Proposal to fund the Protocol Guild Pilot via a Lido Grant

Abstract This is a proposal for a grant which will direct funding to the Protocol Guild (https://protocol-guild.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html), a vested split contract composed of Ethereum core protocol contributors. This snapshot vote to commit to transfer 2,000,000 LDO from Lido treasury to the Protocol Guild vesting contract, which should be deployed in the next few weeks. Proposal rationale: https://protocol-guild.readthedocs.io/en/latest/1-proposal-rationale.html

What is the Protocol Guild? The Protocol Guild aims to address the challenges mentioned above with an autonomous value routing mechanism: a weighted split contract that includes vesting (0xSplits 8). Members will solicit sponsorships in the form of tokens from applications & protocols that build on Ethereum, which gives core contributors the possibility of upside exposure:

• current contributors are rewarded for past work through time-based weighting
• current contributors contribute for longer periods, resulting in less contributor churn
• new contributors are incentivized to join core protocol work To date, the membership includes over 100 Ethereum core protocol contributors, including researchers, client maintainers, upgrade coordinators, and more, all self-curated (member list here 8). This is a broad-based ecosystem effort, not managed by the EF. Members come from 21 different teams and 9 organizations; only 30% of members are directly employed by the EF.

The Guild will act as an autonomous value routing mechanism, operated independently from any existing institution, purpose-built for incentivizing long-term core protocol work.

Motivations for Lido to support the Protocol Guild Lido directly builds a product on Ethereum’s base layer and would benefit from funding its development further Lido should be among the protocols maximally aligned with the ecosystem it operates in