Credibly Neutral Public Goods Funding w/ Trent Van Epps (Protocol Guild)

**Speaker A:** Foreign. **Speaker B:** Welcome back to the Strange Water Podcast. Thank you for joining us for another great episode. You may have heard me say this a few times before, and you'll definitely hear me say it again during this conversation, but I believe that one of the most exciting and promising reasons to be involved with Ethereum is because I believe that Ethereum is perhaps the final manifestation of the open source software movement. Now, that's a huge statement that deserves unpacking at some later time, but let me sum up most of it by pointing out that Ethereum allows everyone to directly financially benefit from the use of the incredible things built on top of it. The culmination of EIP 1559, the reduced issuance of ETH post merge, and many other of these pieces of Ethereum's history have created a new kind of public good that distributes its profit to the vast majority of ETH holders. But these are big ideas meant to paint a picture across an entire digital economy. To put it frankly, the Ethernet is too esoteric and indirect to provide for competent development and stewardship of Ethereum. The reality is that real humans need to develop the software needed to operate, upgrade and maintain any of the technology that makes any of this work. And those real humans even eat real food and have real bills. So here's the problem space we're about to enter. How do you ensure that there is sufficient funding for the public infrastructure that underlies the entire Ethereum ecosystem? Lots of people have very strong opinions on this matter, but there are few that I respect more than today's guest, Trent Van Epps. During this episode, we'll cover all things public goods funding from the current mechanisms that support public infrastructure today, how other chains and ecosystems have decided to support their public goods and will eventually land on the Protocol Guild, a public goods funding concept that Trent has been building since early 2022. The idea behind Protocol Guild is simple. Tokens are donated by successful DAOs protocols or other ecosystems that are built on top of Ethereum, and then they're split between a curated list of Ethereum Protocol contributors. This is a fantastic episode for anyone that believes in the Ethereum that we have today and wants to see it continue to mature and to grow. And next time you're getting an itch to write a DAO proposal, consider a contribution to the Protocol Guild. One more thing before we begin. Please do not take financial advice from this or any other podcast. Ethereum will change the world one day, but you can easily lose all of. **Speaker C:** Your money between now and then. **Speaker B:** All right, time to bring on Trent. **Speaker C:** Trent, thank you so much for joining us for the Strange Water podcast. Great to have you on. **Speaker A:** Thank you for having me. **Speaker C:** Of course. So before we start talking public goods at all, let's, you know, I'm a big believer that the most important part of any conversation are the people in it. So let's start with you. What is your background and like, really specifically, how did you go from just like normal regular person out there to like someone who's dedicated their life to this like, very bizarre world we call crypto? **Speaker A:** Sure. So, like a lot of people, I started completely outside of crypto. Maybe over time that'll, that'll become less and less normal as, as people I don't know get degrees in IT and come out of school learning how to do blockchain development and things like that. But for now that's, that's pretty common. But I started in architecture and design. That's what I went to school for. I did that for a few years professionally and then found crypto on specifically Ethereum on Reddit and just kind of dove deep into the community there and was really consumed and really excited by the things I was seeing. I saw an early Mist demo, I think in 2015 or 2016. Mist was this. Today is something like the Gnosis safe app interface where you have like this way of interacting with different projects all through a single application interface. But back in the day, that was 2015 or 2016, these were just like ideas and things that we hope to build in the future. So yeah, when I saw that demo, I was hooked. And just over the years following that got deeper and deeper. Eventually quit architecture and started working part time here and there. This is about 2018, part time for a few different crypto projects. Then I joined full time working company called White Block. And then I also worked at ETH Global which does hackathons. People are maybe familiar with that. And then I joined the EF maybe two and a half years ago. And just over that entire timeframe, I started off just by, you know, I'm not, I'm not a developer, I'm not technical to a large degree. I have an understanding of the concepts that people are talking about, but I'm not, not working with code really. So I started with what I knew on the edges of the Ethereum community, showing up to core dev calls, trying to understand the people and the structures that make this community come to consensus, to be able to build things. So yeah, I started off like taking notes on community calls, transcribing podcasts. Like these are things that were very easy for me to do and within my skill set and then just over time got deeper and deeper, more accustomed to the way the community operated and just started doing my own projects. Some of them related to public goods, funding and. Yeah, so that's all in parallel to sort of the work that I was getting paid for and then eventually ended up at the Ethereum Foundation. And I couldn't, I couldn't be happier. I really enjoy the work that I'm doing there. **Speaker C:** Awesome. Well, we'll talk in a minute about like, kind of the. It's very funny. Like, everyone has a different journey into crypto, but it's all kind of smells the same where it's like you, you just encounter it somewhere on the Internet and then like, realize that there's something crazy here. And then we all like, kind of bootstrap our way into the industry by like, essentially creating content. Like, whether it's transcribing other people's content or me, I was literally just writing threads on like, basic computer science and basic, like Ethereum. But yeah, so anyway, we'll get to the content pipeline into crypto in a second. But let's go back to 2015 ish, when you start to see Ethereum on like Reddit or on the forums or whatever. Like, as an architect, someone who is not like, deep, deep into, you know, financial stuff, like political stuff. Like, you know, there's so much that draws people in crypto, everything from like wild speculative profits to this, like, really hardcore libertarianism. Like, there should be no borders. Like, what in that moment when you stumbled upon it in Reddit was like, interesting to you? **Speaker A:** Yeah, that's a good question. So I think one of the things that got me into architecture was. **Speaker C:** The. **Speaker A:** The idea that something that your, your output of your work. I mean, this is why a lot of people do things. The output of your work can shape the world in some way. And in architecture, that's literally the physical or the built environment. You're designing a space that people will inhabit and you can shape their interactions or the way that they inhabit space by the way you design it, the materials you use, certain features that are included or not included. And so that impulse to design or shape the world was very strong. And I think it's strong for a lot of architects and designers. However, what I experienced going from school to the practice of the profession is that it's quite different. It's, you know, you're going from the abstract ideas and the concepts to effectively running a business. It's very different. So there was a big discrepancy between what I was expecting with the professional and the actual practice of it, which is fine. Like the real world is very different from the academic study of something. That sort of goes without saying. And maybe I was a little naive going into it, but that desire to shape the world or engage with forming something was still there, even if I wasn't so in love with architecture anymore. So when I found Ethereum, it was kind of an opportunity to, or at least at the time, my perspective was that it's a way to engage with shaping the Internet and different technologies that might be very widespread in the future. And I grew up after sort of the first wave of the Internet coming into being. I know it's been developed for many, many decades, but really in the 90s is when it started, the late 80s and 90s is when it started to take off in a consumer facing way. And yeah, that was, that was before my time. I was born in 1992 and so I didn't really have exposure to all that. I also grew up completely without Internet and only got it later in life. So when I found Ethereum, I was very curious about, oh, you know, this. I always heard early stories of how the Internet had developed and this sort of romantic notion of Web1 and the ways that you had these tight knit communities. And maybe this was an opportunity for me to sort of participate in a new rebirth or a new development of a technology that's going to maybe one day be crucial to the Internet as we use it. Um, so yeah, that, that's sort of the, the context around architecture and, and does the desire, the desire to shape things and how that transferred? **Speaker C:** No, for sure. I mean that resonates so much with me. I was born in 91, so like I very much understand just, you know, I, I in retrospect got the Internet like early. You know, all of my memories, like, definitely like the Internet was slow and dial up and like terrible, but it was there and, and I just, you know, I grew up into this world like kind of thinking that the Internet was something that, you know, is part of like the end of history. Like we were done with everything, everything interesting had already happened. Like, I very vividly remember opening my first like stock account when I was in college and like the thing I was interested in purchasing was Apple. And like by that time like just things are done, you know. And I think for me part of what is so exciting about Ethereum is, you know, like, you don't need me to tell you this. But like for people who, who don't really get it yet, like Ethereum is part of the history of the Internet. And you know, like I think of Ethereum as just like the first and like the last way that we're going to express property on the Internet. And so, you know, to understand it in that context, it really is about, you know, building the Internet, shaping the Internet and realizing that the 90s or the 2000s were not the end of history. That like a very naive comment by people who survived the Cold War. **Speaker A:** But I can, I can also go back to. Sorry to cut you off, but there was also, you also touched on like the political aspect of things. And so like shaping the world is pretty generic and like every, every political ideology wants a shape in the world in some way. So it's not very informed. But I definitely, one of the things that ties into politics I guess would be I grew up pretty conservative and then went away to college and found that there are other ways of interpreting the world. And then just growing up in the United States and observing the electoral politics, presidential races. Yeah like from my teens to early adulthood just came pretty, became pretty disenchanted with democracy at scale just because it's, it's very hard to effect change within a system that just, it's structured the way it is. So in some sense this was both like crypto, I think represents for me and maybe some other people who are politically inclined. Like this is a way to affect both small and large scale change because the technology can be used at many different scales. Right. It's a, it's a global technology in that it's used, can be accessed by anyone in the world. Anybody can run a node. But you can also construct, you can construct tiny instances of the technology and like a DAO for example, but you can create very large examples of this as well. And I think we're going to see larger and larger examples of the scale of coordination that is possible with crypto. And so I mean obviously I didn't, I didn't know that then, but I think I at least had an instinct towards this thing, this technology, this infrastructure is one way that I can give greater agency outside of the, like build agency for people, self determination, sovereignty for people outside of the traditional political system. Hopefully it plays out as I'm expecting. But yeah, that's definitely. And I've gotten probably more left leaning over the years and now I'm definitely very interested in commons based production as a way of viewing or framing how I'm building things and maybe we'll get into that later with talking about Protocol Guild. But I think crypto is incredible for doing a lot of this like peer to peer organization at a scale and with certain affordances that weren't possible in the previous technology set. **Speaker C:** Yeah. So I think we can go all day on why crypto is amazing and what it allows in this world that it's becoming more closed off and dangerous. And we can go all day on Ethereum, but let's kind of progress forward on your story and get us eventually to Protocol Guild. So again we briefly mentioned, and I don't know how the only thing I'll say about the content pipeline into working in crypto is like, it's not just trend, it's not just me. Like that's Vitalik story too. Just like go look up Bitcoin magazine. Right. Like I, I think there's something like so cool and profound that that is how you get into crypto. At least before there's university programs or professional training programs. It's literally go find something interesting and then write content on it asphodelic. But with that is like the background. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you found public goods and why you became more and more interested in that and maybe touch on a little bit about what public goods means in the context of crypto. That is just more specific than like this generic term of public goods that we think of everything from like a freeway overpass to, you know, public health care to you know, something like funding a guest client. Like what is public goods to you? And then why did you find yourself resonating and like. And moving closer towards it? **Speaker A:** Sure. So yeah, public goods is this term that everybody throws around and often there's disagreeing definitions which conflict with each other. But if you take the traditional definition of public goods or commons goods, it's things that are non excludable and non rival risk. So like you can't prevent somebody from using it and your consumption of it doesn't impact them necessarily. Obviously if we're thinking about physical public goods, like a subway station used or sorry, like a train, you standing in the train takes up someone else's space. So there are some limits on some things that people would call public goods when you get into the physical realm. But because we're dealing with software and digital goods, it's. You can't prevent somebody from looking at code. Like the marginal cost to reproduce that code is just looking at an interface or looking at a website on GitHub or something. So there's no, there's some different restrictions when it comes to or there are fewer restrictions when it comes to digital public goods. So that's like the high level definition. But when it comes to Ethereum, these are things that sometimes people frame it as they don't have a profit mechanism built in which is useful in some ways in that you know that they're not going to construct a mechanism or product that is aligned towards extraction. Other ways to think about it is what would be really hard for a market to produce this thing. So if it's, you know, something that's more user facing, like a wallet for example, these are things, this is something that is typically created by or there are many, many different kinds of wallets and they have different features and it's relatively easy for users to switch between them if they want certain features. And you know, maybe someday there will be business models for these wallets like they charge a fee on swaps or something. However, if you look so that's at like the user layer but if you go down, down, down the stack all the way to the infrastructure layer, what would it look like for a core client to charge a fee that went to the op the maintainers of the software? When you start to do things like this, it becomes strange for not just the users, but like the political orientation of how the software is produced. Are all the different versions of. Are all the client teams charging a fee? Is only one charging a fee? What do they do with that money? Are there possible ways in which this can degrade over time? Like it can it fall out of equilibrium? So once you start to maybe that's like one way to look at it is like when you introduce a fee, is that even possible or desirable? And if the answer is no, you end up with some really unfortunate degraded state. That's maybe a case where a public good would be possible. Now that's not to say that you know, this condition always persists or will always play out like that, but it's one way to frame it. So yeah, my path was like you said, writing and just making content around specifically core dev stuff. Layer 2s when they were first starting in 2019, I was always fascinated with the political and social dynamics for things like mining when it was still around. I was involved in the Prague POW debates back in the day and just got deeper and deeper in thinking about how these, how these software goods, these, these common goods created by the input of many hundreds of people over time and you know, coming to consensus, disagreeing the political and social process that went into creating this thing, which, you know, is very painful at times to, to create this. But in reality it's the only way that it could be created through the consensus of many, many people. And so just by exposure to the all core devs calls and the many different teams and individuals that are working on these things, this is how I first became aware of like, what are public goods in this sense? And then later on the Commons framing. Yeah, so yeah, just over time became more and more exposed to the concept and yeah, hopefully that covers all the little bits of your question. **Speaker C:** No, no, for sure. So I think the quintessential example of like Ethereum and public goods, at least in my mind, feel free to push back, is on the actual clients of Ethereum. Right. Whether. And things are getting more complicated now, but we'll just pretend like there's only one client, you know, there's not like a consensus client, an execution client. But can you maybe walk us through very briefly the history of like first, like we have just the cons, we just have Ethereum, right. Like the first consensus client. And that maybe doesn't need to be thought that strongly about, you know, incentives in maintaining the software because, you know, the software is the product, it's everything. But as we move further and further away from that, we realize that we need more clients for security reasons. We need them for, for, for a lot of reasons. And we need to start thinking like, how do we incentivize people to essentially create duplicate pieces of software that like, by definition, or at least by our like, highest ambitions will never form a fee? Like, can you maybe walk us through that story and like, help us understand like why public goods is so important in this space? Specifically in this credibly neutral space. **Speaker A:** Yeah. So if we go back in time, Geth was one of several early clients. I don't know if they started exactly at launch or a little bit after. And if any of the early Geth team hears this and you can come and yell at me later for not knowing, but there were a number of clients at the beginning, I think three, I think Parity was one of them. There may have been another client. But this is different from something like Linux which has just the kernel and then people build on top of it. Linus has famously said, like, there's no need for a spec. It's just like we have the kernel. But in Ethereum it's different for a number of reasons. One, it's a distributed system and hopefully I'm not putting my foot in my mouth because I'm not a distributed systems engineer, but with these systems, once you introduce a bug, let's say we had a single client, like Bitcoin, for example, the client is the specification. To boil it down, whereas in Ethereum, there's this. Today we have the yellow paper, we have the consensus and execution specifications, and these are what clients interpret into different forms. So we have this central version, the specification. Clients create an interpretation and then they produce instances of the state which are then merged into mainnet or the blockchain as we interact with it. So it's this divergence and then reconvergence which makes it so important that we have many different implementations from a technical perspective, because then it's much less likely that you will have a bug that makes it into the canonical set or you end up, let's say, forking out a minority client. So technically this is super important, but politically and socially, so politically, you don't want to have any single team that's overweight in terms of coming to consensus or how they engage with how the protocol is governed and so stewarded over time. And so like I said, early on there were a couple clients already. It wasn't that, it just started with one. And over time we've seen more and more clients. Today, I think there are 10 to 12 at varying levels of sort of main net readiness. This is both execution and consensus layer, because there are two different layers now. Yeah. And socially, right. You have. Once you have exposure to more languages, you can bring more people into Ethereum. It's a way of scaling up the number of developers who can engage with the core evm, the core specification. And so this is another good thing. So we have social benefit and then we have as many people as possible bringing their context and their experiences into Ethereum to build a client or just interact with an existing one. Politically, the production of the protocol is not constrained or dictated by a single organization or a single team. And then, like I said, technically, we don't end up producing a bug that ends up in the canonical chain. If you have many clients that must agree over time over this distributed consensus, for sure. **Speaker C:** And I think we can talk all day about why it's so important to have multiple clients. And that's everything from the attackability of Ethereum to just the brittleness or as you keep saying, our exposure to bugs, I think all of that is super important. But within the scope of public goods, I think it's really worth it to drill down on, you know. Now we'll Fast forward to 2023 where we are today, like how do these like incredible pieces of software that form the backbone of Ethereum, like how do they get formed? Like who is paying for it? And so I think like we can look at a couple different examples we can look at. I'll let you kind of like give us the taxonomy. But there's everything from, I believe was it one of the clients was just purchased by Off Chain Labs. And like that is a way that we believe, you know, it can be supported in the long term because now there's a business entity, there's things coming out of like groups that are supported by Paradigm. So you know there's deep pockets there and we're sure that there's going to be like some sort of support. Can you just kind of talk through the taxonomy of like all the different clients and how they are supported and so that we can kind of understand like really at the base layer, like how is Ethereum like moving the ball forward? **Speaker A:** Yeah, the. So yeah we can go back in time again. The main way that it all started was the Ethereum foundation just giving grants to people. I believe they were usually longer term grants of a couple years and that's probably still the norm today. So you kind of have this group of people, I know Prism started this way just they're, they're really interested in doing something. They were early on to what was called E2, then the beacon chain. Now they were just really passionate and wanted to build something and be engaged in the process. And so once you have a group of people together they can get a grant and distribute it amongst themselves. Oftentimes they will create a commercial entity and this is typically the form that we see client teams hosted within that there's some, there's some legal entity that hosts the software or at least hosts the people that are working on the software. Of course these are open source projects so they have many external contributions but typically the majority of the teams will be hosted by a commercial team and then they can take these grants from the Ethereum foundation and distribute them to fund the operations. So that was the main way early on. A couple years after that we started to see gitcoin grants sort of take shape and this was I think one of the first main ways that client teams or at least the commercial entity that hosted the clients, and you're going to hear me make this distinction quite often because I think it's important to note there's the commercial entity which is like the wrapper, which may include more than just the client project itself. So Like Lighthouse, for example, is a software project. It's a team of people working on it, but they're housed within the Sigma prime legal entity, which is I believe in Australia they have some legal entity that, that also has other projects. So they have an auditing arm that's at least one that I know of. But so it's a larger company. And then the Lighthouse project is within it. So grants is the main thing. And then. Yeah, to my point I just made. Oftentimes these client teams will have adjacent services that they can offer and then fund the client in that way. So some will do auditing, some will do consulting with either legacy industries or trad tech, whatever you want to call it, Web2. Or they will do consulting with other L2s. There's a couple different ways in which they can make money. And I skipped around a little bit, so I was talking about gitcoin. Gitcoin emerged, yeah. A couple years after the start of the network. And you know, that was one way for a client team to have exposure or a way for the ecosystem to fund them. But again this goes to the commercial entity, not the individuals. And I think for the scale that client teams need to operate at, gitcoin Grants was usually like a nice bonus, but it's not doing the main bit of funding. So grants, Gitcoin grants, that variant. And then even more recently we've seen things like Optimism's rpgf which is like same thing, Gitcoin Grants. You apply with a profile and then there's some deliberation process and then they will get funding in some way. Those are the main ones that come to mind. I know some client teams or the commercial entities which house the client teams have gotten VC funding or like you said, have been purchased by Arbitrum, sorry off Chain Labs, the company that works on Arbitrum. So yeah, there's a handful of different ways in which these core clients are maintained financially. And then of course, Protocol Guild is another way that we target the individuals working on this stuff. And those are probably the main ones. I know actually a few client teams also had, I mentioned consulting, but they will do consulting for other L1s, like Gnosis chain or I know Aragon for a little bit was working with Binance Smart Chain. I don't think that's the case anymore. But yeah, so there's a number of ways in which client teams can get funding. But maybe what we'll get into is. Yeah, this is actually quite important and nuanced how this funding comes in and the. Yeah, the context in which it comes in is really important. **Speaker C:** Yeah. So I think you, you brought my attention to something we need to hit a little bit later, which is the landscape of all the different entities that are offering public goods funding, whether from gitcoin to this new Optimism program, Protocol Guild and just maybe like the EF directly. But before we get there, while we're still talking about how clients but let's like generalize it a little bit more to all core Ethereum infrastructure when we're thinking about how these things are first like funded at Genesis and then maintain funding long term. What are the types of funding that are like really positive and like contribute to a sense of public goods, like let's say small donor amounts from the community. And what are the types of funding that are like very scary and like lead us to think that like there might be like some sort of capture of public goods. And in this case I'm thinking of like, you know, what if a very predatory bank like goes and purchases a like a client team like outright or something like that. Like when you're just thinking broad strokes like what are the types of funding that you really want to foster, encourage and what are the types of funding that we need to just make sure stay within a guardrail that doesn't, you know, like taint the whole thing that we're doing. **Speaker A:** Yeah. So I guess I should have started with the disclaimer of like I am a protocol Guild member and an employee of Ethereum Foundation. However, none of this is representative of, you know, these organizations or the other people that work for them or with them. So my opinions are my opinions and maybe mine alone. One thing I forgot to mention is so you're asking about the spectrum of funding and sort of the characteristics or qualities that they bring along with them. One that I forgot to mention, which is interesting is the client incentive program that the Ethereum foundation runs. So it's sort of like a grant. I don't know if you've, you're familiar with it or you've heard of it, but basically the EF will give a chunk of Ether to these client entities that are producing the software that the client actually produces. They will give them Ether to run the client that they're producing and then in that way then they receive the rewards from it and the access to those keys unlocks over time. So it's a really interesting way to one, you can, it's an incentive to create good software that doesn't have bugs and then you can also do like a long term incentive alignment because it's not a full unlock. They have to, I think it's over two years or, or something and it's a significant amount of money. I don't recall off the top of my head and it might be different for each team but it's not, you know, it's not 50K. It's, it's the other end of the spectrum in order of magnitude the other way. So this is a great way for client teams to get exposure to, to their work and also be funded by the product of their efforts. So in terms of, in an ideal world I think, you know, it'd be great if we had individual donors who were just altruistic and really appreciated the work of client teams and they were able to sustain themselves through this, you know, grassroots, bottom up, small scale donors. However, that's not the case. Gitcoin, like I said or I mentioned earlier, is, it's a nice bonus but it's not sustaining these, the entities that are producing the client software just because it's really hard to do this at scale. The amount of individuals you'd have to motivate and help understand why it's important to have so many clients becomes challenging after a while. And one of my criticisms of Gitcoin and RPGF maybe in a little different ways is that it sort of, it pits these groups against each other because it constrains everything to a two week window and so you're forced to compete for everyone's time and every dollar is basically something that you are pulling from someone else's grant. So it becomes this sort of attention game and yeah, requires a lot of effort on the part of these client teams and the people who would probably rather be just developing the software than doing this sort of quarterly raise every time. And so yeah, like I said, ideally it'd be all grassroots. That's not, probably not going to happen. And so we see things like gitcoin emerge as sort of an intermediary that can coordinate these funding rounds. And the same thing with Optimism's rpgf like it's this larger entity with a pool of capital that they can help to coordinate. They don't do it on a quarterly, but maybe it's like every six months at this point. But you know, they're doing it semi regularly and this is sort of the way that we've seen funding get, get allocated in the space. Yeah. So bottom up is great and then we have these sort of intermediary entities that help to structure some funding rounds. You can also think of the Ethereum foundation as an intermediate entity that directs funding to these different organizations. And one of your questions or one part of your question was like, what are some ways that wouldn't be great? So yeah, like you said, a large multinational coming in with millions of dollars and purchasing an existing client team, that would be not great just because there's this, there's this political and social network of relationships and norms that have been built up over the past almost 10 years at this point. And if you all of a sudden have the company or the labor of the employees is purchased and it's pulled out of that, or not really pulled out, it's being housed within another commercial entity, in the near term it might not change things, but in the long term it does change the assumptions of how these individuals might be interacting with the consensus, how these individuals are coming to consensus, what they think is important to include in the protocol specific features, what priorities are, how to scale things like that. So I think that's definitely like the far end of the bad, the bad spectrum in terms of funding these entities. And then sort of maybe more towards the middle we have things like Arbitrum or sorry, Off Chain Labs purchasing Prism. I don't think it's immediately clear what this sort of, what this is. And it's sort of funny like when it happened last fall, it's. I haven't heard a ton of people talking about like the, the deeper implications and maybe now that we're almost a year on from that, maybe some people will talk about it again. But generally, like another disclaimer, I love the people at prism. I really enjoy talking to the Off Chain Labs teams. They're all really great people and I don't think they would ever do anything intentionally to subvert the Ethereum Protocol, governance or core development, anything like that. However, as it's just the reality that now they're encumbered or contained within a larger organization, a larger commercial organization that over time may. It's always possible that, you know, the founding team or the, the core cultural values of something that, that existed in the past, these things may not carry forward to the future. And now that it's been acquired, you have these individuals which are diverting their attention between the L2 and the L1 work and there may be some unexpected externalities or dynamics which emerge which we're not really aware of yet, or it's really hard to anticipate these things long term. **Speaker C:** Yeah. And like, I think both of us very much agree that it's like this is not doom and gloom, like it's totally like realistic to think that this is only a net positive for the industry. And like a great example would be just like go look at Google and how much like the amount of headcount and resources they put towards just like full on open source projects. And you know we think about like Google is this like search and like maybe email entity but you know I, I have a lot of friends that work there and like some of them are like directors of like 30 person teams that like solely all they do is like contribute to the REACT framework or something to that effect. And so you know there, there's totally a world where private companies like really like really understand the vision and like are able to contribute back to it because they know that like the more credibly neutral that Ethereum is, the more valuable that their products are. And so it's not all doom and gloom and it just does introduce new risk. **Speaker A:** Yeah, one thing I will, maybe I'll take like just a step closer to doom than you because yes, totally there, there are ways that private companies can like contribute in a pro social way to open source software. And I mean I've been studying Linux for the past few months and I gave a talk at Protocol Berg specifically about the parallels between Linux and Ethereum and how these ecosystems have developed and what we can learn from the Linux ecosystem given it has a 25 year head start. And one of the things you see is yes there are these private companies, these corporate entities. So Red Hat is a great example of a company that's built its business model around exclusively working on open source software. But what you see over time is like we touched on at the beginning, these are digital goods, you can't enclose them in the same way you could enclose like a field that you're sharing with other farmers. You can't kick them off, but what you can do is sort of claim enclosed influence, manipulate the relationships of the employees that you pay. And so we've started if you're, if anybody listening is familiar at all with Linux, it's very much supported by and funded and supported by these commercial entities that are really, really deeply intertwined with the production process or the production of the software itself. And so like yes, they can't enclose the digital software. What they can do is insert themselves into the social and political frameworks that are used to produce this software. And that does have potential. If we're thinking about potential for capture or potential for negative influence, like that's where it's going to happen. Is by these individuals who are, you know, they have one foot in the commercial entity which may have many, many other like Google massive company is primarily concerned with profit or at least not losing money. And then these open source projects or software, it's a, it's a, it's a very, very small side effect, it's a small side concern. And so you have employees which have a foot in this profit seeking entity and also these open source projects and at the end of the day their allegiance is going to be towards the profit seeking entity because that's what pays them and then otherwise maybe they can leave. So I do think it's important to also just be very clear eyed about it. Yes, commercial entities, private entities, they're going to come and like basically what we have now is, is, you know this is basically it's, it's today's I think it's very uncomplicated, as kind of absurd as that may sound. Like Ethereum development in the production process is relatively uncomplicated relative to where I think it will be in a few years. I think there will be dozens of Ethereum clients and some of them will be maintained by Coca Cola or whatever there's going to be, it's going to get broader and broader and more people will want to have a say in the political and social production of the software. And so I think it's really important to one prepare for this future and you know like you touched on maybe I'm just like rehashing the same bits but yeah they can produce great software, they can be great people but it's important to really, really keep this in mind that at the end of the day they may have different objectives than just producing the core Ethereum network. **Speaker C:** For sure, for sure. I mean point taken. And yeah, I mean it's like very naive to look at like Google and say like they're really here contributing to open source when that's like essentially they're like corporate greenwashing for people like me. Right? Yeah, yeah, so, so I think I love how much you're just talking about Open Source and Ethereum, like Linux and Ethereum, all these things because to me what is incredible about Ethereum and why I'm not financial advice but why I'm willing to put a significant portion of my net worth into the asset is because, and again not financial advice because I very much believe that for the first time ever we have the ability to have like financial exposure directly to open source. Like not specific pieces of open source software but like open source As a concept like that's kind of what I see Ethereum as like the final manifestation of Open Source and this thing that we can all contribute to. And unlike Google where you contribute to it and then the profit gets sucked into the entity, what Ethereum does is like through EIP 1559 and all these like, interesting mechanism, like spits it right back out to ETH holders. And so I think like what we have here is incredibly cool and like a full on like step change from what Open source was before. And so one of the opportunities we have here that Open source generically doesn't have is like protocol enshrined funding. Right. And I would love for you to talk like maybe using you know, alt L1s like Canto or as an example or maybe just like talking hypothetically about a world where let's say like 0.5% of eth staking profits go into something like the Protocol Guild or some sort of pool that gets distributed. Like can you little maybe first reflect on if you think that that's a good idea and if so, yes, why yes or no? And then two, like do you think that if it's a good idea or not, is it realistically possible for something like Ethereum to add that in after we've like, you know, done a lot of our development even though there's still a lot to go. **Speaker A:** Wow. Yeah, I feel like we could, this could be like three or four questions even about like the, the trade offs of having financialization embedded within the like the core DNA of what the software is and yeah, like going back to Linux and some of the, some of these other projects and how they developed early on. But yeah, so the reality is we're here today with a substrate that has a native token. It has these certain capabilities that are baked right into it. And yeah, the ETH token is used in consensus. It, I guess in some sense, yeah gives you exposure to the software or like this collective belief in this alternative vision for digital infrastructure globally accessible. So in some sense it is, it is when you, when you're, if you purchase eth, you probably believe in the capabilities of this, the people making the software and their like the stated aims of the people who are thinking ahead to the future. And I guess, yeah, one of the things that we completely glossed over is like the history of public goods funding and you mentioned one of them is like a percent of the block reward. Like this is used by some other chains. I don't have like a list off the top of my head, but I Think the majority of proof of stake chains today and a lot of the proof of work chains today have some block like percent of the reward of the native currency produced. Each block that goes to a shared treasury that is then managed by a bunch of different, there's a bunch of different governance processes, there's foundations some of them have on chain governance where you use the native token to vote on allocations or like smaller grants rounds, things like that. Ethereum does not have this and never did. And maybe I'm forced to argue this because I'm yoked to Ethereum, but I think this is really great in hindsight and a lot of people would probably agree because when you don't have a native block reward, you remove a lot of contention around what's going on with that. So there's one, this native funding mechanism, it's really hard to allocate funding properly because it needs to be managed. When something needs to be managed, there's a political process around it and this is even assuming like a foundation is managing it. Once you get into things like on chain governance it becomes 100 times more complex because you have so many more voices to incorporate into your consensus process. So. So I think Ethereum saved itself a lot of heartache by not doing these two things. Again, maybe I'm just. This is just cope and in reality like these two systems are great and we just don't have them. And I'm lying to myself but yeah, Ethereum doesn't have a native block reward and so we rely on these altruistic mechanisms to kind of prove which one is going to be the best. And the answer is probably a mix of all of them. And one of the things you mentioned was these sort of in protocol rewards and they take, they take a couple different forms you mentioned Canto is looking into this, but near and Phantom also have some other version where this is more focused on. In my understanding, this is more focused on the application layer where you can. It's much easier to monetize. The way that they've set up these protocols is that they take some measure of the transaction fees which go through a contract and then some percent of that goes to the deployer of the contract. So yeah, like I said, near has a version of this, Fantom has a version of this, There might be others, I know Kanto is looking into it and maybe even pgn, which is this public goods chain that Gitcoin is affiliated with. So a lot of people are interested in this, but typically it flows to the application developer, not Necessarily the core protocol. So that would have to be, again, relying for Ethereum, it's relying on these altruistic incentives of people who, you know, I really love the. The client that I'm using. I'm going to donate directly to these individuals that. That produce the software that allow me to receive an income by participating in validation and things like that. But yeah, I'm curious, do you think there's a world where Ethereum ever adds a block reward percent? **Speaker C:** Is there a world wherever happens? I think no. I think we're too ossified. The goal for Ethereum is for us to finish the development and for it to ossify, and we're obviously not there yet. But I do think that some of our core principles are. And one of those core principles are like, don't put a giant pot of money at, like, the base that. The base layer. And like, for the reasons that you're saying, like, that. That makes a lot of sense to me. Right? Like, we shouldn't basically put like, a giant, giant pot of like. Of like, literal cash that says, hey, if you capture this protocol, not only, like, do you get to control it, but there's a literal prize, right? **Speaker A:** Yes. Not only do. Yeah, you. You don't. You not only get the social and political access, but you literally get paid to capture it. **Speaker C:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and so, like, not so. So I very much understand that, but part of me is also like, look, like, okay, let's. Let's take that as a given and let's remove enshrined protocol, you know, funding, and then just like, talk about the world we have now. And, like, it's totally awesome that somehow, like, we convinced enough people with, like, vested interest that, like, whether it's like, you know, Vitalik himself to, like, people who have become, like, incredibly wealthy from this casino, like, Tetra Node to, like, anyone in between. Like, we've just basically convinced them that they need to fund this, and we're essentially, like, hoping that that lasts long enough that, I mean, essentially that, like, the eth price is so large that all these problems just kind of solve themselves. Right. And so it. It does seem to be working so far. And, like, I'm really excited about that. But to me, this is like, feels a little bit just like the entire history of crypto, like, hoping that it's gonna work out without, like, a real understanding of, like, why we have corporations in big business and, like, why the. The world is the way the world is. You know, like, Google isn't like Larry and Sergey just aren't like uniquely evil greedy men. Like, they are a product of this world. And so, you know, there's just something like a little bit uncomfortable for me for being like, with Ethereum, we're going to run things different because like it's, it's not arbitrary the way things are. **Speaker A:** For sure. Yeah. And maybe we'll get into this in a little bit. But like one of the main reasons why I'm happy that we don't have this in protocol funding is that there is no suitable mechanism to receive and distribute that. So yes, it could go to the Ethereum foundation and then the Ethereum foundation parcels this block reward out, it could go to a new mechanism. Yeah, there's a number of concerns around like just what actually happens with it. Sure. It's one thing to think about, yeah, we should have this pot of money. But the whole governance process is, it's not trivial to think about, like the ways in which it could get abused and effective governance, how does it get turned off? Things like this. And no surprise. Yeah. I think that Protocol Guild is the mechanism that's closest to this so far. I don't think it's near it today, but it's, in my opinion it's the closest we've gotten to having a, some sort of mechanism that could accept this type of funding in the future. **Speaker C:** Yeah. So I guess we've already been going for 55 minutes here, so with our last few minutes, let's, let's just get to what we were supposed to talk about 50 minutes ago, which is what is Protocol Guild? And since we're running out of time here, can you tell us like first what it is and second of all, like, what do you guys need today in order to continue the mission? And like, what does support and contribution look like today? **Speaker A:** Sure, I'll give the lightning quick pitch. So Protocol Guild is a collective of core Ethereum contributors started in 2021. There's this recurring conversation just like we've been having, about how is the core protocol funded, where does the funding come from, who does it go to, how is it managed? Things like this, this has been a part of Ethereum's history and every couple of years it bubbles back up. And in 2021 this conversation came back up again and one of the outputs from it was Danny Ryan suggesting, okay, let's just make a dao with a list, an on chain list and convince all these on chain entities or DAOs that have a token to contribute 1% of their token. That way, you know, there's this sustainable revenue stream from projects that are successful to Ethereum. If they're successful long term, then the membership has exposure to the broader network and we get this vested funding which can go can be spread out over time. So this was the initial idea in 2021, October 2021 and then sort of I worked with a number of core contributors to refine the idea and we launched it in May 2022 for a one year. What's that? **Speaker C:** This is not a great time to launch anything. **Speaker A:** Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, we couldn't, we can't really be choosy with our timings here, but we launched right in, right around. Yeah, the Terra collapse I think was right around then and yeah, so launched this, got enough core contributors on board and said look, we don't have any funding but here's an idea, we're just going to publish this registry on chain with a vesting contract attached to it and we'll see what happens. So we ended up raising around 13 million, some of it solicited, some of it not solicited and this vests for one year directly to today we have 152 core contributors. So this is people who are working on client teams as expected, but also the researchers who are thinking about things like EIP4844 dank sharding in the future, ways to make the protocol more censorship resistant, secure things like this. Then we have people like myself and Tim who focus on coordination for network upgrades, engaging the community, talking, figuring out what the schedule is going to be, making sure the people who, anyone who's impacted is actually participating in the governance process and then people who are even more outside of the behind the scenes like people doing DevOps for testnets or people who are helping to test these network upgrades. So it's a pretty wide array of people that and a lot of them during presentations I usually like to do like raise your hand, how many core devs can you name? And people will do like three or four but there's quite a few that you don't have awareness of. So what Protocol Guild does is it surfaces that social and political set of people into a single registry, we update it quarterly and it allows both this grassroots contribution so anybody can send to the contract and also significantly, protocols can support it. So we had many large organizations and that's what made up the bulk of the 13 million including the most recent one from the Arbitrum community included Protocol Guild in the airdrop. So that pilot lasted a year and now we are taking Everything we learned writing it up, implementing it in the organization, and then we hope to launch the next version of the contracts within the next few months, hopefully. But that's the basic pitch of what Protocol Guild is. It produces this crystallization of social and political relationships that actually produce Ethereum today in the future, because it's. We make a commitment to update this set every quarter. And so funders know that their, their assets or whatever value they're altruistically giving, they know for sure it's going to go to the individuals that are actually creating the software. **Speaker C:** So would you say like the secret sauce or like the thing that you guys are doing different is focusing. Like everyone raises money in the same way, but like what you guys are doing different is focusing instead of on like specific pieces of infrastructure or pieces of software or like projects, you're focusing on the individual builders who are contributing to these projects and like really trying to foster a community of people that know if you're contributing to Ethereum, you're going to be supported even if you're part of an entity that like, isn't really about, you know, gathering the resources to support you directly. **Speaker A:** Right. It's about providing an alternative mechanism so that maybe in the future when the level of funding going through it is large enough people, they're not forced to be employed by a client team. Again, these are my radical opinions and probably not all members share this belief, but that's what I'm working towards, is to provide a credible alternative to people having to work on these commercial client entities. They will continue to be engaged in the core protocol process. That's fine, and I don't expect that to change long term, but at least I hope that we can provide a credible mechanism for people to actually do this long term. So in some sense it's both larger. The Protocol Guild is different in that it zooms out and also zooms in different relative to other funding mechanisms. So a lot of them atomize the core protocol into specific projects like you mentioned with it, client teams, some software repo. But in reality we know that Ethereum as a body of software and also a network, it's not produced by any single client. Right. If there were a single client, it wouldn't be the distributed system today that has credible neutrality, fault tolerance. It would be centralized around this single team that's working on it. So we have these many different contributors, many different projects that constitute the Ethereum political, social, technical process of constructing the protocol. And so what Protocol Guild does is that it recognizes that it's all of these individuals that are contributing to the whole, the broader collective project. It's not these isolated individuals. And so it recognizes at a higher level that there are, there's this collective good being produced at a large scale. But and at the more micro scale, it's produced by individuals, not necessarily the companies that are employing them. So it's the labor of individuals that go into maintaining these relationships that go into the production process that is then useful in producing this global collective good. So that's one way in which Protocol Guild is unique in that it tries to address the holistic development process of many hundreds of people, many different interests, but at the end of the day, it's produced by individuals towards a large collective output. **Speaker C:** Yeah, man, I love that. And I think that like that beautifully ties together what we were saying earlier about how, what, what Ethereum is, is this, if not the final, this next manifestation of open source. And like, look like we don't need to figure out how to like get capital to like form into entities to chase more capital, right? Like we figured that out in like whatever, 1600 and we've been doing it well since like what, what we do need to figure out and like what is special about Ethereum is it's always about like breaking power down and breaking authority down from these like huge entities into individuals. And I just love that like Protocol Guild is doing that kind of with the approach to public goods fundings because, look, it's like super, incredibly easy for any one of us to say somebody needs to fund the clients and then to develop like institutions or pots of money or whatever that are essentially like, let me pay for more clients. Right? But I love just to like take a step back and say like, it's not really about clients, it's not really even about infrastructure. It's about making sure that the people that are contributing are able to maintain the like, the ethos that we care about as opposed to like the ethos that we are building towards. Right? Which is like, it isn't going to be amazing when the global financial system runs on Ethereum, but the flip side of that is the world is going to look more like Ethereum and Ethereum is going to look more like the world. And it's really important for you guys to be a counteracting force in that. So again, we've been going on too long already. We should have got to the Protocol Guild a long time before this. But with our last couple of minutes, obviously always Protocol Guild would appreciate more donations and direct contributions. But for those of us who maybe can't contribute or want to look to contribute more than just dollars or ether tokens. What are the types of things that you guys could really use right now as you're entering into this second year or second phase or how can we help? **Speaker A:** Yeah, in much the same way that you and I got started, it's just like showing up and engaging with things that you find interesting. So we always appreciate people looking through our docs, even simple stuff like that, like read through it, tell us what doesn't make sense, what's unclear, what could be structured better. Because if we're not capable of writing out how the project should exist or properly describing it, that probably means like, we don't have a good conception of what this thing is either. So we'd love to have more people review the docs and then externally we'd also love more projects to obviously one day we'll, hopefully in the near future we'll start fundraising up again and that'll be a great way for large projects and individuals to just connect us with organizations or individuals that you think are good funding candidates. We're happy to talk to anyone and everyone about the guarantees of the mechanism, how we curate over time, how we define the core protocol, things like this. So if there are even just helping spread awareness in the most basic form, tweeting about it, sharing it with people, when they're asking about what public goods mechanisms are out there, what can I help fund through sharing? Protocol Guild is huge because again, it's, you know, we've been here for, doing this for two years now and I've been amazed by the, the reception from people, but still, still relatively unknown. So any sort of awareness can help. So, yeah, check out the docs, tell us where things don't make sense and then help us reach more people just by sharing it around. We'll be engaging in the next RPGF round for optimism. So if you're a badge holder or just like part of that community, keep an eye out for our application and hopefully our pitch as to why we should receive more funding from op. **Speaker C:** Yeah, for sure. And just to hammer that home and build on it. Right. Like what? Like the. This is all grassroots. Right. And I think that if you're looking to support the Protocol Guild mission, but you know, in a way that's within your own community, like one, like look for people that like, are good recipients of grants that are like building core public goods. But like, perhaps more importantly, if you're really involved in your DAO or in a community like, maybe you should be making a pitch to why that community should be contributing to Protocol Guild, right? And maybe think about like you walked up to Ethereum and built something on here because it existed, and that's amazing, but like, it didn't just get. It didn't just exist. It was not put here by God. It was like created by the blood, sweat and tears of people that, you know, still need to be working on it. And so, you know, if you've ever achieved anything on Ethereum, like, it's important to think about how to make sure the next guy has that opportunity and by the way, how to make sure that the chain still exists for your success to continue in the future. So, you know, if you're in this space, you're part of a community. And if you're part of a community, that means you either know someone who's building core public goods or you know someone who has benefited from them. And so either way, like this right here, if you believe in Ethereum, whether it's through Protocol Guild or through gitcoin or any public goods, like, this is really like, what is special about this space and like what we need to protect. So, Trent, man, thank you so much. Thank you for just your time and everything that you're doing and for really helping us understand how this is going to work and how we can really focus on the things and the people that need support in order to continue. I love the world computer metaphor. I will live or die on that. Continue to boot up the world computer. Trent, thank you so much. Um, before I let you go, can you let the audience know where to find you, where to find Protocol Guild? Like how to stay up to date? **Speaker A:** For sure. Yeah. First, thanks for having me. I don't do too many podcasts, but I always appreciate when there's just free flowing conversation and it's not just like a list of questions. So great job on that. Thank you. Yeah, so on Twitter it's Trent underscore vanapps not as active there, but also forecaster Trent. Also not super active there, but you can if you want to come engage with me. Where I might be super active is come ask me questions about Protocol Guild that we have a discord. You could find it on the Protocol Guild Twitter, which is just the name of the project. Rotocolguild. Yeah. Thank you again, I appreciate it. **Speaker C:** Of course. Yeah, man. And I think we'll all become more active once we figure out what social network we're supposed to be on. But yeah, at this point I'm not really sure where I'm supposed to grow my following. **Speaker A:** So for now, it's all of them. Yeah, every single one. **Speaker C:** Yeah. Yeah. This is the. The cost of decentralization, right? **Speaker A:** Yeah, for sure. **Speaker C:** All right, man. Trent, thank you so much, and let's stay in touch. I hope to talk to you soon. **Speaker A:** Likewise. Thank.