(x-post with the Guild Guild paragraph.xyz instance)
Contributors: Josh Tan, James Waugh, Rena OāBrien, Kevin Owocki, Ven Gist, Michael Zargam, Paul Wackerow, Manu Alzuru
TLDR:
- Guilds as Collective Power: Historically, guilds have organized individuals for collective bargaining and resource pooling, and this model has been extended to digital communities like the Protocol Guild, which supports Ethereum developers through aggregating funding.
- 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.
- Guild Guild is a locus of coordination for Guilding (Guilding = Creating, Stewarding, Enabling, or Studying Guilds). Itās a mechanism for making and promoting more guilds.
What is a Guild?
A guild historically, is a community of individuals or groups that collaborate for a common purpose, pooling resources and efforts to achieve shared goals. This concept dates back centuries, when guilds played a significant role in traditional industries like trade and craft, organizing workers to collectively bargain for better working conditions and wages.
Today, the term āguildā extends beyond physical trade into digital communities, especially in web3. One particularly compelling example is the Protocol Guild. This innovative project creates new ways for Ethereum core contributors to be rewarded collectively.
The guild mechanism helps create consistent support from the ecosystem and facilitates the streaming of funds to core developers. The Protocol Guild is an early example of the power of this mechanism, and its treasury has accumulated millions of dollars, with these resources distributed among Ethereum developers.
Collective Bargaining Power
Guilds, by their nature, empower their members with significantly more collective bargaining power as well as smooth the volatility of access funding allowing members to dedicate more attention to their trade. While Protocol Guild is a novel mechanism, it seemingly takes inspiration from both traditional guilds, which have existed since the 11th century, and modern online gaming guilds, both of which have a common theme of empowerment through organization. Insofar as they increase the bargaining power of individual contributors against more powerful, institutional entities (on- or off-chain), they also function like 20th-century labor unions. When individuals join forces in a guild, they can solicit funds more effectively on behalf of the collective.
Guilds are important coordination mechanisms which allow for more efficient matching between supply and demand for expert labor. The guilds create a legible group-level identity which can be relied upon to reliably produce high quality work in a particular specialization, while also offering members more time to focus in their specialization.Thanks to a net saving in attention for both the guild members and the organizations funding their work, the creation of a guild is a positive-sum innovation.
The Need for Guilds
The success of the Protocol Guild has inspired discussions on guilds at MCON.fun this year. We think the Ethereum ecosystem would benefit from the creation of more Guilds.
Guilds present an incredible opportunity to increase collective coordination and bargaining power, ensuring long-term success for developers and contributors within the space.
The Guild model offers a way forward for the creation of various guilds across the blockchain space. Some potential areas include:
- Protocol Guild: The original model for protocol development and core contributor funding.
- Dev Tooling Guild: A specialized guild focused on the creation and maintenance of developer tools.
- DAO Guild: A potential guild for creating DAO reporting standards, organizing professional delegates, coordinating governance research, and addressing the growing complexity of DAO operations.
- Security Guild: A potential guild specialized on Ethereum security.
- IRL Guilds: A potential guild that have real-world (IRL) use cases, extending beyond the digital realm into IRL events, experiences and connection.
- Guild Guild: A guild for guilding. Distributes the means of guilding, and helps collections of guilds organize
Some Guilds that may exist in the future, from Vitalik:
As more and more Guilds come into existence, we will start to see more funder fatigue. We can balance this fatigue of attention with credible, reputable lists of Guilds. See section on āReducing the cost of attentionā.
Guild Guild: a Guild Generator
This leads us to the concept of the Guild Guild. Guild Guild is a locus of coordination for Guilding (Guilding = Creating, Stewarding, Enabling, or Studying Guilds). Itās a mechanism for making and promoting more guilds.
Guild Guild responds to the need for more guilds across different sectors of the ecosystem. Guild Guild would replicate, and extend, Protocol Guildās success while addressing challenges like the ecosystemās total available attention.
How will it do that?
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Propagate the means of guilding: Make it as easy as possible to launch a new Guild
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Reasonably simplify formation
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Share best practices: creation, fundraising/operation, other support needed.
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Aggregating guilds into a Guilds of Guilds
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Bi-directional: top-down curation, bottom-up self-organization
Attributes of the Guild Ecosystem
The structure of a Guild ecosystem should embody several key values:
- Anti-Capture: The essence of having multiple guilds ensures that no single entity can monopolize the system. The decentralization of guilds prevents centralization and captures by any actor.
- Pluralism: The Guild ecosystem should encourage a form of ācoopetition,ā where cooperation and competition coexist in a healthy dynamic.
- Localized Governance: Guilds should be governed at a local level, allowing for diverse decision-making processes and autonomy within each guild.
The governance surface area for each Guild is very minimal, allowing maximal autonomy of individuals with the whole
- Domain Definition
- Simple/Legible criteria for what qualifies for membership in the guild.
- Curation Logic
- Who is contributing?
- To what relative degree?
- Splitter Logic
- Optionality such as constantly streaming or manual trigger.
Reducing the Attention Cost of Coordination
The addition of guilds saves attention for both guild members and funders. Since guilds tend to emerge around specializations with well defined curation logic, the GuildGuild serves a two-fold purpose: 1) Distribute the means of guilding, and 2) facilitate coordination amongst guilds, helping to organize registries of guilds. This model ensures that holistic strategies that span specialization are available to funders, while the individual guilds focus their attention on their specialized tactics. See Block.scienceās piece for more on the importance of strategic and tactical autonomy. Disambiguating Autonomy: Ceding Control in favor of Coordination
Funders who are responsible for allocating capital and evaluating outcomes can coordinate with GuildGuild to identify relevant experts and recursively evaluate outcomes. Success will be most evident if both funders and guilds experience an overall reduction in effort spent in the process of matching funding to expert labor.
Furthermore, each individual guild is successful insofar as it identifies and curates contributions which are reliably useful to funders. Itās acceptable and even expected that not all guilds will survive. Under this model guilds govern themselves by publishing their curation logic, splitting logic and/or membership rules. Over time, guilds build reputation with each other, GuildGuild and funders by providing quality work. The resulting contribution economy provides many stable loci of coordination ā preserving adequate decentralization while reducing the attention costs of that coordination.
Next Step 1: Creating a Guild Generator
Moving forward, the Guild Guildās vision involves developing a guild generatorāa framework that helps other groups form guilds efficiently. This includes:
- Tech Infrastructure: What technical infrastructure does the Protocol Guild rely on? How can smart contracts be optimized or extended for other guilds?
- Social Coordination: What are the necessary social components of a guild? Can elements of the Protocol Guild be modularized?
- Governance: How can we encode off-chain governance mechanisms into a replicable recipe for other guilds?
By curating and publishing this recipe for guild success, Guild Guild aims to create a space where multiple guilds can thrive. Imagine a user experience specifically for Protocol Guild forks, managed and supported by Guild Guild.
The ultimate success of the Guild Guild will be measured by its ability to generate new and productive guilds, setting the precedent for a new wave of collective organization in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Next Step 2: Aggregating Guilds into a Collection of Guilds
We imagine many Guilds launch in the coming years. This is something we want to support and encourage across the Ethereum public goods ecosystem.
Who will be qualified to launch a Guild?
Any community with a shared purpose of Ethereum public goods and purposeful coordination.
Itās important these guilds are reasonably easy to launch t itās relatively easy to launch a Guild (or even Guilds of Guilds!). This will mean there are many experiments in creating Guilds, and to create an evolutionary ecosystem where the most legitimate experiments will rise to the top.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Guild Guild has the potential to stimulate how guilding efforts are coordinated and rewarded in the Ethereum public goods ecosystem. By lowering the barriers to guild formation, it will empower communities to self-organize, collaborate, and amplify their collective bargaining power. The infrastructure, tools, and governance models offered by Guild Guild will foster an inclusive and decentralized environment where diverse guilds can thrive, resist centralization, and advance Ethereumās long-term resilience. As more guilds emerge, this ecosystem will nurture innovation and empower contributors to make meaningful, collective impact. Now is the time to get involved in shaping this transformative model for the future of public goods.
Call to Action
Reach out to the contributors of this article to learn more about how you can get involved.
LFG (Lets F***ing Guild)
