# Protocol Guild | Sustaining Ethereum's Future - Cheeky Gorilla | ETHDam III - 2025 - Speakers: [Cheeky Gorilla](https://streameth.org/speakers/cheeky-gorilla) - Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal) - Date: 2025-10-07 - Duration: 19:33 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-zkp5Fql6vYk - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkp5Fql6vYk ## Description Welcome to the 3rd Edition of ETHDam, hosted May 9–11, 2025 in Amsterdam. This year, we brought together the brightest minds in privacy, security, and AI for a unique 48-hour hackathon + conference combo. 🌷 https://www.ethdam.com// 🌷 ------------------ Protocol Guild | Sustaining Ethereum's Future - Cheeky Gorilla | ETHDam III - 2025 🎀 About the Speaker: As a full-time contributor to the Protocol Guild, Cheeky spends their time building norms around setting aside a portion of Ethereum's ecosystem revenues to fund core protocol work. 𝕏 Follow Cheeky and Protocol Guild: https://x.com/cheekygorilla0x https://linktr.ee/protocolguild https://x.com/ProtocolGuild ------------------ About ETHDam & CryptoCanal ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, an education and events platform rooted in Amsterdam, expanding into Rotterdam and ZΓΌrich. Keep up with us to see updates on future events: https://www.cryptocanal.org/ Follow CryptoCanal on X: https://twitter.com/CryptoCanal Join CryptoCanal TG Community: https://t.me/CryptoCanalCommunity Join CryptoCanal Discord: https://discord.com/invite/XJVjpCqQBz CryptoCanal unites crypto enthusiasts committed to making a positive impact. Unapologetically political, we prioritize education, events, and services while championing cypherpunk values like privacy, sovereignty, and censorship resistance. ------------------ πŸŽ₯ Credits: Intro / outro by babyPRO - https://babypro.art/ ETHDam Photography by Paulus – https://concretestate.eu/ ------------------ Special thanks to our partners who made ETHDam possible: 🌹 Hackathon – Bouquet: Oasis Network https://oasisprotocol.org/ 🌷 Hackathon – Petal: Circles https://aboutcircles.com πŸ’› Conference – Gold: Zano https://zano.org/ Dash https://www.dash.org/ Bitvavo https://bitvavo.com/en 🩢 Conference – Silver: Igra Labs https://igralabs.com/hero πŸ’› Conference – Copper: Lido https://lido.fi/ DeTrip https://detrip.travel/ Cake Wallet https://cakewallet.com/ The Grid https://thegrid.id/ Calimero Network https://calimero.network/ 0xbow https://0xbow.io/ Mina https://minaprotocol.com/ JobStash https://jobstash.xyz/ Cyber Capital https://www.cyber.capital/ POAP https://poap.xyz/ Acronym Foundation (Supported our Top 10 Hackers) https://acronymfoundation.org/ 🌱 Sponsor: EF Ecosystem Support Program https://esp.ethereum.foundation ------------------ 0:00 Intro 0:32 What is Ethereum and the Commons Problem 1:59 Financial Disincentives for Core Devs 3:23 Failed Funding Mechanisms and the Need for Social Norms 5:00 Protocol Guild Concept and Design 7:01 Membership Registry and Eligibility 8:24 Funding Mechanism and Distribution Logic 10:02 Protocol Guild Pledge Explained 13:22 Current Impact and Results 15:01 Challenges Measuring Contribution Fairly 18:01 Broader Applications and the Future of Guilds ## Transcript Welcome to EA to E to E to E to E. All right, we have our next talk uh from the cheeky gorilla. Uh this is pro protocol guild sustaining Ethereum's future. Thank you. All right. Hello everyone. Is this a good distance for the mic? Can you all hear me? It's perfect. Let's do this. All right. Yeah. Thanks for the intro. Uh, thanks to the organizers for having me. Um, I'm Cheeky Gorilla. You can call me Cheeky. Um, I'm here to talk about Protocol Guild. Um, a funding mechanism for Ethereum's core devs. Um, but before we talk about Protocol Guild, let's really quick talk about Ethereum. Specifically, what even is Ethereum? And I'm pretty sure that if I were to ask 10 of you what Ethereum is, I will get at least five different answers. Some of you might describe it as an infinite garden or ultrasound money or a settlement layer. God forbid, some of you might describe it as Bitcoin plus smart contracts. But you know what? You would all be right. There are so many ways to describe Ethereum because there are so many ways to use it. And to that extent, we can kind of think of Ethereum as a commons like forests or fisheries. What are commons? They are an area or shared resource that is accessible to and used by the public. Unfortunately, like all commons, this resource can be abused. And I'm of course talking about the tragedy of the commons, which is when individuals act in their own self-interest, depleting shared resources to the detriment of everyone else. And that's why I have Mollik here, who you may know we like to use to represent coordination failures in Ethereum. And Mollik is holding up a tweet by Amin Solommani who's actually roaming around outside. Uh and Amin is bemoning the lack of funding for Ethereum's core protocol development. And the issue that he raises is a serious one. Today the financial incentives associated with working on Ethereum's core protocol only provide a fraction compared to other work in the ecosystem. And that's really bad because it means it's not economically rational to work on Ethereum. And so we visualize this issue in this chart here where you can see that Ethereum's L1 R&D work is both low risk and low reward. But more importantly, it shows by how just taking on a little bit more risk by going to work for a large crypto project like an exchange or layer 2, they can significantly increase their rewards. And so if one of these core devs gets a lucrative job offer, we can't really blame them if they take that offer. Why does that matter? Well, because Ethereum is still very far from being done. If you are at all familiar with the road map, there are a bunch of really exciting upgrades that are planned for both the short, medium, and long term. Um, and of course, this is the only way that we're going to allow Ethereum to be able to on board the world. But to execute this roadmap, it is imperative that Ethereum can actually on board and retain its talented core protocol contributors. So this brings us to an existential question for Ethereum. How can we rebalance these financial incentives to make this work economically rational on a riskadjusted basis? So brainstorm with me. What about altruism? Right? Can we rely on kind individuals to fund this work out of the goodness of their hearts? Well, this is Ethereum, so we do have some examples of this. This is u Preston Vanlon from the Prism client team um tweeting about the lack of funding for the Prism client back in 2018. Now, luckily for Preston, some guy replied, "YOLO!" and sent him a,000 ETH, which was worth around $100,000 at the time. Now, is that something that we can rely on? Absolutely not. It's uh it's not sustainable. And quite frankly, we don't know if there's a risk of capture because these kind individuals could have ulterior motives. And of course, it's also uh narrowly targeted because not all core devs are on Twitter asking for money and receiving money. So, what about making Ethereum's holders pay? I'm sure all of you are Ethereum's holders. Um, what would you think about carving out a portion of Ethereum's issuance to pay for this work? Well, there was an EIP which proposed to do this, but it was rejected. Why was it rejected? Because that is not credibly neutral. Ethereum is about collective empowerment, and that does not include forcing a paycheck for core devs into every single block. It would also be really hard to change if ultimately this didn't quite work out the way we intended. Protocol upgrades cannot be made willy-nilly in Ethereum, which is absolutely a feature and not a bug. And lastly, lastly, it's a slippery slope because, you know, if we establish a precedent of funding core dev work this way, who's to say that another group of people wouldn't pop up and say, "Hey, you should also pay us this in the same way." So, there's got to be something better. Well, what about social norms? So, here we have a tweet from Danny Ryan back in October of 2021 where he said, "Make it a social norm for projects building on Ethereum to donate 1.5% of their token supply to the individuals who are designing the L1 infrastructure they rely on. Now, this is a very interesting idea because it targets individuals, not teams. So, you know that funding is actually going to the people who are doing the work you want to support. It would also give those individuals exposure to the value being created in the ecosystem via tokens. It would be a cost borne by the actual projects themselves and not their users. And of course, if this were actually a social norm, then it would have a low risk of capture and could even be long-term sustainable. But we're missing a piece here. How would you actually distribute that funding? So, let's take a step back. What we need to is to build social norms so that we can rebalance the financial incentives for Ethereum's core protocol work. We need a distribution mechanism that can distribute all those ecosystem tokens to Ethereum's core protocol contributors in a way that's sufficiently fair, in a way that remains accurate over time, and perhaps most importantly retains Ethereum's credible neutrality. Now, maybe some of you can guess what I'm getting at because I've just described protocol guild. And to really understand how Protocol Guild can be used to rebalance financial incentives for Ethereum's core protocol work, you need to understand Protocol Guild's two core components, a membership registry and a funding mechanism. So, first and foremost, Protocol Guild is a membership registry of Ethereum's active core protocol contributors. Today, this includes a list of 188 individuals. These are people from all over the world and all of them are working on the future of Ethereum. But what are they actually doing? Well, there's broadly speaking three categories of work they could be involved in. Either client development or research work that will eventually be eventually be implemented by clients or work that supports those first two which includes includes uh spec work, testing, security, infrar coordination. Here's a bunch of teams that uh could be eligible for membership if you're working in these teams. You've probably heard of client teams like GE uh Aragon Basu Teu. You may have heard of research groups like robust incentive groups uh group uh Julian from that team is actually here presenting. Um and you may have heard of coordination teams like Ethereum cat herders. But I should clarify that protocol guild's membership is centered around individuals not teams. So if they hire you and you do the work but you quit but you keep on doing the work, you could still be eligible for Protocol Guild membership. Now I did also say it was a list of active contributors. And what I mean by that is to be eligible for membership, you need to have contributed actively and continuously for at least 6 months. But on average, Protocol Guild members have been contributing three and a half years of their lives to the core protocol. And the oldest member, he's been there from the very start, over 10 years. And as a collective, Protocol Guild members have contributed over 650 years to the core protocol, which is why we can confidently say that Protocol Guild represents the individuals who are stewarding Ethereum's future. What is the net result of all this? Well, we've made the entire set of Ethereum's core protocol contributors directly legible on chain. But how does that rebalance financial incentives? Well, this is where the funding mechanism comes in. because we've built a funding mechanism around this list. So, let's talk about how the funding mechanism works. For starters, we have a single Ethereum address that anyone can use to send tokens directly to everyone in this list. This is the easiest way to support this work. And of course, it's all on chain, so anyone can see um anyone can see who has donated, anyone can verify that the donations are in fact going to this list. But what actually happens when you make a donation? Our donation address is an immutable vesting contract which trustlessly vests funds linearly. So every single block over four years. Why four-year vesting? Well, because we want to create strong long-term incentives for these core devs to stick around and and finish the job, basically. And lastly, how are we distributing the funding? This is one of the most difficult things in public goods funding. How do you distribute funding in a way that matches impact? And we chose to use what we perceive to be the most simple impact measurement that we know which reduces our operational overhead and that's time. So the longer you've been contributing the higher your share of donated funds. However, we also don't want the oldest members to just run away with all the funding. So we introduce a square root function which compresses that variance which essentially has the effect of the oldest members they're constantly getting diluted their share and the newer members their share is increasing at a rapid rate race rate compared to everyone else. So as a net result of all this we believe that we have a funding mechanism which is simple and transparent which creates strong long-term incentives to both on board and retain Ethereum's core protocol contributors over the long term. thus enabling Ethereum's ecosystem to fund its dependencies. And that last part is really important because it brings us back to this notion of social norms, which brings me to the Protocol Guild pledge. Now, are there any projects in this room that have taken the Protocol Guild pledge? Are there any projects that are thinking about taking the Protocol Guild pledge? Has anyone here heard of the Protocol Guild Pledge before? All right, let's let's go over what the Protocol guild pledge is. Um, it's a slight variation of what Danny Ryan proposed. Um, it's, uh, projects committing 1% of their token supply to support Ethereum's core protocol development. So, let's unpack this. Why are we asking for native tokens? Why not ETH or stables? Well, because what we want is for Ethereum's core protocol contributors to be able to benefit from the value that's being created in the ecosystem in the form of ecosystem tokens while staying focused on their core protocol work. A lot of the job offers that they get are based in like tokens which could be high six figures, low seven figures. Um, for the skills that they bring, they are generally compensated far beyond what they can make on the core protocol. And again, a lot of that is based on these these tokens that haven't been launched yet. Um, so by donating your tokens, you basically get to give this upside to the core devs while they stay focused on shipping the upgrades that you depend on. Why 1%? Why not a dollar value? Well, because by denominating the pledge as a percentage, we help to normalize donations. Not all projects can make, you know, millions of dollars worth of donations, but all projects, no, no matter how big or how small, could make a 1% donation. It's also easy to pledge. You can take the pledge before you even have a token. It abstracts volatility because a $1 million donation in a token um might not be worth a million dollars in a bare market whereas 1% is always 1%. And lastly, we did the math and we think that unlike Danny's suggestion of 1.5%, we think 1% is actually sufficient if we can kickstart this social norm in the majority of projects to do this. And lastly, why take the pledge at all? I hope because you're in this room, I don't have to uh drill this too much, but essentially to fund your dependency, right? If you're building on Ethereum, you have a dependency on Ethereum's core protocol development. And by taking the pledge, by donating your tokens, you're helping to rebalance these financial incentives to ensure that these talented core protocol contributors stick around to continue maintaining and upgrading the protocol that you depend on. It also contributes to a more resilient Ethereum by providing another diversified funding source for this work. And of course, it helps scale Ethereum's values. Public goods are good. Ethereum's core protocol development is a foundational public good. Here are the first three projects that took the pledge. Shout out to Ether, Tao, and Pondow. And that's all it took. They just made a post about it on Twitter and the forecaster. And so at this point, I've told you everything you need to know about Protocol Guild, the Protocol Guild pledge. Um, we've been around for just over three years now. And so you might be wondering, okay, is Ethereum's core protocol development economically rational yet? Has Protocol Guild actually done something? And the answer is, we're getting there. So we've received almost 9,000 donations to date in total, um, which are worth or were worth almost $200 million at the time of donation. Now I should clarify that the vast majority of that came from projects that took the pledge. Shout out to uh Ian layer, Ether, Tao Labs, and Puffer. Um but you can see in our donor leaderboard that we have received substantial donations from many different projects in the ecosystem. Now I did say that was the value at the time of donation. Today those funds are valued at $50 million. Um $50 million is still an enormous amount of money. But we need to remember how is how is this funding being distributed, right? Because again we have 188 recipients today. These are core devs and all the funding is being vested over four years. And so what that actually means is that the median core dev is receiving $50,000 from protocol guild. And $50,000 is a great chunk of change to get. Of course, um it is nowhere near enough the job offers the the offers that they're getting in the space, right? So it's not enough to replace a full-time salary. It's not enough to combat the job offers are getting in the space. So, we need to increase our funding by orders of magnitude. So, no, Ethereum's L1 R&D work is still not economically rational for now. I think it's fair to say that based on the results that we've seen in the last 3 years, based on the buyin that we've seen from the ecosystem over the last 3 years, um that there is a desire to turn this around. And so my call out to you, if you know a project that's planning a token launch, why not suggest to them to take the protocol guild pledge to help rebalance the financial incentives for Ethereum's core protocol development so that we can all secure the future of Ethereum together. Last shout out, if you plan on going to ECC, the tickets are a little bit pricey, like $500. Um, there is an auction going on right now on and the link is there, paddlebattle.auction/cc, auction/ECCC where you can bid on a ticket to ECC. Proceeds go to Protocol Guild. So, this is a fun way for you to potentially contribute and while potentially paying less than $500 for a ticket to ECC. Thank you very much for being here. There any questions? I have one. Um so I I really like the uh quadratic function being applied to how much time someone has been contributing. Is there any measure of how much they're contributing? You said they have to be like you know consistent and you know you got to do it for six months but like what there must be a a lower bound here right like how how do you measure something? How do you measure contribution? Excellent question. And if this presentation were five minutes longer, I would have delved into that. Um because it is the one thing that we are we have been thinking about how can we optimize this because um it is not necessarily fair to just reward the people who have been contributing the longest. It does not their contribution timeline is not necessarily a reflection of how valuable they are or how much impact they have, right? Um but again with this mechanism we are asking projects to donate 1% of their token supply. That's an humongous ask. Um we need to make sure that this mechanism is extremely simple that it cannot be co-opted or attacked in any single way. And again time waiting is extremely simple. Um that being said we are currently trying to think about how can we modify this slightly to make sure that um we are helping Ethereum accelerate as fast as it needs to. Um we don't want anyone to accuse uh protocol guild of basically allowing core devs to just rest and vest right uh another way to describe this will be communism which I mean has described us as sometimes um but again the reasons behind this are that this mechanism needs to be as credibly neutral as Ethereum's core protocol development itself which it funds right uh and so if we say suddenly that oh you know Justin Drake deserves 10x more than some other guy that's a really subjective thing that we need to be able to like stand behind in a way that isn't subjective, right? So, this is what we're grappling with right now. We would love to have a way to like inject impact in there and we're circling around a couple options that we could do this that we feel doesn't fundamentally change the mechanism, but you're going to have to wait a few more months until we're ready to reveal something about that. But thank you for the question. No. Uh, and has anyone else approached you about using this in other places like Oh, yeah. smaller scale. I want to use this for my open source project because I want to encourage community builders, all of that kind of good stuff. Absolutely. So, basically the uh there there was a while there. There was a couple months where guilds were like the new the new thing. Everyone was really excited about guilds and there was going to be like a dev tooling guild and there going to be all sorts of guilds and like protocol guild would be like the daddy that like inspired it all. And then [ __ ] deep funding came around and now everyone's like, "Oh, we need AI." And so the guilds have kind of like gone out of favor a little bit um in favor of deep funding, which is like using AI to like fund everything at once. Um which is cool. Like they're they're trying to solve a very complex problem of trying to sol trying to fund everything via like with one address. We're not trying to do that. We are laser focused on one thing which is Ethereum's core protocol development. And we can go to bat for the fact that your funds are going directly to the individuals who are doing this thing. um introducing AI and is expanding the scope as as as large as deep funding is, we think has some critical critical vulnerabilities. We're excited to see their pilot conclude to to see if those um concerns that we have are validated or if we can learn from them. Um but yeah, I didn't mean to [ __ ] on uh Deep Funding at the end of my presentation, but yeah, hopefully that answered your question. Yeah, it does. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.