Exploring the Protocol Guild: 177 members, received more than 100 million US dollars, a solid backing for the development and maintenance of Ethereum L1

ether.fi, Taiko and other projects have donated to Protocol Guild, as well as LayerZero’s move to force airdrop users to donate, which has aroused widespread attention and discussion in the community, as well as some confusion and questions. As a strong backing for the development and maintenance of Ethereum L1, ProtocolGuild plays a vital role in the ecosystem. So, what are the membership requirements, access and donation release mechanisms 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 Ethereum L1. It is committed to providing financial support to core contributors in the Ethereum ecosystem through native token incentives for Ethereum ecological projects to ensure the vigorous development of the Ethereum network. and continuous innovation. 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 launched PGv2 at the same time, aiming to enable Ethereum L1 R&D contributors to join the chain. Directly identify and display who is currently contributing to the protocol and for how long through the use of time-weighted lists and clear membership criteria.

ProtocolGuild promises that it is recommended that Ethereum-based projects 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 It 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 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, mainly from Ethereum Foundation members and Ethereum mainnet 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 Ethereum Foundation Application Research Group (ARG), ethPandaOps (Ethereum Foundation sub-group), Ipsilon R&D team (focused on EVM research), and the Ethereum Foundation’s Portal Network (committed to redefining how 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’s Protocol Support team, and Justin Drake from the Consensus R&D team. 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 Protocol Guild, committed to donate 1% of the token supply to Protocol Guild before the Protocol Guild commitment was disclosed at the end of January this year to support the continued development of Ethereum. Subsequently, the DeFi mortgage lending protocol PWN, the zkRollup-based Ethereum Layer 2 project Taiko, the decentralized lending pool EthereumCreditGuild, the modular decentralized storage Layer 2 project EthStorage, and several other Meme projects also followed suit and allocated 1% of the tokens. to ProtocolGuild.

In addition to the 1% token commitment, ProtocolGuild also received various donations during the pilot period, including 500,000 UNI, 200,000 ENS, 2 million LDO, 3 million ARB, etc. Even the US spot Bitcoin ETF issuer Bitwise recently donated 50% of the proceeds from the Ethereumadvertising NFT issued by it to Protocol Guild. Coincidentally, in September last year, another ETF issuer VanEck announced plans to donate 10% of the profits from its Ethereum futures ETF to Protocol Guild to thank Ethereum contributors for their nearly ten years of efforts. A few days ago, 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, of which donations from ether.fi and Taiko account for 66%. If coupled with LayerZero’s mandatory donation, the amount received by Protocol Guild will exceed 100 million USD.

As of this month, each ProtocolGuild member has received generous donations in the past 12 months of $54,000, which 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 interruption of 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.

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

In addition, ProtocolGuild uses DAOhaus's MolochV3 contract to conduct on-chain negotiations, giving each member equal electionrights to approve or veto changes in on-chain membership. Once the Conclusion is reached, ProtocolGuild’s multisig takes care of handling these changes and updating the split contract to reflect the latest membership list and funding allocation. In the vast universe of Ethereum, ProtocolGuild has attracted corecontributors who are committed to the development and maintenance of Ethereum with its unique donation and fund distribution mechanism. 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. Reference: https://protocol-guild.readthedocs.io/

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