Protocol Guild Has Distributed $20M To Support Ethereum Development

Data from Dune shows that Protocol Guild has received $54 million worth of donations from ecosystem projects and individuals, with the funds valued at $92.2 million when donated. The project has received 8,202 individual donations from 782 unique donors.

The support has allowed Protocol Guild to disburse more than $20 million to developers in two years, with an additional $33.5 million currently subject to a four-year vesting schedule. Contributions are heavily weighted based on the amount of time a recipient has spent contributing to Ethereum.

Three-quarters of the distributed funds have been withdrawn by developers, with recipients receiving an average distribution of $111,174 each. Developers are set to receive a median distribution of $48,281 over the next 12 months and received $27,142 over the previous 12 months. The guild’s 181 members represent roughly 30 projects.

Trent Van Epps, an Ethereum Foundation employee and Protocol Guild organizer, told The Defiant that the projects supported by Protocol Guild extend well beyond the Ethereum Foundation.

“Protocol Guild is important because it elevates less visible (but still crucial) work to the same level as others,” he said, citing the Ethereum Execution Layer Specification team as an example. “This collective approach is important because it's how the guarantees of the network and the software powering it are produced — by many projects in collaboration, not any single client.”

Van Epps recently noted that the guild has distributed roughly $300,000 to its top five recipients. The funds vested for developers over the next four years range between $3,807 and $319,000. The Protocol Guild's legal entity also receives a fixed allocation equating to 5% of proceeds, currently worth $1.69 million.

In a recent blog post, Van Epps asserted that Ethereum’s success is contingent on the work of a “broad, competent, and stable set of maintainers.”

“There is a lot of work yet to be done to bring a scalable, usable, and secure Ethereum to the world,” Van Epps said. “This scalability, usability, and security expertise has ripple effects out into the broader Ethereum Mainnet and EVM ecosystems, Layer 2s, and DeFi projects."

Protocol Guild launched its initial one-year pilot in May 2022 with 111 members.

Protocol Guild pledge

In February, Protocol Guild called on ecosystem projects to donate 1% of their respective token supplies to support Ethereum developers.

The call has attracted pledges from 10 projects including the EtherFi Foundation, Taiko Labs, Puffer Finance, and PWN DAO. Protocol Guild has received donations in the form of 24 different assets.

Last year, VanEck, a global investment manager, pledged to donate 10% of the profits generated by its Spot Ether ETF to Protocol Guild.

"Contributions through the Pledge allow core contributors exposure to the broader ecosystem that they normally don't have access to when they contribute full-time to the core protocol," Van Epps said. Protocol Guild binds everyone together into a collective organization, which reduces the concerns associated with isolated individuals receiving large sums of funding from projects close to the Ethereum core protocol — where it's especially important that credible neutrality is maintained for the projects building on top of it."

Ethereum Foundation researchers step down from third-party projects

The financial remuneration of Ethereum Foundation employees is currently under the spotlight after Justin Drake and Dankrad Feist stood down from advisorships at EigenLayer, the pioneering restaking protocol.

Drake and Feist announced the positions in May, igniting pushback from community members warning that the roles could create conflicts of interest for the researchers.

Drake noted that the assets allocated to his vesting schedule were worth “millions” and “could easily be worth more than the combined value of all my other assets (mostly ETH).” Drake said he did not receive any remuneration at the time he stepped down from the EigenLayer advisorship.