Funding and Sustainability: Funding Panel

Transcript

to it. Thank you, Greg. Um, next up we have a panel discussion. Um, and then we'll break for lunch. So, on the panel we have Tomas, uh, Baronabe, u, Cheeky from Protocol Guild, Mario from EPF, and Pat from Pier 2. And I guess this is this is the opportunity for anyone to ask questions, but I'll I'll just I guess um kick it off with a question that I've been asked um and I guess this one's addressed to Cheeky, which is um can the bean teams

expect to be supported by Protocol Guild? And if so, like what is the the process and story here? Diving right in. All right. Um yeah so the answer is it's complicated. So in a way I could answer we kind of already do right um yourself and other members here um our protocol guild members are benefiting from this mechanism but then I know there's a lot of you that are focused on like the client implementations uh that are not eligible and um what we basically need to assess from from protocol codes perspective is um how do we uh expand our eligibility framework to account for beam chain client development ment in a

way that doesn't open us up for capture in in other ways, right? And so um maybe just to say take a step back. So today um I think all all mainet clients um are eligible for protocol build membership. Um and uh like they're specifically uh named in our eligibility framework. Um but we do have this caveat that like to be eligible for membership you need to have uh be tech technically diversified like basically not just a clone of someone else. Um you need to be like producing your own blocks like mainet ready. Um and so these kind of things would currently make uh the beamchain clients ineligible right um it doesn't mean we don't think that you are

fantastic core devs. It means that as I said we we do need to expand our eligibility framework. Um, but of course we want to do that in a way that's like mindful of a few things. Number one is uh quite frankly our funding levels are also like far lower than we would like them to be. If we on boarded all of you into prototype guild today um you would not be satisfied with the financial incentives. Um but that's not your onus. The onus is on us the core um the the core team of Protocol Guild which includes myself, Trent Vaneps and Peter to basically fund raise more. Um so that's one challenge for us and then the second challenge for us is that we the arc that we're on so far is that we have made it more difficult uh for client teams to join protocol guild so far um

because we want to make sure that they can't just have someone who just forks get and like you know gets the salary from from protocol guild um and we're also mindful of the fact that um more clients add testing overhead as we all know right and so we're actually currently discussing with the membership about capping the number of client teams. Um, and this will be a a tricky discussion. Um, there's a bunch of ways that this can be done, but this gives you an insight into basically how we're thinking about this. Um, and so fundamentally bringing it back to to Beamchain, what's relevant to you guys is that like from a research perspective, the things that can ultimately impact the spec of Ethereum, we already today consider that eligible work. So if you are doing that kind of work and you are not a protocol guild

member um maybe talk to Justin to intro to us or talk to me directly um and then we can see um if that's actually the case. Um if you are a client team um we basically have to have more discussions internally and externally which means that with the client teams for how we can expand our eligibility framework in a way that uh will not open us up to capture in other ways. Um and and I guess specifically because protocol guild is not like operated um in a unilateral way. We need to have buyin from the entire membership. Um and and one thing that we have heard from protocol guild members today is that they would really like to to consider um being chain clients. They would have to have they would like to have more

clarity on like what is the the timeline um for eventually bringing beam to mainet. And of course these things are very tough. Um, but hopefully this gives you a good context on like the kind of the battles that we have internally both from the fundraising perspective, both from like our capture perspective because of course we do hope to raise our fundraising by orders of magnitude. Um, at which point the financial incentives of that um could could increase the governance overhead of protocol build to a level that is completely unsatisfactory for the mechanism. Right? So these are the kind of dilems that we have and um so but again you know fundamentally for the group here uh for your peers if you're working on research you should be eligible if you're working on a client

team you're probably not eligible at this point but please work with us so we can figure out what is the correct wording um to make sure that beam clients can be eligible even probably before they hit mainet um but perhaps once the timeline for this has been solidified a little bit Wow, very detailed answer. Thank you so much. Um, I'll ask my second question and then I guess we can open it up to to the group. This this one's targeted to Barnab. Uh, so on on June 2nd, we had these new strategic objectives, scalar one, scale blocks, improve UX, and the beam chain doesn't fall within these short-term objectives. How do you think

about where the beam chain fits? Um, and how does this impact funding? Uh, yeah, great question. Um, okay. So, I think what's helpful maybe is to give a bit of context as to why we went uh with that model of the Rio and I would start actually three years ago when we shipped the merge. I think it was like a flash point in the existence of Ethereum, but also in the existence of the EF and the way that things were organized at the EF. I feel like that was the place where we had almost the most alignment between our research resources, our engineering resources and the community like we are all aligned on

this is the one thing that we that we really need to ship. After the merge, it was a bit less clear. I think the research resources were keeping on that momentum. So we are more focused perhaps on the consensus layer like trying to deliver like more ideas around yeah different consensus model thinking about NE from the consensus layer perspective. Um scaling we had this narrative that since we have the rollupcentric road map rollups are the ones that are supposed to scale. So we're going to try and provide them like a bit more resources in in the form of blobs. And over time I feel also that the community was raising more and more issues that we are not

really like paying attention to. So the alignment in general felt a little bit iffy. Um and I I guess the first idea that came to to fix that problem was well the merge was so successful at aligning everyone. So let's try to synthesize again what the merge could look like. I think this was one of the first pictures of the bean chain as Justin was proposing it and I feel like it has evolved a little bit from that. So I'm not saying that this is still the case today, but the idea was really to say let's try to rally behind like another big project that aligns research that aligns engineering that all the community and I think it's very powerful in principle and and does have like positive things but part of what the

community told us after that was okay yeah this is good like we want fast we want all of the things that are on the beam chain bucket list but also with the merge taking so long like does a bunch of things that we also really really want that that we think you guys really need to focus on that are equally important perhaps as everything that's on the beam chain docket but more urgent to us to to deliver on and these things are scaling the L1 scaling the blogs and improving the UX as I understand it and so with our announcement on June 2nd I think the idea for us was to say we've heard that we've heard like how urgent how important like how we need to

deliver and execute perfectly on the path of shipping these three things um and that seemed to say uh well what about the things that are not these three things and that's another part which I think is interesting which is the EF has never been like extremely legible and sometimes we don't really say exactly what we're working on or not working on and with this step that we took in June it it was kind of unprecedented to say to make extremely legible the things that we are like Okay, this is extremely urgent for us to do and leaving implicit the rest and but it it it almost like shown an anti light on the things that were not present in the announcement such as being chain and so now to me like the the right way to to think about it is to say we have our three strategic

priorities. Another thing that we have heard that was kind of missing from the announcement and that we are working hard to to fix is to say what about security of the network in that context. So the first thing we want to say is these three strategic priorities will always live within the framework where we never like destroy the network. We always have 100% of time. So that's like the first thing we need to to make clear. And the second thing is these three strategic priorities doesn't mean that these are the only things that are important to to us and thinking about the transition to postquantum security thinking about nextgen censorship resistance thinking about nextg consensus. These are things that are also important and that we need to be

able to keep allocating resources to at the EF and outside of the of the EF. And so I think that's to at least to me that's kind of the direction that we're heading and and yeah, in mid July we'll have an announcement that I hope will go more into details around around this thinking. But yeah, so sorry for the the stress that perhaps the initial announcement has caused. I think it yeah we still realize that these issues are important but we do really want to emphasize that these three things scaling V1 sc so much that they're extremely urgent like they're top of mind for so many people that are users of Ethereum programmers businesses building on Ethereum and we really need to show a very strong commitment that we are going

to deliver on these three things. Thank you. Another very detailed answer. Any questions from the audience? Okay, I guess I'll ask my third question then. This one's for for Pat, who's the the CEO of of Pier 2. Um, I mean, from my perspective, uh, you're um, you know, pretty unique in the sense that you already have an existing business and you've been funding so far completely out of pocket development of of of your client lantern. I was wondering like what are your expectations as a client from from from the future and um what is

your take on like some of the the answers that were given by by GP? Sure. So maybe just a quick introduction. So Pier 2 um we have been doing a lot of staking uh as a service. So working with exchanges and funds and and custody providers. Um possibly the staking model if Justin has his way won't be too viable in the future. So we might need to look at a few other things. But um in terms of in terms of looking at uh the future and looking at uh the beam chain um we're really fortunate that uh we have a team that just really loves Ethereum. Uh so contributing in the open source space

has been a pleasure uh in in that sense. Um but as well as that it also has the benefit of u being able to become really informed uh on the topic of staking and sort of providing uh the customers that use our services with a lot of security that we're think thinking about the future uh of Ethereum, the future of um how we can really battle harden our setups uh so on and so forth. So I think that's an added benefit when it comes to things like protocol guild and uh client funding and client diversity. Um I think it's it's really important that uh well the Ethereum Foundation and the

ecosystem isn't wasting time and isn't wasting money. Generally there's a lot of incredible teams that are contributing to the space in an incredible way but um we can't have 20 clients. uh there's the argument that you don't need too many more than three or four or five possibly. So um making sure that you really strike that balance has been something that I think Ethereum today has done quite well. And um I don't envy being in in Cheeki's position of having to sort of choose who is actually really valuably contributing to Ethereum and sort of setting setting those standards for what funding looks like. So um yeah, interested to see how it all evolves. But um striking that

balance between appropriate resource allocation and ensuring that you have the appropriate decentralization properties that you get from client diversity um is is a challenge and um I look forward to seeing how that gets solved. Thank you. Actually, I have a question for you first, but then yeah, I'll go to Mario. So I was actually curious on on your take on on this point which is like what do you think is a good number of clients and do you think that the clients are competing with each other where you know at some point there's negative externalities or do you see that you know the design space for Ethereum is extremely vast especially Ethereum

becomes the the internet of value and there's all sorts of opportunities for for businesses to grow around the around the clients and that maybe 15 clients is not so crazy after all. Conflict of interest. So I Okay, fair enough. Uh Mario, let's uh last question for you. So um you're the head of the protocol fellowship uh program and I guess we have a few people here in the room from the the fellowship program. Do you think the program can be used as a bootstrapping and onboarding mechanism

for people to uh eventually become devs or maybe even for existing devs that need financial support in the shorter term? Yes, thank you. Yeah, that's exactly the goal. Um, so EPF hope that most of you are familiar with and yeah, there are a bunch of fellows right here in the room. So, uh, that's great. it works and um yeah our goal is to empower individuals but also help the client teams. So uh we are making it easier for people to start working on core development uh by financially supporting them but also creating community connecting them to the right people providing guidance to work generally on core which means all client teams but actually like Justin like um so so I've been doing this for a

couple of years now uh going around these conferences inviting people to contribute to the protocol but you've done the best job when you announced beam chain there was so many people excited interested like the Twitter and the DMs I believe your email that you published there you get so many people now interested in working on the core protocol so I think that it's interesting uh match here that beam being so novel so exciting making news it actually brings more people to start working on the protocol maybe they end up working on the beam chain probably but also start looking around for more relevant things and right now we started the cohort six um like two weeks ago uh there are 15 of the follows or something like that here in KH couple

of them right here from the current cohort and we have maybe five people looking into beam projects because they're exciting and um I think it's especially with new clients new beam clients uh uh starting it's um it's a great way to yeah help people to um uh to support them on the journey to start contributing to these to start building them and it's also because it's in the space where um it's sort of prototyping like it's it's not it's uh it's not too critical like you know for example like Fusaka or something that's uh uh not not a place for somebody being on boarded to to work on uh that's something much more uh critical it has much more priorities but uh beam chain being in this design

space where people are still prototyping and figuring out how it works I think it's a great place to learn to um to actually uh try their skills and u and contribute yeah and we provide some financial statement for people uh but I would say that we are in the contrast with protocol guilt in the sense that PG is for like the established core developers who've been contributing for some time 6 months a year or so and um uh we are on the other spectrum that if you want to get started and you have the we we believe that you have the talent the uh the actual skill to uh to get into this we will guide you on the journey and provide provide help uh and it helps the client teams themselves because then it's much easier to get colleagues like in in the client teams

in Ethereum it's not just the financial part of it but the on boarding process like especially a new team which doesn't have HR or onboarding process at all just having a contributor who is uh starts working with them uh and gets the guidance and eventually it's much easier for them to become the part of the client team um yeah I think I think that's nice thanks yeah great answer and uh like on on the point of growing the space and attracting new talent uh yeah I think one of the things about the beam chain that people like is that it's it's a compelling vision about the future um and that brings in believers right people who believe in something TM um

and um thanks to the beam chain we actually made a bunch of hires within the firm foundation will came through that ladies Tomar um and you know we also have Emil who we recently gave a grant to in addition to like the nine new teams and My personal belief is that it it is good to have kind of a a second wave, a second generation. Well, I guess we have the OGs and then we have the people who came with the beacon chain. And I think it is healthy to have this this this third generation. Um and uh yeah, I'm hopeful that uh with all five of you here uh we're going to have all the

infrastructure necessary to to make that that third generation super healthy. On that note, thank you so much and let's go have some question. Oh, one more question. Sorry, I missed you when you asked earlier. All right, so in the the interest of sustainability talks, um the LIP PDP project has been a growing element in the Ethereum ecosystem. You know, it was a little bit in the beacon chain. The beam chain is like allin. um the energy coming into the lip project has gone through the roof since the the beacon or the beam chain project has launched. So um my question is uh how do you guys see us funding something so critical but also

not owned by anybody, not anyone like now that it's an independent open- source project, right? it the grants, programs, the education programs, everything like that is all funded from the community and it's not exactly clear how we plan to sustain that going forward. Right now it seems to be go get a job at one of the client companies so you can get paid to work on the P2P. That seems to be our only answer at this point. But um as Camille pointed out like the success of the beam chain is requiring going so deep into the stack that we're doing scaling experiments on gossip sub all that kind of stuff. So I always ask this question every time I come to these conferences because in the end I'm usually the person who hands out

the money on the grants right. So how do you guys see us funding live P2P in the long term? Who wants to take this? I I'm not technical, but I I can speak briefly to this perhaps from a protocol perspective is that if we ask people about lib P2P eligibility for protocol guild and they like deeply know LIP P2P um it seems like 5050 split if they should be part of it or not, right? Um and so that's difficult because we we like to operate as a DAO. how are we going to vote on on on that kind of split? Um, however, it is indicative of a larger issue that we at Protocol Guild

had, which is that like there's a lot of future changes coming with Beam. Um, and Beam is introducing because it's notification all kind of stuff a bunch of new stakeholders, right? Who like uh you know could be eligible, maybe not. is depending on like because like things like block production, think about all the the stakeholders involved in that today versus like four years from now could be completely different. And so um we need to think deeply about all of these things. Um and this is again this is not something that like myself or Trent are like experts in. We need to have input from people like you, people from the membership already um to see how can we make protocol guild more futureproof um account for these things so that like the core devs that are

doing amazing work that we want to fund that really are part of the core protocol in a very meaningful way that they are getting funding from protocol guild. Um but yeah, I think there's no easy answer as it stands right now. We just compete with you directly like we go in and sign up for the same grant programs you do. I mean like I mean the big one was optimism you know RPGF3 right we were the fifth largest go vote getters you guys are like two or one you know exactly so um yeah there's like the dev tooling guild which which has spun up and like do you fit better into that so far uh the only people been able to get funding for live P2P now since they have elaborated the the thing is uh specifically client applications

you know like Uh the only group that is not tied directly to a client would be the IP shipyard team and they because they were the core maintainers of protocol labs, they were able to get some funding. But like the community function in general, like myself where I run the lip P2P days and coordinate a lot of the research amongst the teams and keep things going. I was told repeatedly maybe the next round, maybe the next round, oh wait, you're not eligible at all. So at the end of 2025, we're looking at basically like there is no community function. There's no meetings, there's no gathering, there's no central watering hole for all the developers working on this stuff. And we actually are kind of right in line with

the whole uh diversification stuff because we have what 10 implementations of LIP P2P now um with the new C lib P2P coming up which is awesome. Um, yeah. So, it's it's very unclear how this is going to continue for myself, too. Yeah. It's really just going to have to fall onto like several of the companies that have money coming in for other reasons. I mean, I'll let someone else also someone else also get the mic, but like from my perspective, um, with your expertise and your knowledge of what's coming in the future, if you were to give us something in writing that helps like break this down how you see it and that we can like disseminate amongst the membership for consideration, that would be very helpful.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I don't have a specific answer on like funding but the networking stack I think has been increasing in importance in our view not just through beam chain but even like for this scale one scale blobs improve UX things like we realized just how far behind we were in terms of the networking and how much multiples of improvements we could get from just having better networking. The first investment that we made was to have this new networking team at the EF which is now three people if I'm not wrong. Um and it's at Raul, right? So he Yeah, he's one of the OG lip p.

Yes. Which maybe is an example of what you were describing before of people just finding jobs, but I I'm probably not the person to have this conversation with because I'm not directly working on this. But uh I think if you feel like a very critical part of our stack is in danger then it's a conversation that we should have and I would be happy to route to the right people. Let me be clear it's not in danger because the core maintainers all work for the various companies that are funded in other ways you know like Alexi does net live P2P right and Marco now is over at EF. Um he's was Zigg and Go andJS. Now he's disco andJS now that we have the Zing team taking over Zig, right? Um and we've got over at Sigma

Prime. So like most of the maintainers are educed in other ways. So is maintainership going to go away? No. But overall community coordination is what's in danger? And that is a hard thing to put in a category because it's like is there infrastructure for meetings? who's running the GitHub organization, right? Like I'm one of the few people that have a commit bid. I shouldn't admit that in public, but um you know, people like me need to exist. I guess it could go to someone like trial over Sigma Prime. That's fine. But I don't think he wants to maintain like is everybody taking notes at the meetings? Are we having live P2P day?

Are we getting sponsors? Are we handing out education grants? you know, how are we training up new engineers who are coming in to the Ethereum community and learning how the networking stack works, right? So, there's a whole lot of other things that is like one or two full-time jobs that don't fit cleanly into, oh, you can just go work for another mine or you can just go work for, you know, you see what I mean? So, there's like we don't have a total solution. Is it in danger? No. Yeah. But it sounds like because maybe the ownership is unclear and the the maintainers are so decentralized, it makes it hard to have like a center for the project.

It's really just the frosting on the cake. It's the last 10% that make it an awesome community. Yeah. That isn't categorized or funded directly. I'm happy to chat. Yeah, be awesome. Thank you. Thanks for your answer, guys. Thank you for the panel. We're off to lunch and I guess Will will The weight up.