Protocol Guild
Protocol Guild is a collective funding mechanism for the maintainers of Ethereum's layer 1 research and development. [1]
Overview
Protocol Guild operates through three components: an eligibility framework, a member registry, and onchain donation contracts.[4] The eligibility framework determines which projects' contributors should receive a share of the funding, and it is used to maintain an active member registry. The registry's addresses and weights are regularly published onchain to a "split" contract — a smart contract that divides incoming funds among many recipients — where vested funding can be claimed.[4]
Funds contributed by projects building on Ethereum go directly to individual contributors after a linear four-year vest, meaning the tokens or assets are released gradually over four years rather than all at once.[1] Protocol Guild deliberately limits its scope to managing these three components and soliciting funding for the eligible work. The organization's documentation is explicit that day-to-day stewardship of the Ethereum protocol continues in existing venues such as All Core Devs calls, ethresear.ch, and the Ethereum Magicians forum, and that donations to Protocol Guild have no bearing on the technical decisions taken in those venues.[4] [5]
The design centers individual contributors over the organizations that employ them. Michael Sproul, an Ethereum contributor at the Lighthouse consensus client, has said, "I love that Protocol Guild centers individual contributors ahead of organizations, and in doing so grants autonomy to all of the people working on Ethereum's base layer."[1] Protocol Guild describes itself as "a mechanism that learns and adapts," continually updating its documentation.[4] Its documentation opens with a quotation from Isaac Asimov's Foundation, invoking Hari Seldon and the founding of two Foundations at each end of the Galaxy.[4] [5]
Membership and Registry
The registry spans the core software that runs and specifies Ethereum. It includes execution clients — the software that processes transactions — such as go-ethereum, erigon (9 contributors), Nethermind (21 contributors), Hyperledger Besu (12 contributors), and reth.[1] It also covers consensus clients, which handle Ethereum's proof-of-stake mechanism, including Lighthouse (13 contributors), Prysm (11 contributors), Teku (9 contributors), Lodestar (8 contributors), Grandine (5 contributors), and the Nimbus clients.[1] Beyond clients, the registry funds work on the Ethereum consensus and execution specifications, the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) repository, virtual-machine implementations such as evmone and revm, cryptographic libraries for data sharding and Verkle trees, and the Portal Network specifications and clients.[1] [6]
Members are organized into active working groups. The documentation lists categories including Wayfinding, Governance, Client Implementations, and Upgrade Delivery, alongside a category for Alumni Members.[4] Membership is governed by eligibility requirements together with a process of self-curation, and members carry both defined rights and obligations.[4] [6]
Governance
Protocol Guild's membership makes collective decisions about the mechanism's scope. On November 4, 2025, after two weeks of discussion and debate, the membership approved the creation of a zkEVM working group, extending the registry's coverage toward zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine work.[2]
On May 6, 2026, Protocol Guild moved its governance onchain by deploying the Agora Governor smart contract, a bespoke membership NFT, and what it terms a full Governance Stack, marking what it described as the next era of its governance.[2] The membership NFT serves as an onchain credential of membership, while the Agora Governor contract provides the on-chain proposal and voting machinery.[4]
Funding and the 1% Pledge
The core of Protocol Guild's fundraising is the "1% Pledge," under which crypto projects commit a portion of their token supply — nominally one percent — to Protocol Guild's contributors, vesting onchain over four years.[1]
On August 24, 2026, Protocol Guild announced that Aligned had completed its pledge by donating 1.5% of the total $ALIGN token supply to Ethereum's core contributors, with the tokens vesting onchain over four years to an onchain split account.[3][2] Aligned has stated that, as outlined in its tokenomics, it "committed 1.5% of the total $ALIGN token supply to Protocol Guild, supporting the core contributors who maintain and improve Ethereum."[3]
Beyond the pledge, Protocol Guild has built additional funding programs. On December 18, 2025, it launched "Sponsor a Core Dev," a program allowing supporters to fund individual contributors.[2] On May 28, 2026, it partnered with Megapot to convert lottery ticket purchases into recurring onchain funding for Ethereum's core protocol maintainers.[2] On August 10, 2026, Protocol Guild's funding arm announced the ACD Fund, partnering with EthCoordinate to directly fund the All Core Devs coordination role performed by the contributor known as Nixo.[2] Protocol Guild states that it partners with established and emerging crypto projects to keep shared Ethereum infrastructure stable and competitive over the long term.[1]
Donation Infrastructure
Protocol Guild accepts donations across Ethereum mainnet and multiple layer 2 and sidechain networks, each with its own on-chain address.[4] Additional donation addresses are published for Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, Scroll, Shape, ZKsync, and Zora, allowing supporters to contribute on whichever network they use.[4] The smart contract architecture is modular and documented alongside instructions for donating on mainnet, on other chains, and via the pledge.[4]
