Exploring Protocol Guild: 177 Members, Awarded Over $100 Million, the Solid Backbone of Ethereum L1 Development and Maintenance
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Exploring Protocol Guild: 177 Members, Awarded Over $100 Million, the Solid Backbone of Ethereum L1 Development and Maintenance
What is the Protocol Guild, an organization that received voluntary donations from ether.fi and Taiko, and mandatory donations from LayerZero?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Karen, Foresight News
Projects such as ether.fi and Taiko donating to Protocol Guild, along with LayerZero's mandatory donation requirement for airdrop recipients, have sparked widespread attention and discussion within the community—accompanied by some confusion and questions.
As a solid backbone supporting Ethereum L1 research and maintenance, Protocol Guild plays a crucial role in the ecosystem. But what exactly are the membership requirements, donation allocations, and vesting mechanisms behind this powerful yet mysterious organization? This article dives into the details.
What is Protocol Guild?
Protocol Guild is an organization dedicated to Ethereum L1 development and maintenance, aiming to provide financial support to core contributors in the Ethereum ecosystem through native tokens from Ethereum-based projects, ensuring the network’s sustained growth and innovation.
Since early 2022, Protocol Guild has completed its mechanism design and began recruiting members. In May of that year, it launched the pilot program—Protocol Guild Pilot. After two years of careful operation and continuous refinement, at the end of January 2024, Protocol Guild disclosed its official commitment, concluded the pilot phase, and launched PGv2. The new version aims to make Ethereum L1 developers directly identifiable on-chain, using time-weighted lists and clear eligibility criteria to showcase individuals currently contributing to the protocol and their contribution duration.
According to Protocol Guild’s pledge, Ethereum-based projects are encouraged to allocate 1% of their native token supply to donate to Protocol Guild. The main reason is to attract and retain high-quality contributors by offering them more substantial potential returns, while ensuring these tokens ultimately flow to valuable contributors. Notably, this 1% allocation is not released all at once but gradually over four years.
Why 1%? Protocol Guild estimates that if 33% to 66% of projects adopt this donation standard, each member could potentially earn between $500,000 and $1 million annually.
To date, Protocol Guild has received donations totaling $76 million (at current value). Over the past year, the median donation amount received by members reached $54,000. Meanwhile, the number of members has grown from an initial 90 to 177 today.
Who Are the Current Members of Protocol Guild?
Protocol Guild now brings together 177 members, primarily from the Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum mainnet clients.
Clients include Geth, EthereumJS, Erigon, Hyperledger Besu, Lighthouse, Lodestar, Nethermind, Prysm, Reth, Nimbus, and Teku. Each client has between six and fifteen contributors included in Protocol Guild, making client-side contributors account for nearly 60% of the total membership.
Beyond client teams, Protocol Guild members also come from key groups such as the Ethereum Foundation’s Applied Research Group (ARG), ethPandaOps (a sub-group of the Ethereum Foundation), Ipsilon Research Team (focused on EVM research), the Ethereum Foundation’s Portal Network (dedicated to redefining how resource-constrained devices participate in the Ethereum network), and other critical teams including Protocol Support, Cryptography, Consensus R&D, Robust Incentives Group, and Testing.
Notable members include Tim Beiko and Danny Ryan from the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol Support team, and Justin Drake from the Consensus R&D team. However, Vitalik Buterin is notably absent from the current Protocol Guild membership list.
Which Donations Has Protocol Guild Received?
The thriving growth of Protocol Guild owes much to generous donations from various projects. Which projects have donated to Protocol Guild, and how are these donations distributed among members?
ether.fi was the first project to commit to donating to Protocol Guild, pledging 1% of its token supply before the official announcement of Protocol Guild’s commitments at the end of January this year, to support Ethereum’s continued development.
Following ether.fi, other projects joined in: DeFi collateral lending protocol PWN, zkRollup-based Ethereum Layer 2 project Taiko, decentralized lending pool Ethereum Credit Guild, modular decentralized storage Layer 2 project EthStorage, and several meme projects—all allocating 1% of their token supplies to Protocol Guild.
In addition to the 1% token commitments, during the pilot phase Protocol Guild also received diverse donations including 500,000 UNI, 200,000 ENS, 2 million LDO, and 3 million ARB.
Source: Dune https://dune.com/protocolguild/protocol-guild
Even Bitwise, a U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF issuer, recently pledged to donate 50% of the revenue from its Ethereum-themed advertising NFTs to Protocol Guild. Similarly, last September, another ETF provider VanEck announced plans to donate 10% of the profits from its upcoming Ethereum futures ETF to Protocol Guild, in appreciation of Ethereum contributors’ efforts over the past decade.
A few days ago, the LayerZero Foundation implemented a mandatory donation during its token airdrop redemption process, requiring users to donate $0.1 worth of USDC, USDT, or native ETH per ZRO token, with proceeds going directly to Protocol Guild. This initiative is expected to generate approximately $18.5 million in donations. Additionally, the LayerZero Foundation will match all donations up to $10 million.
According to Dune data, the total value of donations received by Protocol Guild currently exceeds $76 million, with contributions from ether.fi and Taiko accounting for 66% of the total. With LayerZero’s mandatory donations included, the total donation value to Protocol Guild will surpass $100 million.
As of this month, each Protocol Guild member received a median donation of $54,000 over the past 12 months, projected to rise to $81,000 in the next 12 months. Over the next four years, $57 million in donated funds will vest and be released to Protocol Guild members—based solely on donations already received.
What Qualifications Are Required to Join Protocol Guild?
Protocol Guild can be seen as a donation and funding distribution mechanism for Ethereum developers and maintainers. What qualifications are needed to become a member? According to Protocol Guild’s official documentation, the basic requirements include:
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The applicant’s project/organization must be fully open-source;
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Regular participation in Ethereum specification repositories, research forums, feature prototyping, and regular Ethereum protocol calls;
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Focus on researching protocol specifications, maintaining and developing core Ethereum protocols (e.g., contributing to implementations of mainnet clients like Erigon, EthereumJS, Geth, Hyperledger Besu, Lighthouse, Lodestar, Nethermind, Nimbus, Prysm, Teku, and Reth), conducting research and implementation experiments related to potential protocol changes, or engaging in Protocol Guild research.
However, meeting these conditions is only the baseline and does not guarantee membership. Applicants must also have worked continuously in the relevant organization/project for at least six months, expect to continue doing so, and not have experienced contribution interruptions exceeding one quarter. For non-full-time contributors, their payout weightings will be proportionally reduced.
A member’s share of earnings is proportional to the square root of their contribution time to Ethereum (measured in months), ensuring a fair alignment between contribution and reward.
Currently, joining Protocol Guild appears to require nomination and invitation by existing members, followed by review and discussion among all current members. Any conflict of interest between nominator and nominee must be disclosed upfront to ensure fairness and transparency.
How Are Protocol Guild Donations Released?
Regarding the vesting mechanism for donated funds, the core lies in its smart contract architecture. Protocol Guild uses smart contracts built by Splits to manage the vesting, distribution, and flow of donated funds. All donations go through a 4-year vesting contract on the mainnet, which vests funds to a designated wallet (Pass-Through Wallet), which then forwards the funds to a split contract for distribution based on members’ contribution shares.
The split contract contains all Protocol Guild members’ addresses and their respective vested fund shares, updated quarterly to reflect changes in membership, additions or removals, and adjustments in individual weights.
Additionally, Protocol Guild uses DAOhaus’s Moloch V3 contract for on-chain governance, granting every member equal voting rights to approve or reject changes to on-chain membership. Once a decision is made, Protocol Guild’s multi-sig will handle the updates and modify the split contract accordingly to reflect the latest membership list and fund distribution.
Within the vast universe of Ethereum, Protocol Guild—with its unique donation and funding distribution model—has attracted core contributors committed to Ethereum’s development and maintenance. As a bridge connecting capital and contributors, Protocol Guild not only ensures fair fund distribution but also injects continuous momentum into the prosperity of the Ethereum ecosystem.
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