ChicagoDAO is partnering with Protocol Guild to bring this proposal to the Uniswap community! ChicagoDAO is a student group at the University of Chicago focused on pioneering a new model for decentralized organizations and building a community on the foundation of research, education, and development.
Find us on Twitter at @ChicagoDAO_io!
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Authors: Trent (PG Member), Tim (PG Member)
This is a proposal for the Uniswap community to support important Ethereum Public Goods through the Protocol Guild: a vested split contract which goes to 110 core protocol contributors.
We propose that 500k UNI (~$2.5mm @ $5.19 UNI) be allocated to support the ongoing work of these core contributors in the initial Protocol Guild Pilot.
Participating in the 1 year Pilot allows guild members to engage with Uniswap 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 and there are quarterly updates to the split contract.
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.
Since starting the project in Nov 2021, we’ve built norms around member onboarding, refined the splitting and vesting mechanisms, and have 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 larger round with longer vesting periods. We are currently outreaching to 5-10 prominent Ethereum-based projects to get commitments for this important first milestone. We want to ensure there is a healthy diversity of contributing protocols both in terms of USD value as well as domain (eg. DeFi, staking, etc). The first commitment is from Lido to contribute 2,000,000 LDO, and the vote (forum post) to contribute 200k ENS will conclude in the next few days.
The funds for the Pilot would be vested directly to Guild members over one year: see the Pilot vesting contract here. Note that funds would not replace salaries for core contributors, and each recipient would be making an independent decision about how to use their tokens once vested.
We are inviting the Uniswap community to be part of this inaugural Pilot in the form of a 500k UNI transfer to the Protocol Guild’s vesting contract. We think this is an appropriate amount which balances between the current size of the treasury ($1.2b as of May 16, 2022), the number of beneficiaries, and the scope and intent of the Pilot.
There are a few reasons why supporting the Protocol Guild benefits the Uniswap community: