protocol work and you want to get deeper into it that's a great place to start uh and then generally with with every open community or every uh project in in crypto the best way to get involved is to just start doing things just show up and ask what can i do to be helpful obviously core protocol stuff might be a little more complex you can't just jump into it there's a little bit of time it takes to understand how this stuff works but yeah just show up whatever your skill set try to contribute even even like awareness for how upgrades are going the work that tim and i are doing around upgrades there's there's ways for anybody to help with that um so yeah show up and just see how you can be helpful you heard you heard it from trent just show up just show up and see how it can be useful thank you thank you so much [Music]