ProposalsProposal 108
ProposalsProposal 108
Authors: Trent Van Epps (PG Member), Tim Beiko (PG Member)
This is an invitation for the Nouns community to fund Ethereum public goods with 500 ETH through the Protocol Guild: a collective of protocol maintainers.
Nouns has established itself as a prominent Ethereum project for a number of reasons. These include the use of novel mechanisms, passionate membership, and a compelling long-term vision through its commitment towards funding and creating more public goods (here, here and here). Underpinning it all, the community has tapped into the collective power generated by bundling individual motivations into a well-designed coordination mechanism.
Similarly, the Protocol Guild is purpose built to incentivize individual contributions through a collective mechanism. This parallel alignment could be enhanced by engaging each within the other: Nouns should fund the Protocol Guild Pilot. This “engine to engine” relationship:
“Ethereum is an unprecedented arena for playing cooperative games” (Griffith, 2019): we should manifest the collaborative opportunities enabled by this arena.
Watch / listen to this Funding Ethereum with the Protocol Guild presentation or read below.
In Nov. 2021, a group of core Ethereum contributors started exploring the incentive mechanism proposed in this tweet via this framing: What mechanism could help us better attract/retain talent and fund core protocol contributors?
We surfaced three challenges to address:
Through a lot of discussion and iteration, the Protocol Guild was formed: a collective of protocol contributors which actively maintains an onchain registry of its membership.
In response to the challenges above, the org was designed to carry out specific activities:
To date, the membership includes over 110 Ethereum protocol contributors, including researchers, client maintainers, upgrade coordinators, tooling maintainers. This is a broad-based ecosystem effort: members come from 22 different teams and 9 organizations. Only 40% of members are directly employed by the EF. The membership is continuously curated through quarterly updates to the split contract - we expect the membership to grow over the next year.
The Guild contracts are an autonomous value routing mechanism, operated independently from any existing institution, purpose-built for incentivizing long-term core protocol work. At no point does PG take custody of funds on behalf of members, it is all handled trustlessly. Learn more about the smart contracts we are using for the Pilot here.
Since starting the project in Nov 2021, we’ve built norms around member onboarding , refined the splitting and vesting mechanisms, and created extensive documentation on how it should be operated.
We’ve kicked off a test of the mechanism’s efficacy with a 1 year / $10mm Pilot. So far, we’ve raised $5.4mm (as of June 28 2022) from a number of notable communities, including:
Secured funding can be tracked onchain through the Pilot vesting contract. We are currently engaging with a number of other notable projects to secure the remainder of the $10mm target.
We are inviting the Nouns community to contribute 500 ETH (2% of the treasury) to the 1 year Pilot vesting contract deployed at theprotocolguild.eth (0xF29…f1a9).
The ETH will vest to each beneficiary members listed on the underlying split at 0x84af…8ea1. Each recipient will make an independent decision about how to use the ETH once vested.
There are a few reasons why supporting the Protocol Guild Pilot benefits the Nouns community:
We hope that a successful Pilot will pave the way for future funding collaborations between Nouns and the Protocol Guild as we scale up. To that end, we think it’s important to demonstrate impact before we scale: learn more about how we will evaluate Pilot outcomes here. We want to make sure the mechanism operates smoothly before graduating to a full-scale fundraising round with longer vesting periods.
Authors: Trent Van Epps (PG Member), Tim Beiko (PG Member)
This is an invitation for the Nouns community to fund Ethereum public goods with 500 ETH through the Protocol Guild: a collective of protocol maintainers.
Nouns has established itself as a prominent Ethereum project for a number of reasons. These include the use of novel mechanisms, passionate membership, and a compelling long-term vision through its commitment towards funding and creating more public goods (here, here and here). Underpinning it all, the community has tapped into the collective power generated by bundling individual motivations into a well-designed coordination mechanism.
Similarly, the Protocol Guild is purpose built to incentivize individual contributions through a collective mechanism. This parallel alignment could be enhanced by engaging each within the other: Nouns should fund the Protocol Guild Pilot. This “engine to engine” relationship:
“Ethereum is an unprecedented arena for playing cooperative games” (Griffith, 2019): we should manifest the collaborative opportunities enabled by this arena.
Watch / listen to this Funding Ethereum with the Protocol Guild presentation or read below.
In Nov. 2021, a group of core Ethereum contributors started exploring the incentive mechanism proposed in this tweet via this framing: What mechanism could help us better attract/retain talent and fund core protocol contributors?
We surfaced three challenges to address:
Through a lot of discussion and iteration, the Protocol Guild was formed: a collective of protocol contributors which actively maintains an onchain registry of its membership.
In response to the challenges above, the org was designed to carry out specific activities:
To date, the membership includes over 110 Ethereum protocol contributors, including researchers, client maintainers, upgrade coordinators, tooling maintainers. This is a broad-based ecosystem effort: members come from 22 different teams and 9 organizations. Only 40% of members are directly employed by the EF. The membership is continuously curated through quarterly updates to the split contract - we expect the membership to grow over the next year.
The Guild contracts are an autonomous value routing mechanism, operated independently from any existing institution, purpose-built for incentivizing long-term core protocol work. At no point does PG take custody of funds on behalf of members, it is all handled trustlessly. Learn more about the smart contracts we are using for the Pilot here.
Since starting the project in Nov 2021, we’ve built norms around member onboarding , refined the splitting and vesting mechanisms, and created extensive documentation on how it should be operated.
We’ve kicked off a test of the mechanism’s efficacy with a 1 year / $10mm Pilot. So far, we’ve raised $5.4mm (as of June 28 2022) from a number of notable communities, including:
Secured funding can be tracked onchain through the Pilot vesting contract. We are currently engaging with a number of other notable projects to secure the remainder of the $10mm target.
We are inviting the Nouns community to contribute 500 ETH (2% of the treasury) to the 1 year Pilot vesting contract deployed at theprotocolguild.eth (0xF29…f1a9).
The ETH will vest to each beneficiary members listed on the underlying split at 0x84af…8ea1. Each recipient will make an independent decision about how to use the ETH once vested.
There are a few reasons why supporting the Protocol Guild Pilot benefits the Nouns community:
We hope that a successful Pilot will pave the way for future funding collaborations between Nouns and the Protocol Guild as we scale up. To that end, we think it’s important to demonstrate impact before we scale: learn more about how we will evaluate Pilot outcomes here. We want to make sure the mechanism operates smoothly before graduating to a full-scale fundraising round with longer vesting periods.