Safeguarding Ethereum's Soul: Protocol Guild and governing the digital commons
In this episode I spoke with Trent Van Epps, who is part of the Ethereum Foundation and a key member of Protocol Guild (PG). PG is a collective of 152 Ethereum core protocol contributors who are curated to receive public good funding from ecosystem sponsors. In turn, this is meant to balance incentives for contributors to work on the Ethereum protocol and prevent high contributor turnover. During the interview we discuss how Ethereum is actually governed more publicly than people realiz...
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Hello, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socials podcast. I am Josh, and I am here in Istanbul, during Dev Connect. And I am with a friend of mine, Trent Van Epps. He is a member of Protocol Guild, which is a pretty big public goods funder in the Ethereum core protocol, ecosystem. And he also is, a guy at the EF doing, coordination around the protocol, who has been, working on some pretty cool things. We're gonna talk so we're gonna talk about Protocol Guild, in a bit. But first, we're going to talk a bit about Ethereum and its very elusive governance structures that, maybe, trends can help us, illuminate and learn more about. So hi, Trent. How are you?
Hi, Josh. Thank you for having me. Long time listener, first time caller. Yeah. It's an honor to to actually be here and well, in it metaphorically on the podcast. But, yeah, I'm excited to talk about Protocol Guild and, maybe help some people understand what this thing is and how it relates to Ethereum governance.
Yeah. I mean, metaphorically, you're here, but also physically in my
Yeah. Apartment in In in every way, we're we're here listening to the cats meow outside.
So yeah. So maybe to start off, so Ethereum, as everybody knows, it is one of the largest, blockchains out there. It's one of has one of the largest market caps of cryptocurrency. Ether, is also the first one to put out, or to create like, make smart contracts, I guess, in reality. It's founded by Vitalik Buterin. All that context that in case people don't know. And it has been able to kind of bring together many different types of people, all kind of, around the blockchain world, as we see here now in at at DevConnect. And kind of, like, at least for me, I'm sort of I I don't even really know that much about the governance around Ethereum. I just kinda get told, hey. DevConnect is gonna happen in Istanbul, and there's gonna be a 100 different events here. You should all come, and there's gonna be a lot of people from Ethereum. Yeah. Maybe do you wanna start with explaining a bit how Ethereum works as far as its, governance structures?
Yeah. So it borrows a lot at least from the frameworks that people operate within. It it borrows directly from Bitcoin, which borrowed from, I believe, the Python community. And in Ethereum, it's called the EIP process. This is where you, in so many words, write up a technical specification of a change or a way you can see the protocol operating in the future. And, there's discussion around it on text forums, things like Ethereum Research or Eth Research or the Ethereum Magicians Forum. People debate the merits. People discuss how it could be better, how it could be improved, whether it's a good fit for the the protocol now. And some of these eventually get included in the protocol. And so, one of the one of the forums where people discuss changes is called all core devs, ACD. There's a couple different ones or, there's some testing calls or one specifically related to the, specific upgrades, for example, data availability sampling. There might be a specific call related to that that happens every couple weeks, and people will talk about a topic and, come to a rough consensus on what the the spec should be, what the implementation should look like, what trade offs should be optimized for, and then it eventually makes it to main net as part of network a network upgrade or you they're historically called hard forks, but Mhmm. I like network upgrade better because it has, some very specific connotations of, like Less contentious. Yeah. Yeah. Like the Ethereum classic, and Ethereum split was a hard fork because the community split, but, typically, these things aren't contentious. It's just the community introducing a new set of protocol features that everyone is on board with. For example, the merge is it was technically a hard fork, but it's, much more of a network upgrade because it brings in proof of stake. So all of these processes, typically, large most of the time, they're async. Obviously, we're here in dev connect, and people are talking and meeting in person. But because Ethereum is such a broad global community, by default, people are talking online and text. They're, you know it's a distributed process where people slowly come to consensus that is maybe not as fast as having everybody in the same office, but in the end, it allows for a much broader participation. And this is maybe one of the fundamental aspects of Ethereum's stewardship process as, a distributed system is that it's not done by any single corporation. Obviously, it's not done by any single organization even, like the EF, for example. A lot of people have this anchoring bias that the EF is this, director of where the protocol is going and and what it's looking like. But in reality, there's, I would say, 20 to 30, maybe even more, a few that I'm not aware of, organizations and teams within those organizations, and then the individuals within those teams that are actively engaged. So probably on the order of hundreds of of individuals who are helping to shape what Ethereum is today and what it could be in the future.
Yeah. So my understanding is that, against or, like, think something that people are not super aware of or would be surprised by is that a lot of these discussions around potential changes to the protocol are public discussions. That kind of if you take the time to go into the forums, you'll find the link to join the Zoom call, which will have, you know, where where the discussion will actually take place. And that's, I think, funnily enough, how you kind of got involved in the Ethereum ecosystem. Do you wanna talk a bit about that? Because I think a lot of times people assume that it is, like, very shady in in many ways, but, actually, there is, like, an things are very public. It's just that, maybe the discussions are so technical that that a lot of people don't even want to go.
Yeah. I mean, I definitely get that impression, or I can understand why people have that impression. Maybe more inaccessible. It feels inaccessible rather than it being purposefully obscured or hidden away from people. But yeah. So from my personal story, I am not a a developer in any way. I mean, I've written some SQL queries and, like, done visual coding things, but I I don't know how to write code. But I'm I'm deep at least now, I'm deeply embedded within, like, engineering culture and, developers, everyday researchers. These are the people I talk to. But I went to school for architecture and design, and I found Ethereum and found the Alcornev's call years ago and just started attending the calls. Like you said, the Zoom link is I believe it's public for most of them. Some of them some of the smaller, more focused ones are invite only. For example, I think the testing call is, like, if you're on a a team that is specifically concerned with this, they will add you to the invite. But the awkward desk call, anybody can show up. You can add something to the agenda. And, you know, obviously, there's some discretion that the person running the call has to add it to the agenda. But if it's a technical topic that fits within, the scope of the call, like, discussing the Ethereum protocol and, for example, the upcoming network upgrade, there's a very good chance it'll just be included and you'll be able to state your piece and discuss it, on a pretty, you know it has pretty wide reach. It's not like, this is, the public call is, you know, unimportant, and there are private calls that are happening that are where the decisions are actually made. The the public call is actually pretty significant. This is where the the stewards of the protocol, the people who are actually engaged with shaping it, come to talk about things. And so, yeah, you can just show up, and that's what I did for many years. Not really sure what I was doing, but I found it interesting enough to observe the process, see the the relationships that people had. And, yeah, that's that's open today for anyone to to still do.
Really? It sound it sounds to me like this is, very heavily linked to kind of open source culture, of open source developments, which a lot of people just don't know that much about unless they are in open source development. It's, like, practices that have already been, going on, I mean, at least since, like, you know, you guys took from from Python. And so but there is no, like, on chain governance structures, which is interesting because what I've read is that Vitalik didn't want to do that, from the get go because that was, like I think probably I mean, probably, generally, a good decision because nobody knew how to make smart contracts in the first place. And so, there is no on chain governance. But what that means, well, it means many things, and we'll maybe, actually, I'll save that question for later. But the people who are involved in kind of, like, this open source development governance or, like, the institutions, I imagine many of them would be, like, the clients of Ethereum. So, like, Nimbus or Aragon or Prism or, all these big clients that have to, add the protocol upgrades to their clients, which then gets spread out to everybody who's running their clients. And a client is just basically like the kind of like the the the piece of code that you run-in order to be able to run
an Ethereum node, you know, for people. But that's who I assume kinda like the major players would be. Yeah. The open source software culture is something I think a lot of people maybe not take for granted, but it's, it's such a an a norm that's part of the community at this point that you it's like the language you speak growing up, you don't really think about that you're speaking that way. Or maybe, the language that you think in, you you it just happens naturally. So, yeah, the culture of open source software is baked into Ethereum, and it it wouldn't work without it. And so maybe people, we don't talk about it because it's just this is this is the norm, and it would be it would be ridiculous to think that the the social and political consensus building could happen if everyone was using closed source licenses and not actually participating in an open, just like a default open, posture towards everyone else. Yeah. Right.
And the I mean, that's kind of it's it's almost like it's baked in open source culture just due to the, like, maybe technical features of a blockchain. Like, you can only do open source Yeah. In many ways. I mean, it it it would be
it's honestly hard to imagine getting, a broader ecosystem to spring up around a closed source chain because Mhmm. But, definitionally, blockchains are useful for getting parties that are mutually distrustful to agree on some final outcome. And if, ultimately, you have to trust somebody who wrote the code that you're running your program on, for example, let's imagine some financial institution wants to use Ethereum. They shouldn't have to trust some company that's operating the software. And the people that are running nodes, they shouldn't have to trust the people who are running or writing the software that is actually in the nodes that the code is correct. Like, they can inspect it themselves. This, transparency is super important and critical to how trust is maintained or maybe put another way, trust isn't necessary. You don't have to trust that somebody else wrote the code in a specific way or it will operate in a certain way. You can just look at the code yourself.
Yeah. And so in this kind of environment, the technical, like just, like, technically, how blockchains work, how it needs to function as a protocol, as something that is openly available to everyone and is sort of like a a set standard of rules for people to follow, in many ways, like, blockchains are kind of like a commons as kind of what what we've discussed, you know, before, off the podcast that, like, there's there is governance around this shared resource of the protocol of Ethereum that needs to have some amount of consensus for things to continue to function. Do you wanna talk about a bit about this and, like, the maybe the relationship with, you know, thinking about commons in a digital context? Because sometimes when we think about commons, we think of just, like, fisheries or or thing physical things. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.
So some some people probably have at least heard of the idea of commons, but for those who haven't, it's the idea that, groups of people can steward or produce shared resources that they govern and are involved in the production of. And, traditionally, in the academic sense, commons referred to, like you said, fisheries or in medieval Europe. It was the the commons where I mean, that's where the term commoners comes from Yeah. Is the people the the the poor people who had access to this shared, this shared field where they could graze their sheep or grow crops. And there was there was very specific agreements on how this land was gonna be managed, who had access to it, what could be done to it. Things like this were crucial. Like, the the frameworks under which the the commons was maintained were very important to how it's structured. Right? There isn't, some external authority that's coming in and saying, this is how it's gonna be run, and you get access to a small portion of it. It was it's the fact that it's operated by and stewarded by the individuals who end up using the resources is sort of intrinsically baked into what a commons is. And to your point, today, we live in an Internet world, and the digital, digital artifacts are more and more important in our life. And so there's also a notion of digital commons, and this can be, it could be data. It can be something like Wikipedia. You could think of it as a digital commons. It's a shared resource that, editors are putting their time and their effort into making something useful for other people. But software is also a really great example of a digital commons, especially open source software, is something that is freely accessible. People can experiment with it. They can fork it. They can do things with it that you couldn't otherwise do with a closed source or restrictive licenses. And Ethereum is a is a really great example. I think it fits quite well into the digital commons frame. And if people are curious, a lot of the inspiration I get for this is from, a professor. I'm forgetting the school he's with, but Benjamin Birkenbine has written about, digital commons and, specifically, enclosure and and capture. Maybe we can get into that a little bit. But, yeah, Ethereum is a great example of what a Digital Commons is because it's stewarded by the people that are producing the software, and this software is freely accessible to anybody who wants to actually make something like Ethereum or, yeah, understand how it works. Mhmm.
And so with the Ethereum protocol being governed as a kind of commons where people who are, you know, willing and able to come to these technical discussions for, like, discussing potential changes for the protocol. But there are there is no kind of, like, hard governance with the Ethereum Foundation. I feel like, obviously, it would play some sort of amount of influence. It does do some research and what potential upgrades should be. Vitalik, of course, is, like, up there as, like, everyone's, like, profit. And, like, if he suggests something, then, you know, it's something that people consider more and more. There are these kind of has all these kind of things in the commons, but one of the things that is perhaps missing, which we can get into now with protocol guild, is that there is no kind of clear, funding mechanism for people who want to work on things that are essential to Ethereum core development. In the crypto world, there are a lot of for profit entities and companies, but a lot of open source development is something that is not a profitable endeavor, for the person, like, directly working on that thing necessarily. Is that kind of, like, the situation, is that how I described it? Kind of what what kind of what the, you know, what the situation is and, like, why protocol guild now, was something that you thought would be, how why you have brought forth protocol guild?
Yeah. So going back to the idea of a commons, there's no single organization or we had talked about how Ethereum is is created. There's no corporation that's that's running it or specifically responsible for introducing these upgrades. And that's kind of intrinsically what makes it so special and so valuable is that there is no single organization that says, you know, it's gonna look like this or in the future, it will change to look like this. And, I'm gonna butcher the butcher the quote, but it's, in the same way that we've we've inherited, like, the this open source ideal. There's this concept of, the quote is something like, we believe in rough consensus and running code. I think that's someone from the IETF many years ago. But in the same way, there's there's no on chain governance. We could probably spend a whole topic or a whole podcast talking about how, token voting is a horrible system. Sure. Sure. There are some chains that have on chain governance, and, you know, you can you can supplement them with, like, technical councils as a, like, an advisory council to in addition to token governance, or there are ways that you can, balance out the financial the financialized nature of token voting. But, yeah, I'm I'm quite glad that Ethereum doesn't have this because it it leads to a lot of really strange incentives and oftentimes, adds more challenges than than are worthwhile to having it. So, yeah, the set of contributors or the people that are actually working on this, they are broadly from different companies. Sometimes we have individuals, but they're all working on different parts that need to in the end, they need to interoperate. So it's this back and forth process of people deciding what, what ways the protocol will change in the future, and this happens over the long term. It's it's a stewardship process. And because there's no, you know, these are all individual entities. They're they they may have their own interest. They may be commercial entities. But, previously, there was no single organization or single mechanism to fund the commons because, again, Ethereum is a commons. It makes sense that it would be funded similarly or at least there would be some way for it to, be produced or be supported in a way that's in line with the the output of it, which is this digital commons. Again, maybe I'm just repeating repeating myself at this point, but, because there's no single organization, it doesn't make sense to fund these organizations individually. Like, for example, you brought up some of the client teams. How do you in a distributed system, there's no client team that is more important than the others. Right? In fact, it's crucially important that there's a broad diversity of these clients being used to produce the network state. And it's it's actually really bad if there's one that has, a greater share of the network. A big theme you'll see in Ethereum is polycentrism or this idea that many many voices is better than a single dominating one. And, this isn't like some people might might say this is like, hippie or, you know, this is like, you guys are just, this is just a dumb, infeasible concept. But, like, it it in in reality, it comes from a very practical perspective that if you have a single client running 100% of the network, the any bug in this implementation is the specification. It is the network. And so it's crucial that, like, the it's not a political statement. I mean, it it is political, but it's not people making a political statement of Right. Right. We're going to have many organizations involved. It's it's a very practical consideration. Like, we need many versions of this running, and that's how you, by by extension, you end up with this, this process which necessarily, involves many different organizations, many individuals. And so Protocol Guild fits into that existing context as a funding mechanism, which plays into this, many contributor governance model. Yeah.
Yeah. So yeah. With, for Google case, it's still not clear. Technically, kind of what happens is is that whenever you want to run an Ethereum node, you choose a client. And that right now, there are several different, types of clients that you can choose, and they're each run by their own, organization. I think some of them I'm not sure exactly if some if they're, like, all for profit or nonprofit or how how exactly each one is. But,
I think most of them are within a commercial entity, but they have, let's say, varying degrees of appetite for growth. Sure. So some of them are just very happy to work on the client. Others have a little bit of a broader perspective, and they will have, like, you know, an audit team or, sometimes they're within a much larger corporation. Like, there's a couple clients in consensus. So it it there's a wide range. But, yeah, one thing well, maybe we can get into Protocol Guild now unless you had something else. No. Go for it. Yeah. So Protocol Guild, as we've been teasing this whole time, is this collective of individuals, crucially individuals, that are stewarding the core Ethereum protocol. And, they, they work on, research. So, again, figuring out what the protocol might look like in the future, They are people who are working on the client teams like you just mentioned. They're writing the code. They're testing it, interacting with the researchers to actually validate ideas about how things can change and what they might look like. So and then there's, like, you know, a spectrum in between possible futures and the current reality and people working within that. And then there's a couple other sets of of individuals who work on things like, you know, supporting both of these functions, testing, DevOps for running test nets, people like myself who do coordination, you know, helping the broader ecosystem engage with the process, the actual governance process of bringing network upgrades to life, things like that, myself, Tim Biko. These are people that are sort of, like, talking just doing a lot of talking and and helping people engage with the process. So there's there's a a number of different types of people that are members of Protocol Guild, but they're all focused on stewarding Ethereum over the long term. And so this mechanism is specifically concerned with surfacing who these people are and producing a list. So it's a it's a, a list that lives on chain. It's a smart contract through, the Xerox Splits protocol, which is just, you can have a contract with a list of addresses and weights associated with it, and we use this as a way for the broader ecosystem to fund the core protocol as a commons. So instead of having, you know, these individual client teams all having to petition, whatever, some public goods funding mechanism for, a grants round or the optimism RPGF, we have a this mechanism, this contract, the protocol guild, framework allows us to say, look. Here's the commons or at least an approximation of it. There's there's some members who aren't or sorry. It presents this to the ecosystem as a way for them to fund it because previously, there was no such thing. It it wouldn't work for the ecosystem to send money to the Ethereum Foundation and then have them distribute it. That's weird on on a number of levels. But now, Protocol Yield produces this list attached to a contract on chain, and it goes directly to the individuals and not the corporations because, why not, dude? Why not just have the individuals? Why why why do we have to have a set of intermediaries,
just give it directly to the people themselves who are working on this stuff? It would be weird to give it to the for profit entity Right. What they would do with yeah. But so then it's kind of, like, in this kind of weird situation, just, like, inherent to the crypto world, blockchain world, and open source communities that, like you said earlier, some of these for profit entities may be building things that are not, like, immediately monetizable. So there is, like, a hypothetical where a for profit company says, we need to cut costs, and so we're going to cut our non monetizable products. And that might be something that is a core, part of the infrastructure for Ethereum. But if you're able to fund the individual who is working specifically on that part, maybe in that for profit company, then they can feel safe that they can continue doing their job as they as they have already been doing, and while also being paid for it and not having to monetize their core infrastructure work, which could, you know, disrupt the commons of of Ethereum.
Yeah. So I'll give a a massive, massive caveat here. Not all companies are bad. The people that the people that work for companies are not bad people. But it's important, I think, as Ethereum matures and be the the the governance process becomes maybe more complex as more parties are coming in, it's worth thinking about what this might look like in five years, ten years. The the this isn't a project that's necessarily going to be completed or done at any point, and it's, I think it's healthy to think about things like capture or enclosure. Enclosure would be Right. The common's term of when the the local baron comes in and says, oh, wait. Actually, you guys have been maintaining this this set of fields for your sheep. Oh, actually, I'm gonna claim it for myself and set up a wall around it, and I have exclusive access to it. And, actually, I'm gonna make you work on it, and I'll take I'll give you some of it back, but I actually retain some. So that's where the enclosure term comes from. And there are examples of this happening, in Linux, for example. Yeah. Again, Benjamin Birkin, Vine has a really cool, like, case study about how Linux gets, intermediated by corporate entities. There are some differences between Linux and Ethereum, but also some really interesting parallels for how, you know, they have a thirty year head start in this, so it's it's useful to see how enclosure or incorporation has played out over that time frame as corporations, sort of encroach on the the commons of this digital software, and they try to you know, they're gonna use it for their own financial gain because that's what corporations do. They're they're purpose built for that. But in Ethereum, how can we think of ways to maybe counterbalance that or at least provide alternative structures where at some point in the future when, I don't know, IBM shows up or Google shows up and they say, we've got $10,000,000 and we wanna buy a client company and all of the, the relationships and social, yeah, the social and frameworks that are naturally, client teams are naturally embedded within, that's what they're purchasing. Right. They're going to be very disrupted if Google says, we're gonna buy one of you. Yeah. And, I mean, this this is not a common thing. There has been one client team purchase, but I think it's very, very worthwhile to start thinking about a possible future where we we can avoid this outcome or the the worst the worst versions of this. Right. So, yeah, this is again, to any client teams, if you're somehow listening to this podcast, I love you all. The, like, corporations, the the world is set up for these typically, and I I get it. But it's just worthwhile to think about what a future might look like where, you know, big money starts coming in is and is interested in, influencing the Ethereum protocol or purchasing influences. And in my view, the most likely way that would happen is through the corporate entity because it's much harder to purchase, you know, the the labor of 20 people individually versus, oh, we can just buy this client team. That and that and that's basically the one one of the the inspirations or motivations for why protocol guild is so important. Yeah. I mean, it's it's ultimately a a strategy for long term resilience. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's like a credible it's a credible alternative. Like, most most people are still gonna continue working at client teams or the Ethereum Foundation. These these entities are still gonna exist, and that's great. I I think it would be strange for everything to be under a single organization that also has its own trade offs. But if there's a credible alternative, it's good to have that as a antifragile, mechanism we can layer on top.
Hi, everyone. If you're enjoying this episode so far, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and join the crypto leftist communities on Discord or Reddit, which you can find links to in the show notes. If you're enjoying the episode or find the content I make important, you can pitch into my efforts starting at $3 a month on patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist to help me out and join the nearly 100 other patrons that contribute financially, which really helps since making this stuff isn't free in terms of money or time. As a patron, you'll get a shout out on an episode and access to bonus content like q and a episodes where you can submit and vote on questions you'd like me to answer, and I'll give my thoughts in roughly twenty minutes. The current bonus episodes have so far explored plenty of topics, including how co ops and DAOs relate, whether there is a socialist blockchain, a review of previous crypto events I've been to, and recently a video reaction to an episode of The Deepgram. Of course, I'll still be making free content like this episode to help spread the message that blockchain doesn't need to be used to further entrenched capitalist exploitation if we put our effort into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. So I think what you explained is kinda like the the purpose of Protocol Guild, but how, how has it been able to do this funding, because it does take I mean I mean, you guys have gotten, like, quite a bit of of of ETH in order to do the work that you guys are doing, because developers are not cheap oftentimes.
Yeah. So one of so I guess, maybe I'll just give, like, a little timeline. So when we originally started the project, and I say we, it's like all of the all of the members. This has been a collective process. And similar to, Ethereum, it's intrinsically requiring a distributed governance process. If it was just me starting protocol guild and just forcing people, it wouldn't work. It would be pretty pointless. This has definitely been a collective effort, a collective activity between all of these. Today, it's a 160 individuals that are members of this. And so, you know, how do we fund the the core protocol and in what way or, like, what amount has been a discussion for many, many years. And it came up again in 2021, you know, heading into the bear market. People people find discussions and topics, things to argue about. And so we this discussion came up again, and, one of the one of the current members said, okay. Why don't we, you know, just have an organization that, the the focus the focus was on retention. How do we retain people long term? Because the concern is as we start to see more DeFi projects or l twos, things that have a token and, crucially, like, high growth potential, it's possible that they will start to pull people away from, protocol stewardship, which we all need. We need this to to stay long term. And so, initially, the concept was, okay. How can we give, exposure? Like, the people that are doing this important infrastructural work, how can we give them some exposure to the the success of the network? And so the concept was, okay. We'll create this collective list, and then projects can donate a percent of their tokens to whatever whatever token they're they're generating. They can donate it to the membership, and then they'll have some exposure. That was the initial concept in 2021, and I think it's shifted more into, taking a the taking a bit of a broader perspective in terms of this is a, a way for the membership to assert itself or represent itself, as I mentioned, as a commons, as a collective set of people who are doing labor. It's it's a collective of individuals. We've also talked about, like, a solidarity primitive. Like, these are core. I think these are much more important to the the soul of this thing than just, like, pure upside. Right. You have a credible alternative if you're working on the protocol that you know this this these assets or these resources will be available to you. Anything that's donated vests over time. And, yeah. So during the pilot, we raised, I think, around, 12 to 15. It it depends, on on the day you're looking at it, but, we have a Dune dashboard which tracks all of this because it's on chain, but raised about 12,000,000 US, and that goes directly to those individuals. And so had a really successful pilot, and now we're looking at how to take what we learned and and implement it in the new version to scale it up to even more significant amounts.
Mhmm. So you guys have done some other interesting things. I don't know if you wanna talk about there's some, like, there's, like, the k KZG ceremony. I remember it was one thing. There was also, like, a book that you guys made in relation to, I believe it was, like, the switch to to proof of stake. It seems so, like, it seems that you guys are able to, is an interesting, like, a creation of, almost like or acknowledgment of history through some sort of cultural artifact, and then there happens to be, like, enough people that become, willing to donate or willing to give give some of their ETH because of that as part of there's, like, almost like a need for a ritual for people to to engage in to, like, to free them of their money, which means that, like, I think partially that, not everybody in the Ethereum ecosystem, at least, is not purely motivated by simply making money. Of course, like, if you are a core developer and then you go and see, like, you know, your friend went to poo poo coin DeFi project, and they're making, like, $10,000,000 off of off of that. They're you're like, you're gonna you may second guess yourself for for a little bit to go, to go get some some of that some of that money, if you are not feeling you are being compensated enough for the the core development work that you're doing.
Yeah. So what you're referencing, the KGG ceremony was a separate thing, but what you're talking about is some projects I was a part of under, if people are cure are curious, they can look up Stateful Works, which is, just a project that I run. And it does slot it slots in very nicely as a complement to protocol guild as a way to, like you said, create these cultural artifacts. So, yeah, a number of past projects have done something like this where, for example, there there was something I made something called the beacon book. And this is, again, this is separate completely separate from my work at the EF and as a member of Protocol Guild. This was just me creating something. Created a book gathering the perspectives of everyone who had worked on the launch of the Beacon Chain in 2020 and compiled it into a physical book. There were NFTs, and people purchased it. And I think it raised, like, maybe 2 or $300,000 at the time, and it went directly on chain to the people that had actually done that. And like you said, there's an interesting it's really interesting to encapsulate this sentiment of the core Ethereum community, which, I know it might be hard to believe, but there are like you said, there are people that care about, common goods, and they care about the people who are actually doing the work to steward this technology. And this is a way for them to express their this sentiment. It's not all Mooncoins and scams. Unfortunately, that's what makes it out of the community. But, yeah, it's it's really amazing to see people also recognize that these cultural artifacts are interesting. And now that something like Protocol Guild exists, I really hope that there are more people who recognize this as a way to create things in recognition. I think of, like, the public works administration during the Great Depression in The US. Like, they just paid people to do stuff and create one of one part of the program was, like, they paid people to paint murals about workers,
which is, you know Hard to believe nowadays. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But in in a similar vein, like, creating beautiful things to celebrate, the work that people have done and particularly, the work that's created for a common good. It's not, you know can you imagine making a a mural about Amazon? Or there's some that's a tech company, like, that doesn't click. But yeah. So I've I've I've done the beacon book. We did something related to the EIP one five five nine. Maybe I won't get into that, but, yeah, there's been a number of things. And, again, another one related to the merge where we're creating art, allowing people to you know, they could give this ETH otherwise, but now they have a memento, something beautiful, a token, or an artifact is probably the best way to summarize it. And now with Protocol Guild, there's this mechanism which will consistently over time, be a or, like, a recipient or a mechanism that will, for the long term, distribute these funds to the ever changing set of curators, because we update the membership of Protocol Guild every quarter. So you know for sure if you're funding it, that it's gonna be an accurate representation. Whereas, you know, you may not have insight into some of these other grant profiles or it's a little hard to have insight, but one of the core guarantees that the membership gives to the broader public, the broader ecosystem, is that we're gonna update this every quarter with, the membership and the weights associated with it. And, I guess I'll say that so the one of the one of the other details, about the mechanism is, okay. Now you have membership. How do you weight the the funds that are coming into it? And, we take a philosophy of governance minimization and, you know, reducing the number of dials and knobs we have to turn because I think, core developers have more important things to do than argue about who gets what. And one of the the very simple mechanism we've settled on is just time waiting. So if you've been around longer, you'll have a a larger wait in the set. And this is a way of recognizing and rewarding or celebrating, let's say, the institutional knowledge that people build up over time. Because Ethereum is a very deep technical domain, and it takes a while for people to get up to speed and and really understand why decisions were made in a certain way. And once they have this knowledge, we wanna keep them around. We wanna help them stick around. And so vesting vesting the funds helps, but also giving people a weight proportional to the time that they've been around is also another way that we recognize it and, celebrate this knowledge because it's super important, because we don't wanna make the same mistakes that we made five years ago. Again, in the future, hopefully, we can avoid that by by keeping that knowledge around long term.
Yeah. The the complexity of Ethereum has increased since the beginning, and using that, I think, has been, well, yeah, it would be it would be really bad
if some of those, like, pieces of knowledge were lost. Yeah. You think I'm like like the village elders. Like, you want you want them to pass that knowledge on Right. To the next generation. Obviously, you know, court devs aren't gonna stick around forever. People, you know, they get interested in other things, and they'll move on. But to the extent that we can encourage people to stick around long enough to pass that onto the next generation of core protocol stewards, the better. And so time waiting, investing are these two mechanisms
within Protocol Guild that we can use to encourage that. Mhmm. And so you guys are also I don't know if you wanna talk about this, but you're going from right now, it's a v one. You're going to a v two. So you're adding some some upgrades to
how you guys are are are running Protocol Guild and and governing that. Yeah. I won't get too deep into the smart contracts, but we do zero x splits can be, mutable or immutable, or you you can change them or you can just issue them once and they won't change ever in the future. And so protocol guild's contract is updatable, and that's how we bring the new membership and the new weights on chain every quarter. And this is really important to how the thing operates, but, today, this is just, a multisig that updates the split. There's a six of 10 multisig that sends the transaction. People validate that, you know, it's roughly correct, and then that goes into the split and updates any allocations for funds that are flowing through it. And in the future, we we well, rather in the past, we started to think, you know, it'd be great if we didn't have this multisig, and we could, make it more trustless for anybody in the membership to have the same, governance capacity that any other member has. So we're working on, moving to a new system, which will use a Moloch DAO, which is just a contract with the ability to create proposals and vote on them. It's very straightforward. But what we're bringing on chain is a registry of weights so, people don't have to trust, you know, the the operators of this multisig to bring the weights on chain. And, you know, we all operate in a very high trust environment. We I know these people personally. I don't think that there would be any funny business where somebody would, like, issue a transaction that, you know, reduces my weight slightly. Obviously, that trust is there. But the more guarantees, the more certainty we can introduce in the system, the less attention people have to expend ensuring that those guarantees are actually met. So if we can bring it on chain and allow more people to engage with the governance, or the the the curation process, I I think that's a win. So we're bringing the off chain tracking of, the weights of members so their start date will be brought on chain. And then, that's one way that the membership doesn't have to trust, this off chain process as much. And so that'll feed directly into the existing split contract. And together, these things will we're just we just put it under the the protocol guild v two bucket. And yeah. So those those contracts are under audit right now, and, hopefully, we'll be actually putting them on chain in the next few months. The other, thing which is maybe, much, much larger than the scope of this, discussion, but it's thinking about what a legal entity looks like. This has been some of the members not I I haven't been involved, but the members have been looking into, okay, how do we bridge between the traditional legal world and this, this on chain world? And navigating the the, like, bridging between those two worlds has been, quite interesting to see the results of those discussions and, like, figuring out what shape actually works or what entity type actually works. And, hopefully, we'll have a much more we'll have, a better idea of that in the next few weeks, months, and then we'll be able to, you know as much as we we people in crypto like to avoid the traditional world and they think they're escaping from it, I think in reality, we're much more entwined with it than we realize. And so this legal entity is really important for helping us, in the future, have some some structure and some protection for members against each other and also, let's say, other entities outside of it that, you know, may have, interests that are not in the interest of the membership. So those are the main things we've been working on and and hope to have those up and running in the next few months. And then we'll we'll begin fundraising again, going to DAOs, going to organizations that are dependent on Ethereum. So for example, the Optimism RPGF program. We've applied twice now, and we're the, I believe, the top recipient in the last round. And it's it's really nice to see people recognizing that this is a dependency to layer twos, and they can fund their dependencies directly through a mechanism like this without having to rely on, okay. We've gotta find, this client team, this client team, this client team, this one, the this set of researchers. There's just a holistic mechanism that they can fund through. And yeah. So we we hope to start fundraising again, in the near future and then, scale it up much larger than than the original pilot was.
Yeah. I wanna I wanna talk about that. I wanna pin that for a moment, but I wanted to, I'm I'm interested in, just talking briefly about the fact that you guys, I forgot what they're called. Van Eck? Is that the the the Yeah. Yeah. VanEck. The new the new is it an ETF? Or I forget what it was. It's a futures ETF. Yeah. Yeah. So they I don't know if we need to, like, explain all of that, but, it's I'm not gonna explain it. Yeah. The thing that normal normies can invest in Ethereum through Yeah. And they have, magically decided to also give some of their profits to Protocol Guild. This is, like I mean, interesting.
Pretty crazy. Yeah. So, so, yeah, ETF and exchange traded fund is a way for, it's just a structured financial product that's pretty common on in traditional finance and and Wall Street. And there's this company called VanEck. They're very old, I think, a 100 well, in the scope of things, maybe not that old. But, like, relative to The US, that's, like, you know, that's that's significant. It's a 100 year old company, and they launched an Ethereum so So the Ether futures product, which is a it's not on chain. It's off chain, and it tracks the price of of Ether in the future, and you can buy and sell it. And these products are really exciting for people for a number of reasons, but the thing that's relevant to us here in this discussion is that this company, this traditional, Wall Street, company, they reached out to a couple people and said, hey. We want to, actually give back to the Ethereum community that's enabling this this asset. We want to give back to the people that are actually making this possible. And so they committed to donating 10% of profits, from operating this this financial product back to protocol guild. And like you said, this is like, if you step back and think about it, it's it's pretty absurd. Like, you have Right. What could have been a purely extractive entity. You know, they're committing in advance to fund this mechanism of developers all around the world who are Yeah. Stewarding a commons. Like, these things are, kind of bizarre to me. None of the Bitcoin also, like, structured financial products are are doing that as far as I know. To the best of my knowledge, they haven't done it, and it may be the case that it's because, I mean, there's a lot of things much less structure. Yeah. There's a there's a lot of things to say about why this is the case in Bitcoin. It's not changing as much. It doesn't Right. That they're very happy Right. They're being stuck where they are. Exactly. But there there is no future for Bitcoin. It is The States now, and it's always going to Stewardship is yeah. I don't I don't know how much of a a focus that is within the community. Yeah. But also for the simple practical reason of this thing can't exist on chain on Bitcoin. They don't have smart contracts. So this is uniquely enabled by Ethereum. It's a smart contract that they can just send directly to. Obviously, their profits happen off chain wherever it does. And I will, I will definitely acknowledge, like, VanEck is getting something out of this. They're Right. Right. This is a marketing benefit for them for sure. I understand their It also fits there. I mean, for that,
futures ETF to, to flourish after is that they they need something to happen into the future. Like, they need to directly be funding in the Ethereum ecosystem for people to do shit for them to, like, even have a chance for this, product to to keep going. Right. And so in that sense, like, the incentives are directly aligned. They benefit from people being interested in Ethereum,
from the technology actually developing long term, gaining adoption because their their product is intrinsically dependent on the the work of these people or or it it wouldn't exist. Like, the the ether token wouldn't exist without, people maintaining the chain and people, like, external institutions or users actually coming and using it. So these things are all wound up together, in the work of the stewards. Yeah. Mhmm. And, yeah, it it is yeah. It was pretty incredible to see. Yeah. Yeah.
And another thing I wanna talk about maybe, as well is the differences between, Optimism's current thing on retroactive public goods funding versus protocol guild. So there was, like, a very interesting sort of discussion and debate between, kind of, like, the different approaches that I've listened to. One of them that happened at Zuzalu, but they are two very different approaches to looking at this problem of public goods funding. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Yeah. In some sense, they're they do have significant differences, but also maybe they're completely different mechanisms which are harder to compare. So I'll try to be sensitive to that. And, again, here's another caveat. I love the optimism team. I I think the fact that they're This is a declaration of war. What do you mean? Never. I think the fact that they're one of the only l twos to have a consistent public goods funding program is, I mean, it's kind of, to be honest, crazy that there aren't other l twos which understand that this is I mean, obviously, it's centered around the optimism stack, but, the fact that if you're they recognize that Ethereum core contributors are eligible for this. Like, it's just recognize your dependencies and fund them. So I celebrate the fact that they're, you know, they're experimenting. They're trying to find Sure. A new mechanism. Yeah. So take that any criticism alongside that. But yeah. So RPGF is, an interesting experiment in the sense that they're trying to look back on the work that was done and and reward it. I think there there may be some disagreements from me personally about how much they over index on granularity or, this idea that you can track every contribution and then directly reward it financially. I think that's a lot more challenging in practice, and there are significant challenges with how people are expected to evaluate this. Mhmm. And to to to their credit, they've introduced things like, lists where you can, which are which are maybe more directly comparable to protocol guild where you have you can set up, you can group different, profiles, grant profiles that may have be in a similar area. So Protocol Guild is a list of projects essentially just represented by their their atomic component, which is the individual. And so they're they are working towards lists which would approximate something like Protocol Guild. And, again, there there's no reason that we can't, directly engage with a mechanism like this. So protocol yield has applied and gotten funding in the past and is applying to this current round. I think one of the challenges that they're experiencing so, yeah, I I mentioned the, the idea of scaling it up is hard. There's significant money flowing through it. I think, the idea of public goods is incredibly watered down and diluted to the point of it doesn't really mean anything anymore, in the crypto space, and it would be we we would do well to be more specific. And maybe one other disagreement is I think they have a very particular vision for what RPGF is and what it does and maybe overly broad in the sense that, you know, projects that take VC funding are encouraged to apply to this thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I worry that in the future, it'll just end up being an arbitrage between, okay, we can fund these companies to do work on the optimism stack, and then, we'll get whatever returns from traditional investing, but we'll also get access to this optimism incentive program. And I worry that, that will if there's a possible future where it eats up a lot of the the funding. So I think that's a challenge. That being said, protocol guild is happy to, like, apply or, like, engage within this this mechanism. And, like, I've personally provided feedback and and, I'm I'm happy to see that people are doing something, especially that scale. Definitely more challenges to be solved. It's it's not like a it's not like a mechanism is not complete.
Yeah. Yeah. So I would I think we were talking earlier. We would kinda compare optimism's approach to kind of, I would say, like, heavily kinda means tested Yeah. Liberal democrat style, you know, welfare, but with heavy strings attached versus protocol guilt maybe being more, like, akin to a UBI.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think this again, I'll keep coming back to the idea of the commons. Like, it's really hard when you're when you're making software or you're engaging in a political, social consensus building process, you can't these are inherently soft processes. You can't Right. Articulate this conversation we're having right now. Like, what is the financial value this provided to the optimism stack? Well, probably zero. But, like Right. Imagine we were having a conversation about optimism. How do you place a financial value? And this is their thing about, impact equaling financial Impact. Impact equaling profit. And I think this is a really, really hard thing to do, and it may even be a red herring of some kind. But, yeah, in in the stewardship of a commons, there's a lot of soft,
soft things that are really, really hard to track. Right. If I picked if I, you know, picked five tomatoes and you did, like, 14 potatoes Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How do we, you know, literally comparing oranges Yeah. Yeah. Oranges. Yeah. So I I think it they over
this RPGF system might over index on, trying to, like, track something track everything from god mode and then translate that into like, you don't it's really, really hard to, see something from a thousand foot view and then get down to the resolution of the individual and the work that they're doing. Mhmm. One book that I really love is Seeing Like a State, and it documents a lot of really cool case studies about, how the state tries to manage something from far away and ends up fucking things up in really bad ways, and how you that it's really hard to, surface local knowledge in a way that doesn't completely destroy the efficacy or the value of that that local knowledge. And Protocol Guild is surfacing that in a way that's legible and at a particular scale. So it it's able to bring this local knowledge of here's a 160 people who, are doing important work, and many of them probably wouldn't be surfaced to the RPGF mechanism otherwise. And so bringing them together as a collective gives a certain weight that otherwise wouldn't have been there. And, yeah, I I just worry about this focus on granular detail. And as soon as you start to, try to apply basically, what's the what's the phrase of as soon as something becomes a measure, it ceases to become a good measure or it becomes a target. Like, you will see that start to happen when they say, okay. We're measuring this this KPI, this this and this. People will start to target that in order to maximize their their revenue from, Optimism's RPGF and then game it in certain ways. And I I just worry about that happening if they continue down the path of, like, we wanna get the most granular level of impact. Obviously, there's a middle ground. This is this is an episode of caveats. There's a middle ground. People shouldn't just show up and expect to get, funding for work that they they can't justify. But I do worry if you go if you try to get too granular and the the weird degenerate incentives that'll emerge, I I think that's maybe something to be very, very cautious about.
Right. Right. No. Yeah. I mean, I I I also applied to their to their grant funding just because it's sort of like, oh, I would love some money, you know Yeah. For things that I've done. But they the kinda, like, the metrics that they put in there is, like, oh, or they ask you, like, what are the metrics that you measure yourself? And I it's like, I was like, okay. I guess views, listens, down to those. Right. And now you're incentivized to, like, pump up your your view numbers and, like Now do I need to, like, make a really shitty, like, you know I wanna see you start a YouTube channel where you have to open your mouth without me on the thumbnail. I need to do start the Good thumbnail. Soyboing, like, on on the thumbnail.
Yeah. Or the at least that your podcast episodes have to have, like, a sensationalist title. Yeah. It can't be descriptive. It's just gotta be Yeah. And it kinda it kinda sucks being being a content creator Yeah. Quote, unquote Yeah. That,
often sometimes what is listened to or what is viewed on my channel are just things that, like, oh, the title that it came up was, like, kinda more catchy this time. Even though I thought, like, maybe the interview that I had previously, which didn't have a catchy title, was way more interesting Yeah. Or way more important or something like that. Yeah. So I take I I definitely take your point. And then yeah. It I also find I mean, just to keep in mind that optimism is VC funded. Right. And that is something to keep in mind as to, like, you know, the context of all this and protocol guilt is not, of course. And so the last thing I wanted to touch upon just because we were part of this, research that other Internet did, and I interviewed our friend Tara who, was one of the research, researchers for this. But, I wanna talk a bit about solidarity primitives. And I and I love shilling this because it's a it's a concept that that I kinda, like, created and made up, and I was like, is this I hope this is, like this makes sense. But I found that it is, like, an interesting way to kind of bridge the gap between, like, I don't know, the crypto the guy who only understands the world through crypto and, like, a real and kind of, like, I guess, like, my politics in in a certain respect. Yeah. So, like, solidarity primitives for people who don't know are just basically taking the idea of financial primitives in the DeFi space of basically money Legos or taking saying that, these financial products and financial mechanisms are instantiated in code via smart contracts. But taking that idea and instead rather than trying to do it as something for simply finance as, like, financial speculation often is the case, but for creating solidarity between individuals and organizations, that is instantiated again through code. But it's not just it's not just a code thing because I think solidarity is still is still, like, a soft thing. It's you can't quantify the solidarity that you have for something else and someone else. It really depends on, of course, what you're able to provide and what the other person is able to to receive. But yeah. So I thought it was it was interesting to see Protocol Guild, take up this concept a little bit.
Yeah. And and this is sort of going a little bit back to what I mentioned about legibility and, kind of in in the way that Ethereum wouldn't be interesting as a privately operated corporation chain. The protocol guild is a way for all of these self interested individuals, to group together in a way that increases their legibility to significant funding mechanisms or, increases the their, like, metaphysical weight in in the the space of things is, like, it's a representation of the collective work. Again, no single individual, no single organization or company is responsible for this stewardship. And protocol guild is a way of sort of crystallizing the the power or the relationships that actually enable that to happen. And yeah. And and solidarity is a great way to describe it if you wanna think of it as a union for a court protocol contributors or a, a UBI, a consistent income stream, but this wouldn't be possible otherwise. It it wouldn't be Mhmm. You wouldn't be able to do something like this if you if you split everybody up into different groups. Like, this is uniquely enabled by the fact that everyone is coming together and saying, look. We produce this this body of software, which is then used to people run it and produce the distributed system that is Ethereum. But we all do this collectively. It's not anyone going off on their own and and, you know, being a a genius. This is something that requires the input of so many different people, And solidarity is a great lens to view it through, and I hope more people can, I would love to see more versions of protocol guild? Like, I do acknowledge that it's maybe very tailored to the core protocol space, But I would love for there to be ways for, different pits of the the community to band together and represent themselves, set up, like, an eligibility framework that's hopefully explicit, and then you can just have membership, and then funding can flow through it. So, for example and one thing that comes to mind is, like, the developer tooling layer, smart contract languages like Solidity and Viper, libraries that developers use like Ethers. These things are all basically operating at the same level of the stack, but they're all, in a sense, competing for funding from the same mechanisms. But all the developers still use these these tools to produce smart contracts or, like, it's it's an important integral part of what they're doing. So it would be really cool to start to see more people use something like this as a primitive. And I know other people have, like, these great visions of, you know, what happens when we start to interlink, different organizations together. You can have, like, mutual aid, exchange of value. So if there was I don't know. I don't know exactly what it would look like, but if there was something else like protocol guild, adjacent to it or some dependency funding, you can start to see this, network of value flows between organizations that are, you know, logically encapsulated by their eligibility form framework, but they're adjacent to each other and recognize that they can start to, mutually support the the work that these other people are doing. Yeah. I I and I know there's other work that exists. Like, coordinate is another tool that people use to, you know, coordinate on chain work. Things like this already exists, and Protocol Guild is also building on, existing work, things like open grants. Like, this is from, years ago at this point, I think 2019 even. So it's not these aren't new things, but it will be interesting to start to see exchanges between similar mechanisms or people starting to see, okay. We can fund each other. We can, surface ourselves to larger mechanisms. And that's one of the you talked about, Ethereum doesn't have on chain governance. Another big difference from systems that have on chain governance is that it also doesn't have block reward funding that goes to Right. So there's there's no, like, percent of the block reward, which typically typically goes to, the actors who are involved in consensus, or with, like, progressing the chain forward, making blocks. They get paid a certain amount of of ETH in this case. But in Ethereum, it's unique and that there's no that doesn't go to the Ethereum Foundation. There's no reward to pay for stewardship. And I think one small reason why that's the case is because there's there hasn't been any credible mechanism to actually accept it. It was like, what would that look like? How would it be governed? And we're a long way from actually getting there and and finding mechanisms. And maybe we never actually have in protocol funding, and it's all, like, this altruistic opt in. Maybe that's good as a way to prevent capture, long term. I'm definitely I would on the side of caution instead of, you know, cementing this permanent technocracy into ruling this this this system. But, I think there's still a lot to experiment and, figure out as we start to, or not as we start to, but as we continue to build out these these systems and how they're stewarded.
Yeah. So there there is no kind of, like, protocolized funding of things in the Ethereum ecosystem, Hence, why Protocol Guild is important. You know, there was a a point whenever the Ethereum Foundation almost ran out of money, I think a few years ago. So there's also need a need for resilience to have, other organizations besides EF that is that is able to to do these types of of of funding. And if there was a kind of, like, attempt at putting on chain governance, it would potentially solidify certain things, that maybe don't make sense in the long term because Ethereum is well, we can say, potentially, it's still early. I don't know. But we do see, like I mean, there's Dash and Tezos, which does have these on chain stuff. And while while they're interesting, they're not nearly as big as as Ethereum. And Ethereum is I think to some extent, it is a bit of a technocracy just because of the Oh, for sure. The Like, yeah. Yeah. The knowledge needed to understand things is quite high even though it is public. So it is like it does tow this, like, weird line
of of things that doesn't fit. Yeah. For for a counter example, if people are familiar with Cosmos, they have on chain governance. And I think a big frustration of the community is that that there's this clash between the the technocracy or, like, the people who are running the code and saying, like, okay. We could we could move the protocol in this direction. And then you have the token holders. Right. The degens. Yeah. Like, the people who see it they see it as a, a financialized vehicle. Yeah. And sometimes or oh, often Or more often than not, like, there's there's a difference of opinion. And I think that's where a lot of the angst in the Cosmos community comes from is, it's really hard to come to consensus when you have these different parties. So Ethereum was, maybe lucky, maybe had foresight, but we are fortunate that we don't have to deal with people purely looking for financial return and making decisions about, like, is censorship resistant? Like, censorship resistance, can you imagine pitching that to a VC company? Like, we're gonna make it easy for, people who who we're gonna make a network infrastructure, that allows anybody to send transactions regardless of their political or, social, sexual orientation. Like, this is not a monetizable thing. And so when you start to introduce these weird, financial incentives, like, it yeah. Like like like we said, there's a clash of values, and it's hard to bridge between those two without constantly having just, like, the same painful discussions about where they where they diverge.
Yeah. Yeah. But so what we see is that there is a sense of solidarity within the Ethereum community, at least those who are building core for those who are building core infrastructure, and that is kind of like a a very necessary and needed thing for the long term for Ethereum to to continue?
Yeah. I think it's important, and I'm gonna keep working on this mechanism as long as it seems to provide value to the membership. We did it like a we did a poll, a very simple poll of, like, did you think the pilot was helpful? Did it inspire you to continue working on, Ethereum core protocol into the future? And, I mean, maybe, maybe obvious, but, like, people were
happy to receive
like, yes. For my work. Receiving funding for this was good, and Protocol Guild as a mechanism was useful. So, as long as that's still the case, we're gonna keep experimenting and iterating on the mechanism and trying to scale it up larger. And, we'll maybe check back in in a year, and we can see what happened in the past year and whether it's still useful as a solidarity primitive to bringing people together and allowing them to support each other in this this, stewardship of the digital Ethereum commons. Yeah. Cool.
Well, thank you so much for coming on Trent. Is there any last words you wanna leave the audience with or or plugs?
People should check out Protocol Guild. Check out Protocol Guild. I'd love for you to DM me and say, hey. This doesn't seem like it will work long term, or here's this issue. Send them hate mail. Please do. Maybe not hate mail, but a criticism constructive criticism mail. Because this yeah. At a certain point, you become so embedded within it. It's hard to see, with fresh eyes, and so I'm sensitive to that and would love to have other people looking at it and giving me critique, or even just spreading the word. If you think there's a funding source we should be aware of, and help us get connected with, I'd love that. Yeah. And nothing really else to plug. Cool. Go support Josh on Patreon and join the bread chain. I'll do your pitches for you. Yeah.
Yeah. Solidarity primitives. Solidarity primitives.
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you.