We propose that 200k ENS (~3.7% of the unclaimed airdrop) be allocated in recognition of past and ongoing work of these core contributors.
ENS is one of the most successful projects built on Ethereum, and yet core protocol contributors do not benefit in any way from the success of projects being built on Ethereum. The Protocol Guild provides a vehicle for the ENS community to distribute governance tokens to those individuals who build and maintain the foundational infrastructure that ENS relies on.
ENS sponsorship of the Guild allows members to engage with ENS in a way that is values- and incentive-aligned. Simultaneously, it will allow them to continue the important work of scaling our shared infrastructure and making it as resilient as possible for the applications on top of it.
Here’s a longer exploration of the project rationale.
If we believe what we are building is important, then we should structure the incentives to attract more smart people to work on it. After all, “Ethereum is an unprecedented arena for playing cooperative games”; we should try to manifest the novel possibilities made possible by this arena. (Griffith, 2019)
The Protocol Guild aims to address the challenges mentioned above with a simple tool: a weighted split contract that includes vesting. Members will solicit sponsorships in the form of tokens from applications & protocols that build on Ethereum, which gives core contributors exposure to success at the application layer:
To date, the membership includes over 110 Ethereum protocol contributors, including researchers, client maintainers, upgrade coordinators, and more, all self-curated (member list here). This is a broad-based ecosystem effort: members come from 22 different teams and 9 organizations. Only 30% of members are directly employed by the EF. The membership is continuously curated through quarterly updates to the split contract - we expect the membership to grow to 150 over the course of the Pilot.
The Guild contracts will act as an autonomous value routing mechanism, operated independently from any existing institution, purpose-built for incentivizing long-term core protocol work. At no point does PG take custody of funds on behalf of members, it is all handled trustlessly. The diagram below and the docs have more information.
Since starting the project in Nov 2021, we’ve built norms around member onboarding , refined the splitting and vesting mechanisms, and created extensive documentation on how PG operates.
At this point, we’re ready to test the mechanism’s efficacy with a 1 year / $10-20mm Pilot. We want to make sure the mechanism operates smoothly before graduating to a full-scale fundraising round for longer vesting periods. The funds for the Pilot would be vested directly to Guild members over one year: see the Pilot vesting contract here.
We are proposing that 200k ENS (~3.7% of the unclaimed airdrop) be sent to the Pilot vesting contract deployed at 0xF29…f1a9 in recognition of the past and ongoing work of these core contributors.
The tokens would not be liquidated, but would vest for one year to each beneficiary listed on the underlying split. Each recipient would be making an independent decision about how to use their tokens once vested.
The USD value of the 200k ENS is $2.49mm as of the time of this post on May 25 2022. This is roughly in line with what we have already proposed to similarly prominent Ethereum-based protocols. Lido’s 2mm LDO contribution was worth $2.6mm; the active Uniswap proposal requesting 500k UNI would be worth $2.75mm.
There are a few reasons why supporting the Protocol Guild benefits the ENS community:
We hope that a successful Pilot will pave the way for future funding collaborations between the ENS community and the Protocol Guild as we scale up the project after the Pilot. To that end, we think it’s important to demonstrate impact: learn more about how we intend to evaluate Pilot outcomes here. We have also adopted an active stance of continuous adjustments to improve PG while we operate the Pilot: improving documentation, resources for members, better transparency, etc.