Thank you Kevin for bringing this to discussion to the forum and others for participating here. This is something I’m very passionate about, and would love to see a dedicated pool in GR14.
We’re looking to address some of the problems mentioned, + a few more:
- effective curation of a demographic that doesn’t always have a grant profile (or stops promoting it)
- general core development funding
- general awareness of how many people work on the protocol - many people only think “Geth” when asked about clients, in reality there’s an order of magnitude more than that single team
- sharing upside from the app layer with maintainers thru tokens
- incentivizing long-term contributions through vesting
I’m building the Protocol Guild with 100 other members: researchers, client maintainers, upgrade coordinators, Solidity contributors, and more! The membership spans 21 different teams from 9 independent organizations. Here’s a high level summary:
a vested split contract which distributes donated assets to a weighted list of Ethereum protocol contributors, self-curated by its membership. The primary goals: to provide autonomous tools for recruitment, retention, and reward to the protocol and its maintainers. If desired, individuals can forward their allocation to a charity.
Some resources for people to learn more:
- Schelling point video: Overview of the Protocol Guild.
- Read the docs
- December announcement
We have a grant for Protocol Guild but as I mentioned in the tweet linked above, there is a ton of competition from things I wouldn’t really consider aiming for any public benefit.
We’d love to talk about how our membership can provide any guidance to a possible “Core Protocol” GR14 side round!