Feedback wanted: Contributing to client teams

I would be interested to see what the sentiment is for supporting Ethereum clients with something like 1% of revenue.

TLDR: Ethereum clients are essential to operations

Many of you will know the benefits of co-funding clients and developing new clients.

  • Sustaining the Infrastructure Long term
  • Clients could accelerate their development, stability and security.
  • New clients could start knowing there is a potential path to financial stability which would drive innovation in the space.

This alignment of working together sends a powerful message that the whole network is working even closer together to bring Ethereum further, plus reducing the risk of attacks or network disruptions.

Allocating 0.5% or 1% of revenue to support Ethereum clients promotes ecosystem sustainability, aligns the interests of protocols and clients, encourages competition and innovation, improves user perception, and ensures long-term protocol stability.

Protocol Guild is just one angle; to ensure that it is not a centralising factor, this could be done independently.

Over time this could even be expanded to include many other essential tools (monitoring, explorers etc.)

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Protocol takes 10% that is divided between node operators and treasury half and half. At this moment, between 6% and 10% of protocol inflow is redirected to client development teams depending on how you define a client development team (Attestant develops a validator client but not a node, and Consensys Codefi is under the same entity as Teku team, but not the same team). They are performing node operation duties in the protocol which come with expenses, so it’s not just a grant funding, but it’s 12 to 20 times more than 1% of DAO revenue. Also, it’s a business model, not a grant, which I think makes it more sustainable.

There are sizeable funds being distributed through LEGO, including for tooling and research. There’s also Lido’s participation in Protocol guild. Overall, 1% of revenue will not meaningfully change the amount of funding Ethereum infrastructure does get from Lido side.

The other side of this is it’s pretty hard to operate these grants programs (who gets how much, what documents are there for tx reporting for recievers etc etc). For protocol guild the bulk of work is done by the guild itself; for node operators we have an established protocol and framework. For LEGO it’s case by case and it doesn’t need to be fair which makes it a lot easier. Making another vehicle for fair funds distribution is beyond what I can do sadly.

I think it’s a good proposal but its time will come when ETH is @ $10k when we’re talking about larger amounts that can actually pay for operating a working and fair client funding program.

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