Protocol Guild
= "Protocol Guild is a public goods project which aims to fund Ethereum core infrastructure".
Contextual Quote
"Protocol Guild ... encourages pro-social behavior. Protocol Guild is a public goods project which aims to fund Ethereum core infrastructure. Instead of using protocol mechanics and incentives to promote itself, operators work behind the scenes to create social alliances among crypto projects. Sponsor projects opt in to collectively shoulder the obligation to fund the core development they all rely on, promoting an ethos of generosity and mutualism. ... The capital allocation mechanism elevates normative commitments above quantifiable financial incentives. They demonstrate that even without the law, it’s possible to build consensus around norms and foster compliance. In short, technical protocols do not provide the answer alone, but act as the basis for wider social protocols.
- Toby Shorin, Sam Hart, Laura Lotti [1]
Description
1.
Josh Tan et al. :
"The Protocol Guild leverages collective bargaining power, allowing groups like Ethereum core contributors to negotiate with protocols and DAOs for funding and resources, particularly for public goods."
(https://paragraph.xyz/@guildguild/guild-guild)
2.
"The Protocol Guild is ...
A collective of Ethereum contributors
working to boost the incentives around stewarding the core protocol
by maintaining an onchain registry of its membership
which allows ecosystem sponsors to directly fund the membership, their work, the public good."
(https://protocol-guild.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html)
Characteristics
- a curation process which produces a list of eligible recipients
Protocol Guild uses “self-curation” by individual peers working on core development. This is somewhat contingent on a high-trust community of peer stewards, where the assumption is that high quality work will still be produced absent invasive oversight. This is also enabled through the perspective of a collective protocol emerging from the collaborative stewardship by many constituent parts, instead of something like a competitive RFP process.
- a weighting mechanism applied to that list
Protocol Guild uses time-weighting instead of subjective peer ranking. While it’s true this prevents more granular measures of individual impact, using time-weighting sidesteps the contention that might come out of peer ranking, doesn’t require time to apply, and is objective and transparent to members.
- Autonomous weighting & disbursement
The Guild has no treasury allocation process, at least in the traditional sense. Instead, it cedes that to an objective time-weighting and trustless vesting mechanism. The intentional tradeoff to foreclose this decision space from ourselves gives us lower governance overhead/ possible contention, at the cost of lower weighting granularity and less flexibility in funding disbursement.
- The Ethereum protocol will still be evolving over the next 5-10 years. The Guild exists to fund and incentivize a stable pool of contributors over that period. Just as the Ethereum distributed system takes inputs from many actors to produce a unified global state, the production of the underlying software combines efforts from many contributors. There is no single entity which maintains and evolves the protocol in isolation. Protocol Guild reproduces the qualities inherent to the production of a software commons as a funding stream. With this tool, the ecosystem can now share the collective responsibility of funding core protocol stewardship. If you’re going to go through the trouble of bootstrapping a new institution and norms to fund it, it may be best to only do it for long term projects centered on the same domain, eg. ongoing workstreams with high trust between the collaborators. The Guild makes iterated social commitments (eg. quarterly membership updates) to continue curating, which builds trust with sponsors."
(https://trent.mirror.xyz/DLYnuoCN-Hwuu0s4G_XZVdI-c2OD2KP3UAg_UFB9MpY)