Roads and Bridges: Funding Our Digital Infrastructure (Panel) - Tokyo 2024

okay thank you everybody okay next up doing backtack panels uh we have sha Mori of frack and Ventures we have Scott Moore of Public Works and cheeky gorilla of protocol Guild and they will be discussing next roads and bridges funding our digital infrastructure cool so hey everyone so I'm Shi so from flon B so I'm working on Frum Ventures as a researching development of Public Funding so and I so I'm a r of um polygon grants programs Rie so so today so I will provide so this session so by Scot and cheis yeah so so this session is a huge focusing on crypto Public Funding um I think so there there are many we um non crypto people so do you work on crypto crypto space please raise the H yeah maybe a few yeah and then so um okay so this session uh this session a to Deep dive in Deep dive into uh cryto Public Funding um for CRI people so but this SS this sis aim to find find the new world who are power who are known good peopers so I invited greatest speakers so who have a great experience and great knowledge on CTO space Scot and chy so first thank you thank you first I'd like to share the context and background of CTO Public Funding especially isum um Isam is a uh next Isam is a protocol for human coordinations and and open source projects many D decentralized community and individuals are building Isam so but actually Isam contributors don't have some incentives and in order to build isum and isum ecosystem sustainably uh we need an economic incentives so I mean it is Public Funding so originally it is hard to provide um maintain public goods so but Italian may be able to fix Global human coordination problem instead of the government so especially through Public Funding next so actually there are many public many projects contributing to Public Funding L um so like uh gcoin and P GE and hypers so it's um incubated by protal labels so please next so um crypto gr program have different type of decision making so First Foundation type and Democratic type and algorithm type and so these speakers gcoin and protocol GE is and s to algor algorithm type like quadratic funding and then using protocols so like a basing protocols or storing protocols next so as was I'd like to um introduce myself so as my contributing of Public Funding Public Funding space so I'm working on researching grants programs I like I try to find the different among various grants programs um quanti uh grants programs by Closs Closs comparing cross comparing comparing various gr programs quantitively so now I have a hypothesis that so the distributed amount so depends on manage management structure of Grant programs next so today's great speakers are Scot and Chi ke I'd like to interest in them yeah SC is a font of Public Works and then cound of gitcoin and public works and gitcoin are contributing to Public Funding especially gitcoin is a famous quadratic funding quadratic funding platform so he has a various experience in Publics funding space so like uh optim and enss so chick is also core contributor from protog git pit is pit is a ISM core developer Collective so Proto is building some protocols token basing protocols and streaming protocols Proto gar is I think phate is bringing a economic infrastructure to uh with um ecosystems uh next so today's I've just provideed provided about three topics so let's talk let's talk about these topics in Public Funding space so Scotland chiy so please har please please har um talk like a p chates okay is this working yes now it is okay cool yeah thank you so much for the introduction um I think the interesting part for me of cryp is that we fundamentally started to get people to actually care about what I would consider and what I mean actually since we're at like the United Nations University the UN would talk about AS Global public goods problems and fundamentally for us I think both like the one that we've been focused on as being open source funding primarily mostly because open source is one of the critical sort of infrastructure pieces that we tend to undervalue um total value in the market today if you look at the replacement for companies that are using it would be about $9 trillion so it's like a pretty major part of the economy that people just don't measure uh until recently and ultimately the crypto ecosystem as someone who spent a lot of time uh working with folks like Nadia who wrote the book working in public and the GitHub team who created GitHub sponsors crypto has really actually brought this problem to the Forefront and distributed a lot more value than traditionally has been sort of available for this sort of problem so when I about like how does crypto fix public goods funding I guess like my first thought is just like you know why is it that like crypto has like actually had this Major Impact on open source and what is about the culture and maybe that's a question I guess for like cheeki is like what got you sort of into this space of public goods funding but especially like open source software and like why do you think the values of ethereum and crypto resonate so much um you know when it comes to that topic yeah I guess thank you sha for the introduction uh thank you Scott as well as well honored to be up here um hello everyone um so yeah you heard correctly my uh my handle up here is cheeky gorilla um I go by cheeki and that's not because um I have some weird fascination with Apes it's because I have a weird fascination with privacy um in fact like I am I'm a little bit crazy about privacy um that's why I am cheeky gorilla because I basically didn't want to have uh any association um outside of my work with protocol Guild um um not because I've done some shady stuff to be clear um but um I think when we look at ethereum specifically um one of the kind of Initial Ideas Beyond like decentralized uber I'm sure everyone remembers that one um one of the promises that we had was like login with ethereum um this notion of you know keeping your own data secure with your own wallet your own keys right um this idea that you know by logging into different platforms online you wouldn't have to just force give away uh all of your personal information and obviously as a as a privacy um focused individual that really appealed to me um and so that was one of the key things that really hooked me about ethereum specifically um but then obviously to bring that to open source software to anyone who's not on a privacy Journey like me um open source software not just crypto but open source software is fundamental for privacy right because you know you can be using any kind of software and odds are you're feeding that software a lot of data right and if that software developer tells you trust me bro we're not using your data in any kind of Nefarious way um how can you actually verify that right how how how can you trust that this this uh this phrase trust but verify in crypto like think about that from privacy perspective when using open source software if you're using open source software you can verify this stuff if you're not you cannot verify anything um and so that to me was the reason why I was kind of really into open source software at the start and why I saw that easy Bridge from open source software into ethereum um and then of course wanting to support all of that ultimately led me to the protocol Guild um which is a uh a collective funding mechanism for uh ethereum's core devs the the developers were building the thing um obviously in my case I wasn't smart enough to be a core Dev um so I did the next best thing which was help them operationally um so yeah I think I haven't quite answered the question for number one but uh that's kind of my background of where I kind of uh started on that path yeah I think that like privacy is ultimately I mean another form of public good ironically right like it's one of those things that we don't think of as a necessary thing until it's Lo lost and and then we sort of regret usually the the sort of lack of focus on those on those pieces I mean for me like the Privacy journey is really interesting because there is a lot of overlap between the hacker infos sort of community and the crypto community and both of those communities tend to care about open source software but they also tend to care about sort of innovation and ways to sort of bridge um sort of old world and New World thinking when it comes to like how software is developed and like you know you see this with even the way that like um security firms work where you have red teams and blue teams it's like let's at least kind of engage with the idea that we live in a more adversar environments and like engage with uh you know the trade-offs of that and try to provide you know in that context the best space for people to operate and like you know a kind of like positive summer public good in the context of of that software um but yeah definitely I mean for me like it was actually a sort of similar journey of just using a lot open source software and machine learning and I ended up deciding actually like where is all this coming from I should probably do something about this and similarly wasn't really smart enough to contribute to those libraries uh in a in a sufficiently robust way I made some PRS but they weren't like very good uh which maintainers Hate by the way actually I should say like you really need to like maintainers is like if you make a bad PR they're just like this is more work this is more things that we have to worry about um which is one of the that's kind of the I guess the fundamental like problem is basically in all these cases things like privacy things like open source software usually the people who are supporting them and creating value uh with them are underpaid themselves or are not really given any of the economic value that we were talking about before so for example um the average open source software developer makes I think about um less than $1,000 doll uh per month uh on their open source software obviously they usually have full-time jobs that they're doing on the side um but with things like op SSL in 2015 uh which was the sort of like Library that uh where the heart bleed vulnerability was from um that you know didn't save people from billions of dollars of damage uh it didn't save people from from the actual attacks because the person who was doing the full-time job had nothing you know no time to work on the actual core library that they were supposed to be in theory working on and so you know this this sort of is a huge huge problem um and these yeah mechanisms that we were talking about in the intro are basically two ways that crypto has started to get like a little bit more of a foothold on this so quadratic funding being the one that getcoin kind of forwarded of how do we democratically allow communities to decide on what should be uh funded via uh basically taking a matching pool from a large sponsor or donor and then letting people individually donate and weighing those donations according to the level of Interest the relative level of interest that those people have in seeing a project succeed and then basically reallocating the larger pools based on that that work the benefit of that model is that that it is democratic it provides like open access the downside of that model is it requires that you're very careful about who actually is participating in the process because if you're not ultimately you know you might not get very many good projects funded you might end up with a lot of noise you might end up with a lot of things that um are being funded by non-domain experts and so this was like actually a challenge that I think we sort of ran into with things that were uh in more of the climate space I think we did some really good work there but I think actually the best work we did was in the open source software space in the sense that things like Unis swap things like optimism things like tornado cach which is obviously you know I think one that we both sort of resonate with although is in some tricky uh situations right now those were projects that were really funded because the community deeply sort of knew what was relevant to the ethereum ecosystem at the time um and and those have obviously gone on to become billion dollar protocols in their own right so um the the interesting question I think for two um which like I'm kind of riffing because I only I only saw these now so I'm like actually just like going going for these like kind of YOLO but like I think the the interesting question is basically what is the you know degree of inclusivity or exclusivity of a mechanism and like for protocol Guild I think it takes a very different approach which is look the core devs know what the core devs need and know who is in in a sense a core Dev let's have them curate a list let's have that list be relatively you know exclusive in in not a negative sense but but in a necessary sense like how do you view that sort of balance in the way that you approach um in in the way that you approach the mechanisms designed for protocol Guild so much to to touch on with what you just said um but I think sticking on that that last Point um so quickly protocol Guild how many people have actually heard about protocol Guild before okay okay I'm gonna I'm going to give you a speed pitch of protocol Guild just so everyone can be on the same page actually no the translators won't like that it'll be a slowly well eloqua pitch um and still in two minutes um there's there's two parts to protocol guilt there's a membership registry which is as I mentioned a collective of ethereum's core protocol contributors again these are the individuals who are working on the core protocol itself who are who are building ethereum who are maintaining ethereum who are shipping the amazing upgrades that um hopefully you all love like the merge um that's one part of the protocol Guild and then the second part of the protocol Guild is we've built a funding mechanism um around that membership registry so that we can basically go to all the various projects in the ecosystem some who were highlighted in shinya slides um and basically say to them hey look um thank you for building on ethereum um ethereum is a very very important public good that uh that could use some of your support because as Scott said um these uh core protocol contributors they have unbelievably specialized knowledge and they are getting unbelievable job offers from almost everywhere in the ecosystem um to the point where it's not actually economic ially rational for them to work on ethereum's core protocol and so what is the effect of that well the core devs they leave every once in a while right to go get paid good for them a lot more on some other projects um you know this probably isn't surprising for you there's a lot of money in crypto there's not a lot of money in ethereum score protocol development um and so that's why we go to these projects and say look if we drain all of the core devs from ethereum's core protocol development well then there's no one left to maintain and upgrade the protocol that we all love um and so this mechanism basically seeks to get buyin from the ecosystem and say hey look donate a portion of your tokens your native tokens to the protocol Guild in such a way that these tokens are then vested to these core devs over four years which creates long-term incentives for them to stick around to continue to maintain the protocol that you depend on right and of course by giving native tokens you're giving these contributors access to upside that's being cre in the ecosystem that's built on the work on their work right so that's that's the speed pitch maybe it wasn't quite two minutes um and so what was remind me the tension well I guess like so yeah like basically if you have this cordev list right like you know that these people are doing good work and you know that like they're obviously you know having this challenge of leaving the ecosystem potentially um but how do you know who should like actually be in that list and like where the list is actually where it stops like I mean if you're Rick Mo from ether's JS for example um you know ether's JS is not core protocol but everyone uses it and ultimately he's the kind of person that like would never by the way go and like work on another protocol um but he gets offers like all the time um and it's the same sort of tension of you know do you include more people and and sort of dilute the lists themselves or do you try to stay very exclusive but potentially uh end up missing people that are going to go off and like leave the ecosystem otherwise would have done really good work and I think my sort of perspective is that like quadratic funding takes the one side of this in the sense that it goes very Broad and sometimes too broad where you know I've definitely seen people like note down sometimes like why is this thing being funded in this round it doesn't really make sense um at the same time you get things like Unis swap which you know I think people generally would agree at this point is good how do you sort of view that tension yeah so I mean for the protocol Guild it's it's it's a novel funding mechanism right it basically was built in such a way that it can slot in with other public goods funding mechanisms out there without necessarily competing with them right so like protocol Guild is is a recipient of optimism retroactive public goods funding it's a recipient of gitcoin quadratic funding rounds um but as we mentioned the core focus of the protocol Guild is to fund these core devs and there are not a lot right today we have a list of 177 core protocol contributors um and that's a relatively small list of individuals so you can imagine losing one of those individuals can be pretty painful because of the amount of context that they have which they've really built up over years of contributing and so the average protocol guild member has contributed like 3.2 years of their lives to this work so you can imagine the amount of like contextual knowledge that they have um now 177 individuals is a small enough number for us to easily come to consensus on this number of individuals right and this is this is is a really important part of the protocol Guild is that we have this problem where there are not enough of these cord devs and since there are not enough of these C devs we can easily compile them into a single list um if we are unbelievably successful um the protocol Guild um and we start saying that we have 500 core protocol developers 1,000 core protocol developers more than that protocol Guild by definition will need to change it will need to change because um we use self- curation to update this membership registry which basically means everyone comes to agreement on who are these cordev and the second you have a thousand individuals that doesn't work anymore um and so to that extent we have to ethereum is well known as a value being inclusive but protocol guilds cannot be that because we have a very specific problem that we're trying to address uh and so to that extent we had to Define who protocol guilds membership is very specifically to include the current cohort of contributors such that we can also very easily monitor our um our progress on fixing this problem by seeing how many new uh cord devs we help on board into the ecosystem how many we help uh retain over the long term so or do you want to jump in like I mean the the tldr for me is like what's really interesting is that like you can actually bootstrap this mechanism then for any case where you don't have enough of the thing that you're looking for because your sample set is small enough to actually like build up um an initial list and and kind of C uh curated Community do you then see there being other areas where people should create guilds and what would those guilds look like maybe around hypothetically privacy or around zero knowledge Technologies or around you know Dev tooling what do you see that sort of looking like and like to me that's sort of an interesting case because it is like everything in in open source like everything in crypto forkable um do you think that would help the value of the mechanism in a sense or would it dilute the quality of the mechanism it's a it's a great question um and I think there are ways it can be done that dilutes the mechanism um but hopefully that won't happen right um but look I mean there obviously is a lot of talk nowadays um about spitting up new guilds right because again protocol Guild is very specifically focused on one thing um what about the other things like for example you might be surprised to learn that solidity the solidity contributors uh are not part of the protocol guilt um and most people when they think of ethereum core protocol they think of solidity because hey isn't that like the language with which you're coding the thing um and they are not part of the protocol Guild because they basically operate at a higher level than the core protocol itself and so to that extent something like solidity they kind of look and feel more like tooling okay and so for that reason solidity is not part of the protocol Guild and so this highlights a potential Guild that could exist in the future a tooling Guild um so there have been talks about creating one it's not something that protocol Guild itself would be um uh would be involved in apart from just giving advice about how things went for us um specifically because a protocol Guild is enough work in and of itself um but B we don't have the context needed to basically curate those other registries for those other guilds uh and so this kind of goes to your question now so something like a Dev tooling Guild to to to execute that properly you would need to start with a very specific eligibility criteria you would need to have an eligibility framework um with which you can go to different um stakeholders in the ecosystem and basically uh I guess convince them that they should be part of this mechanism and convince them that other people should be part of this mechanism too to a limit because again this thing does not work self curation does not work um at a massive scale right so you want to be able to like tightly Define your El ibility criteria to the point where self curation still works the second you want to go beyond that that's great you can um you're just not going to use self curation anymore and just because self- curation works for the protocol Guild doesn't mean it's what everyone else needs to needs to needs to use however obviously it works for us and so when we will talk to other potential guilds out there that's how we will approach the the the topic which is starting from the smallest group possible so that you don't have any because this is where things can fragment right if you have two competing groups who don't think they should be in there um over the long term that's going to get very messy so from the beginning you need to have buyin from everyone um that this is like the um the best group of people to reflect this Guild because obviously you're going to be fundraising for this and so to that extent the legitimacy of your guilt is foundational for fundraising because if people think your guild is a mess if people think your guild is not properly defined if your if people think that the guild has weird people in there that does not belong or weird teams in there that do not belong it's going to hurt your legitimacy it's going to hurt your fundraising um so these are really really important things to to think about when creating a guild um the good news is that someone much smarter than me uh Trent van EPS he has written two mirror posts about this um I think the first one is called so you want to start a guild so you can search for that and I think the second one I don't know what the second one is called it was much more recent but if you look at his uh mirror website trent. eth um you'll find it and so he's written extensively about this um and he basically lists out all the considerations that you you should have when when thinking about these things so this is actually good because we touched on legitimacy and I didn't uh see the third question yet so when we're talking about legitimacy like I guess maybe one question related to that is what do you think uh an illegitimate Guild would look like like what is an example of a guild that you don't want to see this is maybe to spicy but like is there something where you think that breaks down like obviously scale of the number of people in The Guild is one piece but like is there a type of you know specificity to the category that's being funded or is there a place in which the type of thing being funded would just be too net like non-neutral to actually be suitable for that kind of mechanism and in those cases um you know even Beyond qf like what what do you think like the other mechanisms are that you would say inspire you or you think people should sort of start to build on yeah I mean there there are some projects out there that say they already have guilds um and I guess by definition maybe it is a guilds but they work for hire right they basically say like we are like a kind of a bargaining Collective um that uh has this group of individuals who are willing to do work and will do work for pay um that is not protocol Guild um and for a very clear reason right uh protocol Guild is about ethereum's core protocol um ethereum's core protocol um needs to be the most credibly neutral the most secure the most decentralized um smart contract platform uh digital currency out there and so to that extent we cannot have projects basically uh giving cash for features um and so any kind of Guild out there that is doing that I would question the legitimacy um first and foremost but I'd also just question like are they a guild at all in by my definition and probably they're not um now as for other public goods mechanisms out there I I without getting too spicy I mean going back to the first question how does crypto fix public goods funding um it hasn't and this is really important right um it is so far to date been a series of experimentations and some of those experimentations are working better than others right and we've already covered a few of the ones that are that we think are are working well um and just because there's a public goods funding mechanism that hasn't been successful doesn't mean that it's not legitimate it just means it was part of this experimentation hopefully it was part of this experimentation um and it needed to be tweaked more but going back to uh open source um that's one of the beauties of why we can have such rapid experimentation is because everything is open source everything can kind of be copy pasted and put some tweaks in there to see if if it works better next time and so you know I think for the most part everyone should be very open-minded about any new public goods funding mechanism that's announced um if done in good faith because it brings us to where we're all trying to go which is fixing public goods funding we do not have the way to fix this yet again we have a series of experimentations and hopefully um the learnings from all of those will actually give us something tangible that can make the world a better place continue funding protocol Guild continue funding other mechanisms uh and continue hopefully uh experimenting with solutions to Global public goods I think that's a good place to end off uh did you have anything maybe R um time up around yeah I I actually had one question so uh regarding protocol Guild are there any opportunities for non-technical individuals to get involved did you see our tweet is this are you laying me up for this oh no not at all I'm genuinely asking we just tweeted about this so thank you um we are looking um for people like me uh who were not smart enough to be cordz but who want to help out with the operations of the protocol Guild um turns out running a guild is a lot of work um and we need more hands on deck to help us scale this mechanism um so if you are if you do have a passion for ethereum's core protocol development and you have been looking for your in this in my biased opinion is an amazing in um you can check out our Twitter I guess for the Post there's also so I I think we literally tweeted about this today there's a like a like a job description um is uh and um that should give you enough to uh to chew on okay thank you cheeky gorilla all right uh so we're wrapping up now you guys done all good thank you so much awesome thank you guys so much [Applause]