Exploring the Protocol Guild: Received over $100 million in donations, providing solid support for Ethereum L1 developme

Original author: Karen, Foresight News

Projects such as ether.fi and Tyapay zekako have donated to the Protocol Guild, and LayerZero has forced airdrop users to donate, which has attracted widespread attention and discussion in the community, as well as some confusion and questions.

As a solid backing for the gelişim and maintenance of Ethereum L1, Protocol Guild plays a vital role in the ecosystem. So, what are the membership requirements, donations, and donation release mechanisms behind this mysterious and powerful organization? This article will take you to find out.

What is Protocol Guild?

Protocol Guild is an organization established specifically for the research, 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, ensuring the vigorous development and continuous innovation of the Ethereum network.

Since the beginning of 2022, Protocol Guild has completed the mechanism design and started recruiting members. In May of the same year, Protocol Guild launched the Protocol Guild Pilot program. After two years of careful operation and continuous improvement, at the end of January 2024, Protocol Guild disclosed its official commitment and ended the pilot project. At the same time, it launched PG v2, which aims to make Ethereum L1 RD contributors directly identifiable on the chain, and use time-weighted lists and clear membership criteria to show who is currently contributing to the protocol and how long they have contributed.

Protocol Guild promises that Ethereum-based projects are recommended to donate 1% of their native tokens to Protocol Guild. The main reason is to attract and retain high-quality contributors, provide them with more substantial expected potential returns, and ensure that these tokens eventually flow into the hands of valuable contributors. It is worth mentioning that this 1% of native tokens will not be released all at once, but will be released gradually over 4 years.

Why choose 1%? Protocol Guilds consideration is that if 33% to 66% of projects can adopt this donation standard, the average member can expect to receive $500,000 to $1 million in benefits each year.

The Protocol Guild has received donations worth $76 million (current value) so far. In the past year, the median donation amount received by members was as high as $54,000. At the same time, the Protocol Guilds membership has grown from 90 to 177 members today.

Who are the current members of the Protocol Guild?

Protocol Guild has gathered 177 members so far, most of whom are from the Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum mainnet clients.

Among them, the clients include Geth, EthereumJS, Erigon, Hyperledger Besu, Lighthouse, Lodestar, Nethermind, Prysm, Reth, Nimbus, Teku, etc. There are 6 to 15 contributors in each client who are included in the Protocol Guild, which makes the client contributors account for nearly 60% of the entire Protocol Guild members.

In addition, the members of Protocol Guild also include the Ethereum Foundation Application Research Group (ARG), ethPandaOps (a sub-group of the Ethereum Foundation), the Ipsilon RD team (focusing on EVM research), the Ethereum Foundations Portal Network (committed to redefining the way resource-constrained devbuzs participate in the Ethereum network), as well as Protocol Support, Cryptography, Consensus RD, Robust Incentives Group, Testing and other key teams.

Some well-known members include Tim Beiko and Danny Ryan from the Ethereum Foundation鈥檚 Protocol Support team, and Justin Drake from the Consensus RD team. However, it is worth noting that Vitalik Buterin is not currently listed among the members of the Protocol Guild.

What donations have Protocol Guild members received?

Protocol Guilds thriving development is inseparable from the generous donations of many projects. Which projects have donated to Protocol Guild? How much donations have Protocol Guild members received?

As the first project to commit to donating to the Protocol Guild, ether.fi pledged to donate 1% of its token supply to the Protocol Guild to support the continued development of Ethereum before the Protocol Guilds commitment was disclosed at the end of January this year.

Subsequently, the DeFi mortgage lending protocol PWN, the zkRollup-based Ethereum Layer 2 project Taiko, the decentralized lending pool Ethereum Credit Guild, the modular decentralized storage Layer 2 project EthStorage, and several other Meme projects followed suit and allocated 1% of their tokens to Protocol Guild.

In addition to the 1% token commitment, Protocol Guild also received various donations during the pilot period, including 500,000 UNI, 200,000 ENS, 2 million LDO, 3 million ARB, etc.

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

Even Bitwise, the issuer of the US spot Bitcoin ETF, recently donated 50% of the proceeds from its Ethereum advertising NFT to the Protocol Guild. Coincidentally, in September last year, another ETF issuer VanEck announced plans to donate 10% of the profits of its Ethereum futures ETF to the Protocol Guild to thank Ethereum contributors for their efforts over the past decade.

A few days ago, the LayerZero Foundation also implemented mandatory donations during the token airdrop claiming process, requiring airdrop users to donate $0.1 USDC, USDT or native ETH for each ZRO, and the donation will be used directly for Protocol Guild. This will result in a donation of approximately $18.5 million to Protocol Guild. In addition, the LayerZero Foundation will match all donations, up to $10 million.

According to Dune data, the total donations received by Protocol Guild are currently worth more than $76 million, of which ether.fi and Taiko account for 66%. If LayerZeros mandatory donation is added, the amount of donations received by Protocol Guild will exceed $100 million.

As of this month, the median donation amount per Protocol Guild member in the past 12 months was $54,000, and is expected to grow to $81,000 in the next 12 months. Over the next four years, $57 million in donations will vest and be released to Protocol Guild members, and this is only based on the donations received so far.

What are the qualifications to become a Protocol Guild member?

Protocol Guild can be seen as a donation and fund allocation mechanism for Ethereum RD maintainers. So, what qualifications do you need to become a member? According to the official documentation of Protocol Guild, here are some basic requirements:

• The project/organization is completely open source;

• Regularly active in Ethereum specification repositories, research forums, feature prototyping, general 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, Hyperledger Besu, Lighthouse, Lodestar, Nethermind, Nimbus, Prysm, Teku and Reth), research and implementation experiments related to potential protocol changes or Protocol Guild research, etc.

However, meeting the above conditions is only the basis and is not enough to ensure membership of the Protocol Guild. Applicants must also work in the relevant organization/project for at least 6 consecutive months and expect that this work will continue, and the contribution interruption period shall not exceed one quarter. For part-time members, their income weight will be reduced accordingly according to actual conditions.

Protocol Guild members share of revenue is proportional to the square root of the time they contribute to Ethereum (in months), ensuring a fair correspondence between contribution and reward.

Currently, in the Protocol Guild, it seems that the joining of new members requires invitation and nomination by existing members, and then all existing members will review and discuss. If there is a conflict of interest between the nominator and the nominee, it needs to be disclosed in advance to ensure the fairness and transparency of the process.

How are Protocol Guild donations released?

When it comes to Protocol Guilds mechanism for releasing donated funds, its core lies in its smart contract architecture. Protocol Guild uses smart contracts created by Splits to manage the ownership, allocation, and flow of donated funds. All donations are made through a 4-year vesting contract on the mainnet, which attributes the funds to a designated wallet (Pass-Through Wallet), which then sends the funds to the split contract for distribution based on the members contribution shares.

Among them, the split contract contains the addresses of all Protocol Guild members and their respective shares of vested funds, and is updated quarterly to reflect changes in membership, increases and decreases in members, and adjustments to the weights of each member.

In addition, Protocol Guild uses DAOhauss Moloch V3 contract for on-chain governance, giving each member equal voting power to approve or veto changes to membership on the chain. Once a decision is reached, Protocol Guilds multisig will be responsible for processing these changes and updating the split contract to reflect the latest membership list and funding allocation.

In the vast universe of Ethereum, Protocol Guild has attracted core contributors who are committed to the development and maintenance of Ethereum with its unique donation and fund allocation mechanism. As a bridge between funds and contributors, Protocol Guild not only ensures the reasonable allocation of funds, but also injects a steady stream of power into the prosperity and development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Reference: https://protocol-guild.readthedocs.io/

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