1. Eligibility

Protocol Guild eligible projects must:

  • Champion Ethereum’s ethos of decentralization, credible neutrality, censorship resistance and permissionlessness

  • Be fully open source under an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved License

  • Have a regular presence in Ethereum R&D or governance venues like ethresear.ch, Ethereum Magicians, protocol calls (e.g. AllCoreDevs, breakouts, testing/interop, etc.)

  • Be engaged in feature prototyping (e.g. EIPs, devnets, etc.)

Eligible projects must also target at least one of the following projects/areas related to Ethereum core protocol upgrades, maintenance and development:

Description

Repos/Projects

Work on the canonical protocol specs.
Should be implementation agnostic + unopinionated

- Consensus specs
- Execution specs (EELS)
- Execution APIs

Ethereum mainnet client implementations.
Must be well-tested, technically differentiated,
and production ready

- Erigon
- EthereumJS
- Geth
- Grandine
- Hyperledger Besu
- Lighthouse
- Lodestar
- Nethermind
- Nimbus CL
- Nimbus EL
- Prysm
- Teku
- Reth

Client testing/security/infra
which supports these implementations

- ethereum/tests
- ethereum/execution-spec-tests

Network upgrade coordination

- ethereum/pm

Research and implementation experiments
related to potential protocol changes

- Verkle trees (Verge)
- Portal Network (Purge)
- Ipsilon (EVM Improvements)
- Consensus work
- Cryptography
- Mechanism design
- Resource pricing

Protocol Guild

- Fundraising
- Research/testing of future improvements
- Internal maintenance of membership
- General communications

1.1 Context

The eligibility framework is a “best effort representation” of Ethereum Layer 1 R&D. It tries to be sufficiently accommodating to what is the core protocol, but not any broader. This framework has been modified previously and will likely continue to be: more restrictive in some places and more permissive in others.

Contributing to the efforts referenced above does not guarantee Protocol Guild membership. While this list tries to be explicit when possible linking to specific repositories, there are some research areas which can’t be linked to a single source and may still be considered eligible.

Formal organizational affiliations are not necessary for membership. It may be the case that some members of an organization will be eligible but others will not be.

Independent or unaffiliated contributors are considered by the same guidelines as any contributors “officially” part of teams/projects.

1.2 How to Modify the Framework

Changing the eligibility framework can be made through a PR to the documentation repo. This PR should add the project in the appropriate section, along with the following info:

  • Name of project

  • Eligibility start date for the project

  • Summary of why this project should be considered eligible/ineligible

The eligibility start date for the project is the date at which the project met the Eligibility criteria above. This is the earliest date that future Protocol Guild members can use to count contributions towards the project.