Roadmap for funding Ethereum's open source

Transcript

That is the idea you know how do we create it not really depend on one and uh make it sustainable. So this road map is just an attempt to sort of uh figure that out and if we can actually establish that system. So we have a lot of the ecosystem which is already stepping up and the biggest request that I've got from some of these teams is the challenge is where do we send the money like you know how do we channel that money we focus too much on the allocation problem and too little on the eligibility question opensource is extremely important for decentralization we should remember Ethereum is strong because of this we already have so many different ecosystems that are already supporting their dependencies.

Hello and welcome to Ecosystem Project Demo, a podcast where we dive into open-source public good projects and funding initiatives supporting the Ethereum ecosystem. This is episode 23 brought to you by EC Institute and I'm your host Puja Ranjan joined by Wayin and Akash from the team. Today we are diving deep into a crucial topic funding Ethereum's open-source infrastructure, the system and the software that keep Ethereum running but often go underfunded and underappreciated.

Joining us are two incredible guests who have been leading this conversation. Let me introduce Sel Rakhan. She is exploring capital allocation at Alo Capital, led grant innovation at Gitcoin and spearheaded the inception of greening pill network. Cel brings a dynamic perspective at the intersection of coordination, funding and governance. Another guest today is Devancha. Devanch works at AI public goods and governance at Ethereum Foundation.

People may follow his research and experiment at deep funding. He is a core contributor to the funding road map and brings a thoughtful system oriented lens to Ethereum ecosystem sustainability. I would like to welcome you both to ecosystem project demo. Thank you for joining us here today. Yep. Thanks for having us, Puja. Yep. Excited about conversation. Yeah, I'm so grateful for you both to have here back again. I know you have been on our podcast talking about deep funding, talking about deep governance and things like that. So I'm so looking forward to talk more about this new initiative, this new road map.

But before we get there, maybe if you can talk a little bit more about your experience in the ecosystem and what brings you to share this road map with the community. So maybe I can start uh first about my experience in the ecosystem. So before I came into web 3 in um I was working as a journalist working in a conflict area of India called the Mauist in like area of central India and a lot of it was writing grants and approaching traditional funders and I survived on that for four or five years before getting very burnt out and I stumbled into web 3 and crypto in uh 2021 of August basically looking at the idea of

how we can sell our impact by registering ing impact uniquely on a blockchain. We can then sell it and then get enough money to create the next impact and no more grant applications hopefully after that. And I actually properly entered the ecosystem with quadratic funding. That's how I got the first support. That's how I earned my first crypto in like web 3. So that's basically the kind of short story of how I got in through quadratic funding. And uh once I got into these mechanisms, I found it fascinating how you know in the traditional philanthropy world, you either get the entire grant or you get zero. But in quadratic funding, you can always walk away with some amount of money. And that's a very encouraging thing for newcomers to come get some

money, prove that you can manage the money well, get more money in the next round. So that's when I began to look at credibly neutral funding mechanisms. And eventually now I'm in the position where I'm trying to figure out how we can get more of these mechanisms and actually make funding less about power dynamics and enable cooperation without domination. Hi, I'm Sel and I you know started my journey in web 3 with Greenpill Network. Greenpill was the podcast that you know Kevin Awoki runs and when I stumbled upon Greenpill podcast you know I was the one question that I had is how can we you know bring some of these discussions and ideas and the tools that are being built at you

know in local community and where I live right can we do it with the people around me so that was the question that led me to sort of you know come up with the idea of green bill network where we wanted to establish local community so that these people can you know um discuss and share knowledge on public goods funding and everything that was being discussed in the podcast and then eventually can we export some of the tools or mechanisms that were built at the local level. That was the beginning and initially I was a grantee because I was running green pill network and we had you know uh raised funds we were raising funds from Gitcoin. So like Dvanch it was also very much like you know quadratic funding to which I

entered and then that was definitely the point where I got more interested in exploring the different mechanisms like quadratic funding is interesting like what else so that's how I ended up at gitcoin where I further explored um the mechanisms and the there was easy rpgf that I worked on which is pioneered by optimism and you know the idea was how we can democratize it how we can enable anyone to actually um if somebody has to run a retro round what do they need like how do they design it so that's how it happened and then you know rest is history so we I'm still exploring the capital allocation design space but now my interest is also as much as I it's important to you know explore the

allocation side of things I think it's extremely important to also talk about and acknowledge the fact that we don't yet have like sustainable ways of funding public goods and you know where is the capital really coming from so capital formation and accumulation is is a part that is less talked about which we have tried to talk about in our proposal and um you know that's where our my current interest is. So yeah that's very fascinating both of you are having a very good background to talk about these things and perhaps we would learn more about the road map. In the earlier episode we also had an opportunity to talk to Agora team who contributed in like the optimism funding and things like that. So for our listeners and viewers, if you would want

to learn more about these kind of public good fundings and the projects engaged, please check out Ethereum cat herders podcast ecosystem project demo where we had talked about deep funding in length, deep gov in length and agor similar projects like that. Well, moving forward with today's conversation, coming to the topic back, I would like to kick off this with the origin of road map like what prompted you to write this road map? Were there any specific challenges or gap in the current funding ecosystem you were hoping to address? I know you already mentioned about these being underfunded. If you can maybe site an example and especially focus on that.

Yeah, I can maybe start off with the impetus of it and I have to credit Clement Lass who's the CTO of Claros for actually giving that initial impetus which eventually led to the creation of this post and the road map. So I think like the way Clement explained the public goods problem in the blockchain world is that imagine that there's some open-source repo like solidity which benefits every team by say $10. So there are 10 teams in the ecosystem which are earning money. These are DAPs which have smart contracts and they're making money. Each of them benefits by $10 from having solidity. So the total benefit to the ecosystem is $100. But the cost to maintain solidity is $60. So if any team

individually decides to fund Solidity, they don't benefit from it because they are only gaining $10, but they're paying $60 to fund solidity. But if everyone could somehow coordinate and get together and give $10, then the ecosystem as a whole is benefiting. Then all 10 teams are benefiting. So that's kind of in a very kind of sharp and clear way what the public goods problem to solve is. Like how have most blockchains solved it. So I'll give you two examples. One of which did try solving it and one of which didn't. So the most common way is what's called a premine. So when you're just launching a blockchain, you keep some portion of the tokens with a foundation or with a DAO treasury which can actually then pay for

these public goods. So the foundation would then give money to solidity. They would give the entire $60 required to maintain it and that creates $100 of value for the ecosystem and that results in the entire ecosystem benefiting like so in a way you can think of the premine as like kicking the football down the road. it's kicking the can down the road that eventually premine is limited and we need a more sustainable solution after the premine gets over. So that's kind of in a brief what the problem is.

And before passing it over I'll talk about the alternative which is not having a premine and we saw that happen with Bitcoin which famously doesn't have a premine or even like a foundation similar to the other chains. And what we ended up seeing with Bitcoin was a lot of the development got captured by vested interests which led to the block size wars and a bunch of other things because there wasn't a neutral entity that could decide the good for the whole ecosystem. There were different client teams that were pushing their own agenda and uh that led to a lot of division and conflict. So that's the future that we are headed into. Unless blockchains solve the public goods problem, we are headed into a future where different

teams will fund developers to work on the core protocol, but they also have their own vested interests and their own revenue models which will result in no impartial steward. So how do we not zombie walk into this issue is kind of the main focus of the proposal. Yeah. Yeah. I think Dvanch has like given a really great like highle overview and just to like you know bring it to specifically PGF for the things that we are currently seeing right one is that also by the way like thanks to Vitalik for his prompt. It was actually his prompt where he simply just said that okay what is that we should be doing you know to increase the standard of um public goods funding space and Ethereum

ecosystem. So that was really one of the you know inspiration we were like you know we just ran with it. And the second was obviously you know right now a lot of projects or sort of repos are dependent on one organization or maybe a few but like essentially people look at EF to really you know look at EF for funding and you know there is an expectation okay this is going to continue forever right which is not really the case. So there is you know it's a reality that is finite runway and it's extremely important for us to create system where people or ecosystems step up right as opposed to really looking at one organization. So that is the idea you know how do we create it not really depend on one and uh make it

sustainable. So this road map is just an attempt to sort of uh figure that out and if we can actually establish that system right and of course the main part of it is like you know who which is like the mapping of the whole ecosystem where we have seen that deep funding is actually the beginning of you know the it's an attempt it was the I think it's the first attempt to really map out the dependencies and challenge some of the traditional things that we are seeing in the mechanisms which is like you know marketing and central sort of group or committee deciding who gets funded.

Right? This has led to just overfunded projects or underfunded. Right? So I think mapping the whole ecosystem is extremely important and then from there moving on to making sure like other ecosystem sort of step up is why we did this and you know broadly what this uh road map entails. Yeah, I'm very happy to see this coming up because I remember the conversation we had with defunding. I think at that time this infrastructure was not very well covered and it was not like considered as kind of dependencies for many of these things. We were mostly looking into clients and softwares but not these kind of dashboards and toolings which are available. So I'm very happy to see that and I think the

proposal has nicely put the problem statement. So thank you for explaining it one more time and making it more clear. Um I noticed there was the mention of um Ethereum foundation as kind of stop gap uh and that can be a problem other than the limited resources. What else do you think can be an risk if we continue using this trend of depending upon Ethereum Foundation or any entity which are kind of premine or trying to support the development over there. So maybe I'll start with just saying that kind of a lot of the other ecosystem funders and Ethereum is actually much further along in this regard which is we have other funders like Octint and Gitcoin and Optimisms Retrop PGF and Arbitum supporting Prism

which is a core client of Ethereum. So we have a lot of the ecosystem which is already stepping up and the biggest request that I've got from some of these teams is uh just help us channel the money. Well, I mean that's the biggest uh request I've got that there are so many repos. We don't know if the money is going to good repos. How do we even differentiate between good ones and bad ones? So I think that's the single biggest request that I've got that like we have money but we need to ensure that it's channeled in the right direction. So the recent Octant epoch and I urge everyone to lock up some GLM tokens as soon as they can so that they can take part but the recent Octant epoch is just to fund the core Ethereum development.

So before a lot of back channeling went into actually getting the teams which we have been supporting like getting them to apply in the octant round and um actually trying to make sure that the good teams that I personally know of apply in the octant epoch. So that's kind of one small effort of how we shift the burden and how we let the ecosystem actually be wiser and smarter in the sort of public goods that it does support. We would definitely like to get to know more about what public good is there. I mean like we'll try to cover this topic at the end because I know this comes every time. How do we consider that but thank you for a shout out to the octant epoch 8 and we are happy to share that we are also have

sent our application. We are one of those participants which we have participated since epoch zero and we are so thankful to the donors of Octent who have supported us for such a long period of time and I hope with this specific round to Ethereum many more projects which are trying to support Ethereum not only just the development but again infrastructure and other core projects they can get funded and can continue working in this direction. Thank you for sharing that. Uh I would like to understand the road map phases. Uh I noticed there is a mention of three-phase road map. Broad listening, the dashboard and the 2% pledge. I

understand we had briefly discussed broad listening when we were talking about deep governance. But uh for the context of um this open-source funding road map uh could you maybe please um explain what these three phases are and how people can navigate through it. I do want to mention like quick disclaimer that you know our thinking has been a bit updated. So there are things that you know mentioned here which may not exactly be the how we see ex getting it executed right so but I'll still walk through this so that we have an idea what was you know where we were at initially and we can also share some of the updated thinking that we have so we've already covered the problem you know that we've talked about. So the solution like you said puja there are three phases. I'll give a high level and

then dwanch can also get deeper into it. So broad listening l2 beat style uh dashboard and ethereum pledge. You know the idea with broad listening is right now like you know we said not just one organization we also have other organizations who have stepped up but the challenge is where do we send the money like you know how do we channel that money? So one is you know can we use tools like polace or talk to the city to understand like what are people thinking what are the people talking about right these conversations are happening but how can we really surface the critical questions that will help organizations decide the eligibility criteria of their you know funding rounds right so what really matters to

the ecosystem and what is the work that is worth supporting what is critical so I think that is one part of broad listing and the other part that we have been thinking about which you know should also talk more about is like how do we map the whole ecosystem right how do we increase sort of the dependency graph for Ethereum right what is the way in which we can do that and then it's important first of all we map so that you know we have visibility on the hidden dependencies and the hidden projects that we right now you know we probably don't know about or you know they're not getting funded and second is then of course the goal would be to identify the critical ones and the ones that are vulnerable and things that you So if something goes wrong can take the ecos can take not the entire ecosystem

but can affect the ecosystem in a ways that you know would be would not be good. So I also consider that as part of broad listening which is like you know increasing sort of the graph and sort of expanding the graph. But yeah that's phase one and uh maybe just want to like take a quick pause and uh let Dvanch you know double click on it. Yeah, maybe I'll just say that in a general trend I've noticed in the public goods and the mechanism designers is that we focus too much on the allocation problem which is how do we distribute money in what proportion to different projects and too little on the eligibility question that how do we even decide which projects should take part in a round and I would

argue that the eligibility question is far more important if there are only good projects in the round then it doesn't matter if your allocation mechanism is imperfect because sure like one project maybe got a bit more than another but only good projects which are relevant to the ecosystem have even got money so that's still a positive so I think overall a lot more effort and work from mechanism designers needs to focus on eligibility and we've seen that in octant as well where octant started off with a kind of direct democracy system of eligibility where any project could come and get votes and they get to take part in the epoch which was capped at 24 to 30 projects like they don't accept more than those but now they've actually

shifted from a voting style system towards a curation style system where they have a team which decides or they delegate it to another team that then decides who gets to take part in these epochs and I really see that as like the way forward like just try to constrain the number of projects that actually take part in a funding round and make sure that those are good so that a little bit of up and down doesn't matter But doing this in a decentralized way in a way that there's no domination is like a really hard problem and that's something I don't have too many answers to. Yeah. And you know what one interesting thing that now that I think of it I remember is when I had joined Gitcoin in GG19 there used to be a round which was called you know ETH infra

round and uh Gitcoin had a council of uh people from Ethereum ecosystem who used to decide you know curate the projects that are going to go in that round. So it would be but eventually you know uh that was um you know the category doesn't exist anymore because we had we just made all the categories open source basically but it would be really interesting to see or maybe compare octen's epoch 8 which is also like you know infrastructure round and what kitcoin had done and that was in a way broad listening right so but anyway that was just something that you know reminded me of uh initial like I think they still have the round it's called web 3 infra And when I saw the list of projects, I

was like joking to the Gitcoin team that like how many of these top projects in web 3 infra do you even consider web3 infra. There were projects there were projects like proof of philanthropy an identity protocol which are probably like important but they more belong to like the DAPs around than like core infra. So I definitely think needing to tighten up the eligibility criteria is like the thing that's lacking currently in our space. So yeah. So and you know that's one of the reasons we want to do broad listening and when we map and you know how can we come up with metrics and whatever is needed for us to really identify you know what is critical and what should be considered and then rest is important but you know second level maybe later. So yeah that's phase one

broad listening and um then we go into phase two which is you know L2B style dashboard. You know one of the things that is extremely important we feel is visibility right because a lot of funding is flowing right so where is the funding going who is getting funded underfunded and what are the gaps and um so that was the idea and you know we have seen the dashboards exist but it's kind of sort of uh you know when we were thinking about it something like this for public goods funding doesn't really exist right like which feels very obvious right so it seems to be something that should exist so that's why you know we included this phase and it's also sort of leaderboard and credit to Dwanch I definitely want to shout out

because Dvanch should mention that you know it's sort of like the leaderboard also because you know when you see who is funding what as an ecosystem you want to you have some sort of reputation also right that has come into picture and you want to make sure like you're there who's you know what is that you want to look into things that you are funding right so I think it just touches a lot of those things which is why I feel like this phase is actually very exciting for me and yeah so that is uh phase two but uh Dan do you want to add anything I just want to but I think this is what uh is basically what we're thinking here yeah I think like u something we've seen with L2 beat is the amazing impact they've had on creating competition

between rollups in getting decentralized we actually have people fighting to become more decentralized which I did not think was possible but it's happening I think and there's like a large part of that credit belongs to L2B for being this neutral empire that actually looks into the code and sees exit windows and goes into the details and it's a very manual process. So it's obviously quite cost inensive but it's something which is taking the entire ecosystem forward and making the L2 road map successful. So I guess this is part of that similar uh framework which is how do we make Ethereum alignment legible and how do we make the consistency with our values? How do we make that clearcut and able to see it

easily? So I guess the first step to that is like if I asked you today who is funding Ethereum public goods more arbitrum or optimism like puja what would you say if I asked you that question how would you respond to that today? It's kind of difficult question definitely yes because you know when we look into arbitrum the first thing that comes to mind is funding a client and client could be like passively funding not funding but facilitating many other projects so it could be funding all those projects together but if I look at optimism optimism has already opened the door and includes so it's not funding anything specific other than layer 2 optimism but also helping layer 1 so difficult unless we know the numbers

Yep. And I think you've encapsulated the problem statement very well that it's difficult unless we know the numbers, but we can't create the same competition to support Ethereum unless we have the numbers. And I think that's kind of the rationale for this funding dashboard that we actually do this very manual process of reaching out to teams including their funding amounts to different ecosystems and make it very visible and clear about who is funding what. And the last thing I'll say is that like phase one which is the broad listening ties in very clearly to phase two which is a dashboard in uh answering which funding counts and which funding does not count. So if we take the example of optimism's retropg it's

funding to protocol guild certainly counts because that's supporting the ethereum l1. Does its funding in retropgodrome count? like probably not like you know it's like aerodrome is an app which is built on top of Ethereum it's a dependent and it's not a dependency and that's kind of the main difference like I love aerodrome I think they are great but they are building on top of Ethereum they are the leaves of the tree and they're not the roots of the tree so I think kind of creating making those opinionated judgments about what counts in the dashboard and what doesn't count I think that's the very controversial position that someone needs to start in this ecosystem Yeah, absolutely. And also like you know one of the things since Danch mentioned

make Ethereum legible the blog that Vitalik has written in the end he you know mentions that phase one will also help us identify the shared dependencies or shared infrastructure which no one ecosystem is responsible to fund. It's really important to surface that and sort of make sure you know that gets into the dashboard and also like you know everybody shares responsibility to fund that. But yeah so that is phase two. I do want to shout out to KL Kurbon and Kevin Walke who actually did a hackathon project called practical pluralism dashboard which was done in Zuzalu Stanbul and they actually tried to map where the funding is coming from and who is getting funded. So it's a nice little dashboard if anybody wants to you know have a look. Yeah great. So

that is phase two you know now. So phase one we have sort of surfaced what needs what are the dependencies what needs funding and phase two we have sort of visualized it right and now obviously phase three feels pretty natural which is like get the funding right to fund so that is what our phase three is which is ethereum pre-commitment ecosystem wide funer essentially you know how do we get ecosystems to really you know commit like where is the funding going to come from right so first step it feels like you as an ecosystem if you commit a percentage of your revenue to your dependencies like that feels very uh sort of the natural thing to do. I want to let Dwanch talk more about this

because this was uh you know originally Dwanch's uh idea. Yeah, I can do that and you've been doing a good job so far of like summarizing it and all of that. So don't question that like you're doing good. Um but basically what I'll say about the 2% pledge of revenue is that first thing is that we need to move beyond this public goods framing and that it's charity and it's something which you're doing which is nice. Philosophers call it a super arerogatory act. So super arerrogatory act is something which is good to do but it's not bad to not do. So making a donation is something which is good to do but if I don't donate it's not bad that I've not donated and I'm not going to go to hell because I didn't donate. So that's

called like a super arrogatory act. So basically that's how public goods is seen today as a super arrogatory act. And the first step really is changing that framing and a large part of that is going to be like kind of the framing that we've proposed is integrating your cost centers and your revenue centers. So if you look at something like Twitter, the reason they can build such a good product is that the profit center which is the ad division is giving money to a cost center like community notes and that creates a better end product for the customer. So the integration of the profit and the cost centers is done with a seauite with a management a CEO

and a CFO who basically take money from the ad division and give it to the community notes division and the ad division can't really complain about that and they have no real authority to try vetoing that or anything of that sort. So there's no domination between the profit and the cost centers in the web two traditional counterparts. But when we come to networks like Ethereum, the same picture doesn't actually hold. We have profit centers like curve and aerodrome and a lot of others and we have cost centers like Viper, solidity and others but there's no integration between these profit and these cost centers. Um so that's basically the first step that we

propose like how do we actually if you want to compete with web two we need better integration of our profit and cost centers. So how do we do that or what is our proposal? Now there are obviously many ways we can go about doing that. The one that we propose is every project creates its own dependency graph. So something like curve finance uses wiper. So asking curve finance to give money to solidity doesn't make any sense for anyone. Curve finance uses viper. They don't use solidity. 0% of their money should go to solidity and more should go to Viper. So that's the first step. generate a dependency graph so that you can see which are all the cost centers that are contributing to you being a profit center. Once you

generate that dependency graph, you can then figure out an allocation mechanism to get weights between these different cost centers. So you can uh use things like deep funding where you have a jury which gives ratings and models which try to align with those human ratings and then the models decide the weights. You can use quadratic funding where you and quadratic voting where you can vote between the different cost centers and that decides the weights. You can use futarchy. You can use uh badge holder voting. There are many different techniques but the basic step is aerodyome should map out all of its dependencies and we have that graph and then we figure out weights on the graph.

So let's assume we've done all of that. We've managed to make it easy for any revenue generating app on Ethereum to map out its dependencies. What is the next step? So the next step we propose is that 2% of the revenue that they earn goes towards these dependencies and these cost centers based on the weights that are obtained. And we can even make this enforceable at the code level where when revenue is earned, it automatically gets distributed across the entire dependency graph. And this kind of just to tie everything back together about the example of solidity which is contributing $100 to the ecosystem but but its cost to maintain solidity is $60 and there are 10 projects which benefit

$10 each. So each of these projects would now put some money towards solidity which is part of their dependency graph and then that can go towards eventually making solidity kind of reach $60 and each of those projects contributing $10 or or whatever share they find valuable based on the weights in the graph. That's kind of the long-term solution and hopefully that will then create redundancy. We don't require any exogenous funding from a premine or anything to fund these sort of public goods because every project is creating its own dependency graph is able to fund it and they're doing it not out of altruism but they're doing it because they need to integrate their profit centers and the cost centers for a good product. And the last example

I'll give before ending is to go back to the example of curve finance. Some years ago, there was a vulnerability in Viper as a programming language and that caused Curve Finance to lose some money. So that's kind of highlighting the need of why this is not altruism like Curve Finance giving money to Viper results in a more secure programming language which results in a more secure Viper. So that's kind of the framing that we are hoping to move towards. Yeah, thanks for sharing that Dwanch. And um you know just to like Danch just to summarize the idea is to arrive at a point where any ecosystem is able to generate their own dependency graph and then they can commit 2% of their revenue to that graph and once the graph is generated you know

it's really up to the ecosystem what is that they want to use to give waiting to the repos or projects right deep funding is one way of doing that like running contest but there can be other mechanisms that can be used to do the waiting of the projects. So that is phase three. I do want to make sure like just want to highlight please do check out deepfunding.app which is a very nice UI which was just like a fun thing that one of our friends Khal built and it's pretty nice and hopefully we have something like this for eventually so that you know you just have to type a node name and you can just list it will list all the dependencies right and it will be like a one-click thing for you to just fund the dependencies. So that would be you know ideal but yeah just in

case anyone is interested in checking out also just here some of the estimates that we have shared you know if uh like ENS has $31 million revenue then you know what would 2% of it would be right so this would give you a good estimate on what these numbers would look like and of course one of the things that we are also planning to do as part of this phase is to sort of um you know increase the list and sort of collect this data as well how much revenue so that we can estimate and project like you know how much will we sort of manage to get in funding if we get 2% of the revenue for each of these ecosystems. So and our you know our goal is yeah we're still defining the goal. I don't want to just throw any number but it's uh definitely

depends on these numbers and then there's another part which is actually pretty nice which is you know we are saying we need to do for game theory what we did for cryptography. So essentially you know we believe that there is an entire community of people who are economists, public goods experts and you know game theorists but it's important for them to come to Ethereum or come to our space because we need more innovation. We need more innovative solutions, innovative mechanisms, innovative ways of thinking, right? That we strongly believe will definitely come from academia. So we are making an attempt to bridge this gap or do this by organizing a research retreat and thanks

to an Benet who is the founder of protocol labs and you know he also strongly believes in it and he has agreed to sort of support this financially and uh we are organizing this retreat in Iceland from July 26 to August 10th and um the idea is you know like I said it's important for the community which is Ethereum outside crypto to feel safe and see Ethereum as playground for them as a ground for them to like really do experiments and you know test out their ideas right so you know we will bring people from both the worlds from our space and from academics world together to work on some of the things that we've also discussed previously which is around credit assignment and you know reward loops

once we have the repos once we have the graph right how do we figure out the waiting how do we figure out you know which uh what matters more So essentially everything as you can see is so well you know ties together a lot different pieces it feels like you know the more I was telling Dwash the other day you know everything has come together very naturally like it was not something that you know we had planned but the way things are falling in place it feels like you know we are trying to solve for things in like different ways and all of it has come together very nicely so which I'm very happy to see So that is the end of the road map. I hope this helps with uh people to like understand what this is and just to

summarize you know there are three phases. Phase one is broad listening and the dependency mapping and then phase two is the dashboard and then phase three is commitment where 2% we will asking for commitment of 2% of revenue from ecosystems to the dependency graph and then the retreat and we are very looking forward to implementing this executing this and we are open to like teams and people who are really interested in doing further research and help us implement menting some of these things. So yeah, open to also chatting with them. Yeah, the main thing we need help on is a name for this project. So if any of you have a name, that's always

helpful. Yeah, right now is road map for funding Ethereum's open source infrastructure, which is nice, but we need an interesting name. So it would be have to nice to have a fun name and you know we have a history of by the way deciding name for deep funding. I think we should just chat a little bit about that. But you know when we were like working on deep funding and one of the things that we realized how important it is to really have the right name like you know this is one of the things and thanks to one who actually got us to think more about you know what is the name of the mechanism and because u it can really tell what it is about or otherwise it can be really misleading also. So I think name is uh super important. It definitely is and I think

people have used this platform in the past to collect name for name and mascots and memes for uh test nets and things like that. So I hope people listen to this conversation and come back with some suggestions some fun and interesting name. So you will definitely going to get that. Thank you both for articulating it in a very well way. I love the explanation with the curve finance and the viper. It helped understand the relationship the dependency that we are actually talking about and learning about the uh revenue like from where the fund will come. This is a very good proposal but I think people have also shared this concern and I would be also curious to learn more about it without the commitment without

the enforcement it is just symbolic. How do you see this getting enforced or people getting encouraged to commit to this 2% revenue sharing with the open source infrastructure? Yeah. So that's also the thing that we learned on Twitter that like a lot of people said that this is where it'll fall short like getting enough people to commit. So I think there are two three things of it. One is the leaderboard helps provide an incentive that we can mark those who've done this commitment and they can keep moving up the leaderboard as they contribute more and more to their own dependencies. So that's one part of it.

The second part is a lot of ecosystems do actually want to fund their dependencies and the reason is that it makes them have a better product. So that's the second part that like projects want to fund the things they depend on but they don't know how to do that in a very simple way that has little overhead. So the second hope is that by just making it super easy to do it, it becomes much easier for projects to do and it doesn't take any cost of their time because the main cost for these projects is the time of their executives and we don't and if you can show a way to do that with minimal overhead there'll be more people who do that and there are already a lot of people doing it. I think we should remember Ethereum is strong because of this. We already have so many different

ecosystems that are already supporting their dependencies. So that's the second part. So first is the visibility of a leaderboard. Second is making it super convenient and easy. And then the third which is the more complicated one is how do we build relationships between the dependencies and the projects because in a way it's a win-win relationship that as someone who's making solidity, it benefits me to know how people are using my programming language. Then I know what features to focus on and it's like basically talk to your users, you know.

So that's also what we eventually see happening that the projects that are taking this pledge and supporting their dependency graph also get greater access to the cost centers and to the developers and hopefully we get a win-win relationship form through that. That's obviously has its own issues and it has its own problems but we've seen some models succeed with it but I guess those are the three things that I would say as an answer to that. Yeah, just to quickly add like as much as like eventually the goal is and the success would be to get this commitment but we would also consider it a success once we have managed to map this and that feeds into the eligibility for Octant and for Gitcoin and you know these ecosystems

when they run rounds because it is extremely important. It feels like a lowhanging fruit almost like you know doing that first and fixing that sort of like helping them tighten the eligibility through this would be I think I would consider it as a as a success and then you know of course the next thing would be to get the commitment. I may have a suggestion here as well like uh Dwanch mentioned about few points and under which one of those were like convenience. If it is convenient for projects to do that perhaps we can create a standard for example we created ERC20 and that helped a tons of projects to build on top of Ethereum. So if we can create a standard by which using a project can just simply uh donate their 2% revenue that would be

way easier and project might want to implement. So any author interested may work on that part. No, that's a great one. Yeah, like I did not relate it to ERC20s but we want to make it as easy as that. You're right. That's a good very well. Uh my next question is with respect to uh dependency of course we talked about that people will have their own dependency graph but as we understand that dependency may vary. How do we want to have a good balance of past dependency and future dependency when we are talking about it?

Yeah, that's a very tricky question. We saw this happen with uh web 3JS which is now deprecated. It's not active anymore, but they've still made contributions in the past. And so, how do we weigh that past versus future? It's like not an easy answer, but like it's something we're thinking on right now. And one solution we got just today is create one model to give weights based on usage by a repo. So there's like a model that we build as a team and that gives like an initial draft that this repo is worth this much, this other repo is worth that other much. Then we have humans come in the loop to give judgments on each of the repos and then that changes the

weights based on the human judgment for the final model which is then selected. So model human model and that can hopefully by looking at actual usage like like the reason web3js was deprecated was that they found that a lot of teams have now switched to using vhim or ethersjs instead. So that's kind of it would ideally be identified at the dependency graph stage that people are not using web3js anymore. It's something in the past but now they are very dependent on ethersjs or vim. So that's kind of the hope that we would be able to identify all of these without involving any humans because we saw that humans actually gave high marks to web3js and they didn't know actually a lot of these things about uh it being

deprecated not being used anymore all of that that is true yeah Ethereum and in fact any ecosystem keeps on evolving and as we evolve we need to make sure that we are supporting new projects so we can have the fruits later down in the future. So we need to be mindful of that and having a process in place to identify which is future oriented would be nicer to have embedded in this uh road map. Well, we had a lot of discussion on how to fund this open-source infrastructure.

One question that perhaps we all know but it will be really interesting to hear from you both uh for those people who may have missed the importance. Why does open-source infrastructure matter especially in the context of Ethereum or blockchain? Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I think opensource is extremely important for decentralization and um like this is what we really, you know, depend on. like if we do not immediately take any action to sustain open-source infrastructure which is inherently does not have a business model it is extremely hard to imagine like in a in a decade or so like if this

ecosystem will even exist right so I think I feel I feel a very strong sense of urgency when we think when I think about it and um I think yeah that's why it's uh it's really important to do it and yeah definitely you touched on it and it's good We all understand that Ethereum is a decentralized ecosystem and as we make it open source it could be helpful for any contributor from any part of the world to come join contribute and add their idea which perhaps the initial contributor may not have it. So that's I feel like it's very important to have it open sourced. Yep.

I can also give my answer to it. Uh it's basically that open source is important for three main reasons. The first is that it just lets us build a much better internet. Uh we've seen the internet splinter off into these walled gardens where when I'm locked into Twitter, I can't take that social graph into other into Facebook or Instagram and then I'm locked in over there. So I think open source can help make like a better internet for everyone. Uh the second is that it just makes a better work culture. People feel more motivated when their contributions are public. it can be built upon by anyone else. Someone who is able to even work part-time is able to still get employment and make

ends meet in open source. I think in like blockchain in general, I'm sure all of us would agree working in the industry that it's actually like a much better way of working. It allows you to bring your whole self to work. So I think that's the second part that it helps build a better work culture where we can build on top of each other rather than build against each other. And the third is just that it accelerates innovation. That by having to not repeat work which is already done once like that open source ethos if someone has made someone has solved a problem once then it shouldn't be solved a second time. I think that can really accelerate innovation and the building blocks that are provided you know that I made some base you build on top of that and then so I think we can work much faster in

open source compared to in a closed source model. Um so these would be the three reasons why I think it's important make a better internet have a better work culture for the world and accelerate innovation. These are very good points. Definitely it's adding value to the ecosystem we are trying to build around here. Well we are on this on this topic I would also love to hear your thoughts on what qualifies as infrastructure like how do you define open-source infrastructure? Yeah, I guess like in philosophy we always taught to contrast things like I'll go on a slight tangent but it's an interesting tangent. So the common philosophical problem is that uh when I

was dreaming I thought it was real but now I'm awake and how do I know that this is not a dream that everything is a dream. So Vitkinstein was the person who actually got an answer to this which I was happy with where he said that we've as humans have invented the word dream to contrast it with our waking state. So when you make a statement like oh everything could be a dream you're playing a language game because we invented the word dream to contrast it with our waking state. So it's important to have uh that sort of contrast. So if we try to answer about uh what is web3 infrastructure, I guess the contrast would be what is not web3 infrastructure

and I think the way I define it is that anything which is userfacing is not web3 infrastructure and anything which is dev facing is uh infrastructure. So something like a is facing the user so that's not infrastructure but something like solidity is interfacing with the devs and that counts as infrastructure. I am a little divided on this thought or opinion because I feel like you know when we are talking about dashboards which may or may not be always dev facing maybe userf facing but that could be considered as important part of infrastructure because that provides a lot of information here. So depending upon you know the who the end users are

we can perhaps do that but generally speaking anything like dashboard should also be considered there. Well I'm sure as you mentioned in this conversation that eligibility criteria is less focused. Perhaps we should do some more conversation around that and how do we select these projects like whether they are real infra or not. So we could have more conversation in upcoming days and we can get more clarity. Uh we are coming towards the end of this conversation. Sorry Sel you wanted to add something please go ahead. No I just this makes me think like of an experiment that we can actually do because you know one of the things that we also keep asking is what is a public

good like how do we define it? So I wonder like if we use polace and then you know use these statements and sort of make a I don't know few statements and just circulate it and see what people say and then you know using it we can sort of make sense and actually see like what people are thinking and you know sort of cluster their uh sort of opinions and actually maybe use it as a way to arrive at a definition as an ecosystem. But yeah that was just like a thought that came. Yeah. And I think like one thing I'll say about public goods is that I like what Vitalik said about shifting away from public goods to dependency graphs because public goods tries to answer the question how valuable is this is X for the world

which is very hard to answer whereas dependency graphs is how valuable is X for Y which is much easier to answer. So that's kind of one thing I like. Yeah. Yeah. And to understand that dependency graph, these dashboard could be helpful because they can provide the real data. Exactly. Y circular dependencies there. Anyway, we are heading towards the end of this conversation here today. I noticed that uh the road map received a lot of feedback, a lot of comment. So I'm curious to hear among these extensive feedbacks on the forum what stood out to you the most and if you have come up with any new plan or any new changes in the initial proposal

based on the feedback that has been received so far. Yeah, I can start. I think the first is definitely you know for phase one broad listening like I initially also mentioned as much as it is you know initially we in the proposal we've only focused on sort of scraping the forums and talking to people which is important but it is extremely important to also map the whole ecosystem which I very much consider part of broad listening right so we need to broad listen to um of ecosystems and understand like what really needs to be mapped and you know map it so that has to I think that is important so not just rely on conversations but actually you know look at the code. So that is one and I think the second thing for the dashboard one thing that I've been

hearing is like uh it's hard to collect the data because a lot not everything is on chain. So um like figuring out a way to do that and also like there have been some uh organizations or ecosystems who have worked in the past for example you know metagav standard and there are few things that already exist. So I think we one of people have highlighted that you know it's important to not reinvent the wheel. So how we can use that and build on top of it right so that would be I think important and that we've been hearing and the the third thing that I think you had also asked is like how do we ensures that not only the past work has is getting funded and you know how

do we make sure it also accommodates for future sort of innovations and you know maybe dependencies which we which are we are yet to see and definitely you know one of the interesting things that I've been hearing is like um this This is so this is great but how do we use it for you know Ethereum is not just open source right there are there's community there is like people there are different other things also how do we do something for non code right like non-software things so what would that be so I think that is something that you know uh it's not like less of concern but more of like probably curiosity and interest from people so I think those are broadly the things that come to my mind uh which

you I've been uh hearing but yeah Tim to you. Yeah I think one of the great feedbacks that I've got is to look at the uh list of GitHub repos in electric capital so they kind of compile all the repos that are relevant to Ethereum and to EVM and to use that as a starting point of analysis so that it also gets more people to add their repo to electric capital which is kind of important to remain on top of that as well. So that's kind of one good feedback I got of like use like broad listening like look at the electric capital list of GitHub repos which I think are 4,000 for EVM and around 2,000 for Ethereum. So that's a lot of repos to already look into and uh I guess on

the dashboard side I think it's similar to what Sel said like just like it's a hard to do it in an automated way and it's hard it also adds a lot of overhead to teams which don't have the time to share all this data with us and um so it's going to be like an ownorous process to actually get this going and um on the dependency graph I guess like we've been getting a lot of feedback on dependency graphs and how to run these competitions in a good way. One of the things was just like the civil analysis problem that people try to submit a lot of models which like in order to give weights how do we run these things in an onchain way you know rather than using a lot of off-chain technology which is like GitHub and others how can we run

these entire dependency graph systems onchain make it collusion resistant so those are some of the discussions that we've been having on all three I have noticed public responses generally helps people who are into building get their ideas even more refined and maybe more useful. While they have started with some initial thought, these suggestions brings it more and it becomes even more helpful for the community. So I'm glad that we are receiving good input. It's been I think about a month not a month has completed but a decent number of input has been provided there. I wonder if you guys want to share any message to our community from this platform. any

shout outs, acknowledgements, the floor is all yours. Uh yeah, I'm just like need help with coming up for with a name for this sort of kind of initiative of the dashboard and getting the commitment all of that. And the second is that we have like a deep funding competition live. So, anyone who wants to kind of try out AI and get their hands dirty with it, we have a very concrete challenge for you, which is that we have a dependency graph of 4,000 open-source repos that contribute to Ethereum, and we need weights between those repos. So, build an AI or a deterministic model that gives those weights and kind of be part of this first experiment on dependency graphs. Yeah. And I think I want to mention that we have the retreat

coming up. So applications are still open. The link is on the forum. Please fill your application if you're interested in joining us. Especially if you're an engineer, if you're a researcher, and if you can take out time for 2 weeks in Iceland, we would love to have you. Um yeah, so make sure you apply. It's tempting. Iceland. Yeah, I think it's a good place for these kind of people to get together, cool down their heads and think about good public good selection of venue. Well, thank you again for joining us here you both. Uh it is really interesting to learn about different new ideas coming in the

ecosystem and it's important that people are thinking and putting them in in form of a road map. We want to have Ethereum sustain here for longer and thinking about long-term sustainability is a must. Thank you for initiating this process and I look forward to see this going in the right direction and maybe getting a lot of support from the ecosystem itself. Thank you for having us Puja. It's my pleasure all the time. Well, all our listeners please check out our show notes. We have multiple discussions on public good fundings, the governance and what's there in the ecosystem to help and support. If you are a new project and trying to survive,

please check out our links. Until next time, we request you to think more about these innovating ideas and if possible, keep supporting other projects in the ecosystem. This is Puja Ranjan signing off. Cheers everyone.