Episode 284: Devconnect 2025 With Trent Van Epps  🔗 **Source:** [Episode 284: Devconnect 2025 With Trent Van Epps](https://share.snipd.com/episode/4f35382b-36ee-4471-b002-216a1da108cc) ## Highlights - **Collective Funding Shields Core Protocol Work** - Protocol Guild centralizes funding for core protocol developers to reduce chronic undercompensation. - Trent says the Guild solicits donations across the ecosystem and has about 190 members to ensure continuity for protocol maintenance. Transcript: Trent Van Epps So Protocol Guild is a collective endowment. It's a funding mechanism for people that work on the core protocol, which is kind of all the stuff that happens in the background. If you've ever used Ethereum and you're sending a transaction, you're interacting with an application and that application runs on the base layer. And the core devs are the people who maintain and steward and scale this stuff that you may not be aware of. So they perform a very important role. And it's really important that we provide funding to these individuals. And Protocol Guild today has about 190 members. We fund them by soliciting donations and contributions from throughout the ecosystem, projects that depend on Ethereum, much in the same way that a lot of open sources funded through Kind of a patronage model from larger organizations. So we've been working on it for a few years since 2022 to build the norm of funding these individuals, helping to reduce the level of undercompensation that they have relative to the Broader industry. And we just basically advocate for the interests of these individuals because we think it's important that they're sufficiently supported. And this work is closely related to what I do at the Ethereum Foundation, which is also thinking about funding, but also helping to coordinate software releases for network upgrades That usually happen once or twice each year. ([Time 0:00:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/23004913-33d0-4f8a-ac93-137ef427e970)) - **Hot Ball Of Money Misses Maintainers** - Core contributors are undercompensated despite a lot of capital because funds often don't flow to maintainers of shared infrastructure. - Trent calls it a "hot ball of money" where investment exists but routing to foundational work is hard. Transcript: Trent Van Epps Start with an important caveat is that I would say most, if not all of these people are not purely motivated by the funding they receive, right? People come for intrinsic motivations like values alignment or some political ideology, or they think that they can have an impact on Ethereum as a project that will benefit people Around the world. So it's not just about funding, right? But at the end of the day, we live in a material world where people have to pay rent and they have to eat. And we have to consider that as part of this basket of things that bring people to the table and help to support them. So with that out of the way, funding is critically important for ensuring we have continuity of the contributor set, right? Ethereum is a complex software ecosystem with many moving parts and many long-term projects that we're trying to pipeline next to each other. And if you don't have consistency or stability with this contributor set, you're much more likely to end up in a case where you have somebody leave to join a different project. Then you have to fill that role, get that person up to speed. It can take six to 12 months to build that context. And this is ultimately bad for maintaining this continuity so funding specifically with regard to the broader crypto industry is a challenge because in some ways it's a hot ball of Money there's so much money floating around and sometimes it's a challenge to get these to the people that are building the shared resources that underlie all of this so while there Is a lot of money, investment, venture capital, it's not the easiest thing to make sure this goes to the people who are maintaining the foundational shared resources. So we do the work of, like I said, advocating for these individuals, pointing out the incredible work that they do. In some ways, it parallels the problems with open source. Like this is not a new problem or a new challenge. It's been around consistently since open source was ever a thing. It's just happening in a new context and maybe with even greater financialization around it. ([Time 0:02:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1e34a90f-f9e3-408b-85b7-d9797ea0efe1)) - **Make Maintainers Legible To Funders** - Surface contributors' profiles and make a direct case for funding using charitable and philanthropic norms. - Trent recommends leveraging decades of open source fundraising best practices and explicit advocacy to attract support. Transcript: Trent Van Epps Mean at a high level this is you could probably lean on a many many years of best practices in terms of charitable contributions you need to surface the profile of these people, make the Case that what they're doing is valuable and should be supported. It's not really rocket science in terms of how you do this. This is largely the same. One thing that's interesting or unique to blockchains and Ethereum specifically is that we have, let's say they have monetization built into them. They have usually some kind of financial aspect that means Ethereum runs on Ether, the cryptocurrency. And so we have these financialized circuits that are baked into the software, which is very different from something like the Linux kernel, which is just a chunk of software code that Then people take and they turn into products. So there are some differences that maybe we can tap into this pre-existing financialization in a way where we can route these flows a little bit easier because there's a tighter relationship Between the infrastructure and the products that are being built on top of it, which may be a little bit more challenging when you have a company like Red Hat, which is making its own products And then they have a specific relationship with the users. ([Time 0:06:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/33d4ebf5-d4f5-4ea6-b0e6-eeeb60d807de)) - **Blockchain Native Monetization Eases Routing** - Ethereum's built-in monetary layer creates channels for routing value to protocol work that traditional open source lacks. - Trent contrasts Ether-native monetization with projects like the Linux kernel that rely on downstream commercialization. Transcript: Trent Van Epps This is largely the same. One thing that's interesting or unique to blockchains and Ethereum specifically is that we have, let's say they have monetization built into them. They have usually some kind of financial aspect that means Ethereum runs on Ether, the cryptocurrency. And so we have these financialized circuits that are baked into the software, which is very different from something like the Linux kernel, which is just a chunk of software code that Then people take and they turn into products. So there are some differences that maybe we can tap into this pre-existing financialization in a way where we can route these flows a little bit easier because there's a tighter relationship Between the infrastructure and the products that are being built on top of it, which may be a little bit more challenging when you have a company like Red Hat, which is making its own products And then they have a specific relationship with the users. But I'll actually flip that around and say that Ethereum has a lot to learn from open source communities in the sense of there's many, many decades of learning experience as it relates To how funding is a form of leverage over these projects. And this is a lot of what I work on is thinking about capture and coercion and control as it relates to funding as a political lever. Maybe we don't have time on this podcast, but there are many, many examples of, let's say, large organizations, multinationals, large tech companies that kind of follow the patronage Model of funding, where they'll give you just enough to scrape by and they ultimately end up creating huge profits for themselves. You know, this is a huge discrepancy between the value of the software and the money that they end up actually making from it. And in many cases, you can find examples of these corporate entities who use funding as a tool to control the developers or the software itself, the protocol. There's many, many great examples. And then in the worst case, you find there will be a bug that results from a specific contributor not getting supported over the years. And, you know, some issues creep in. This is, I could probably reference 10 different examples over the years if I had them on hand, but it's a very common problem. So what the work that I do is, for example, Linux is a great comparison. It's a large, successful, complex software ecosystem that has a more mature political economy that Ethereum could learn from. ([Time 0:07:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b1bed42e-b71a-4ce1-b5f3-b10fa23270ea)) - **Funding Is Political Leverage** - Funding can be a political lever that creates capture or coercion when donors exert control over projects. - Trent warns large patrons may give just enough to extract value, citing corporate patronage risks like Red Hat case studies. Transcript: Trent Van Epps And this is a lot of what I work on is thinking about capture and coercion and control as it relates to funding as a political lever. Maybe we don't have time on this podcast, but there are many, many examples of, let's say, large organizations, multinationals, large tech companies that kind of follow the patronage Model of funding, where they'll give you just enough to scrape by and they ultimately end up creating huge profits for themselves. You know, this is a huge discrepancy between the value of the software and the money that they end up actually making from it. And in many cases, you can find examples of these corporate entities who use funding as a tool to control the developers or the software itself, the protocol. There's many, many great examples. And then in the worst case, you find there will be a bug that results from a specific contributor not getting supported over the years. And, you know, some issues creep in. This is, I could probably reference 10 different examples over the years if I had them on hand, but it's a very common problem. So what the work that I do is, for example, Linux is a great comparison. It's a large, successful, complex software ecosystem that has a more mature political economy that Ethereum could learn from. We're only 10 years old, which is, in the grand scheme of things, not very old. But there are many, many case studies that we can start to learn from and hopefully apply to our context and see what things we can do differently to avoid. If we're successful, which we hope many institutions and nations and organizations, for profit and non-profit start to use Ethereum, but there will be more and more contention around What the Ethereum protocol means and who has voice in the governance process. ([Time 0:08:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/64edfd64-bb9f-466b-a2ff-a15251c89a82)) - **Preserve Diversity To Protect The Protocol** - Prioritize heterogeneity across client implementations and geographically distributed teams to preserve robustness. - Trent notes Ethereum runs ~10 client implementations and intentionally avoids centralizing developers in one country. Transcript: Trent Van Epps I mean, if you're working at the application level, making an NFT and selling it to your community, you're going to have a different set of needs than somebody who's working on the software At the core protocol layer. So there are different levels of needs. In terms of funding for protocol devs, again, going back to this idea of the competitive pressures in the industry that surround them, there's constantly well-capitalized entities Who are trying to poach away these developers. So again, I'm biased, but there is a prioritization in terms of the magnitude of problems that we need to understand where they rank in terms of the risk to capture at the protocol level. Yeah, I guess that would be the first thing that comes to mind. One interesting thing I can say with regard to diversity or inclusion. This is obviously like a big culture war thing for the past too many years. But one thing that's interesting about Ethereum is that we accept this as this is not optional to have. And it comes from the, if you're familiar at all with how blockchains work, they're distributed systems that have to have an adversarial mindset of someone in the network can try to DOS you or try to behave maliciously. And your protocol has to be aware of this and be able to accommodate this reality. And one of the things that we take very seriously is this idea of diversity or heterogeneity, whatever way you want to frame it, is absolutely a bare minimum necessity. And so this plays out as it relates to the number of independent teams we have working on software. If you're familiar with Ethereum clients, there's upwards of 10 different implementations of the Ethereum specification. And this is necessary to ensure the robustness and the continued uptime of the distributed system. It's not a nice to have or some political statement. This is a result of a pragmatic and intentional decision as it relates to the political economy of Ethereum. And it goes even further. We want people to be from all around the world. We don't want all of the developers to be based in the U.S., right? That would be an incredible problem for a number of reasons. So it's important that the teams themselves, not just having the individual software projects, but they need to be globally distributed. ([Time 0:11:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/92751f11-e700-4442-99db-c98b6ef1d080)) - **Collective Bargaining Multiplies Funding** - Collective representation dramatically increases legibility and unlocks bigger funding commitments. - Trent contrasts individual funding requests with Protocol Guild's 1% Pledge that secures token allocations from new projects. Transcript: Trent Van Epps Yeah. A couple of things come to mind here. So first, we're still early. Like I said, we just celebrated the 10 year anniversary and this is relatively young in terms of where people hope the project will go. So there's still this shared excitement, maybe naivete, that comes from being a younger community. Maybe we will turn into Linux in 30 years and there will be no artists at our events. I hope that's not the case. So we do have the benefit of youth, quote unquote, the youth of the ecosystem. And this is helpful towards everybody having shared buy-in and excitement about we're doing something that is having real impact on real people. We're not just building for corporate entities or individuals who are just looking to extract, right? There's real benefits. And I think this social and political cohesiveness helps towards that end of people are more likely to collaborate. It's also still relatively small. So you kind of know the people that are working in adjacent areas where again open source is many more decades of growth and maturation and it might just be practically difficult to get Everybody on the same page because there's so many individuals. The other thing that came to mind is we have a bit of shared trauma as it relates to regulatory pressures in the U.S., how the federal government views this technology. I was over the summer in New York attending the trial of somebody who's working on privacy preserving software. Very sobering experience, but a lot of the community has this trauma bonding of like, we're building this thing that's important. There's outside forces that either want to stop it from being built, or they want to be intermediated or captured in some way, whether it's a corporate entity or a nation state or a bank Or something. So this is another thing that I think compels us or forces us to have these tight social relationships. The third thing that I think is really a huge learning from me as, you know, I've been working on this Protocol Guild organization for a long time and the huge unlock, sometimes you can Explain the organization as a union or a syndicate, some kind of collective project of these individuals banding together. All of those analogies are wrong in some way, but if they help you understand roughly the direction it's heading in. When you bind together, you had asked about what can the open source community learn from Ethereum in terms of funding and shared motivations. One of the huge eye-opening experiences for me is that when you put a bunch of individuals or even teams and projects or funding organizations together into a larger collective whole, You unlock this legibility, which previously, you know, if I'm going as an individual to a funding organization and say, look, I work as an individual on all these open source projects, And here's the value of my work. They may or may not fund it. When I go as part of an organization of almost 200 developers, the weight of this collective representation, it effectively unlocks orders of magnitude more funding. And I mean, this is collective bargaining in unions. This is why it works is because you have many, many individuals representing themselves as part of a larger collective whole. And again, it's the difference between saying, I work on this, these specific projects, and we work on this large scale collective maintenance of these important shared resources. And it's been incredible to see projects, funding organizations or ones that are building on Ethereum, it immediately clicks. They say, oh, I have this existential dependency on the software that you're building, the resources that you're maintaining. And all of a sudden, it's not individual developers competing against each other, making funding requests. And instead, it's this collective representation, which makes it so much easier to explain what we do, why it's important. So for example, we have this one funding vehicle called the 1% Pledge. Pledges are very common in the philanthropy, but we've just applied it here. And what we do is solicit projects that haven't launched their token yet. And we ask them to commit to 1% of the supply being committed to this set of individuals. And building norms is very hard. It takes a very long time to bootstrap them. But it's been incredible to see projects recognize that this is a vehicle that they can just plug directly into. And it goes to this set of people that they know are doing the work. So collective representation has huge impact. I don't know what it would look like in the broader open source ecosystems, because, again, Ethereum is still relatively small. The community is somewhat tight knit, so it's easier to this case. ([Time 0:15:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/25f58914-ec94-4ffa-8262-0c20a1f87fec)) - **Bootstrap Funding Norms With Token Pledges** - Use simple pledge vehicles like the 1% Pledge to create funding norms for new token projects. - Trent explains asking projects before token launches to commit 1% of supply to core developers has been an easy plug-in. Transcript: Trent Van Epps So for example, we have this one funding vehicle called the 1% Pledge. Pledges are very common in the philanthropy, but we've just applied it here. And what we do is solicit projects that haven't launched their token yet. And we ask them to commit to 1% of the supply being committed to this set of individuals. And building norms is very hard. It takes a very long time to bootstrap them. But it's been incredible to see projects recognize that this is a vehicle that they can just plug directly into. And it goes to this set of people that they know are doing the work. So collective representation has huge impact. ([Time 0:20:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2facf199-3e41-4c61-b023-b4f54a2cb53a)) - **Real Impact Seen In Argentina And Kenya** - Media highlights scams and speculative excess while missing positive real-world uses in places with weak institutions. - Trent recounts events in Argentina and Kenya where access to stablecoins and censorship-resistant value transfer had tangible benefits. Transcript: Trent Van Epps Unfortunately, controversy is what surfaces. This is what news organizations will surface. This is what will get clicks. And the reality is that people getting scammed or people making a lot of money or the excess of the industry is what makes it outside of our bubble, which is the unfortunate reality we Have to deal with. I often like to point out to people that with any new technological innovation, there are unscrupulous people who show up and try to take advantage of that. Back when railroads were exploding across the United States and the UK, there were people getting scammed to buy into these railroad schemes, right? Human nature has not changed. It will never change. There will always be scammers who try to take advantage of people who want to make money or are looking for some quick way to make money. Unfortunately, this is not going to go away with crypto. We've over the years, I think, developed a very good immune system to try and push back against this and some sort of internal policing of, you know, we don't accept bad actors. We try to maintain a high level of rigor when it comes to that. But at the end of the day, it's difficult to really push out the positive stories in a media environment that thrives on conflict and controversy. So an ongoing problem that we'll need to pay attention to. Podcasts like this are a great way to surface the positive sum contributors. People who are building something that matters. People who depend on access to stablecoins as a lifeline. You know, we're here in Argentina, which has had a turbulent history with regards to both broadly political themes and monetary policy. People in Argentina, I was at an event last year in Kenya. You don't really understand how impactful this is until you talk to people in under. One of the other things I like to point out is in the West, people often say, and I'm coming from the United States, people often, they see it as crypto is this haven for money launderers And scammers, again, because of this media problem. But they also don't even see the benefit of why do I need access to this censorship resistant way to transmit value and govern value. And it's because our institutions are largely working, whereas in other parts of the world, this is not the case. And so we have a bubble that we live within, depending on the country we're coming from. And it takes a lot of communication to surface these stories that demonstrate the impact of what we're building. ([Time 0:22:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b5a13293-0ffe-474e-9d01-4ae0ef548167)) - **ZKP2P Eases Onramps From Payment Apps** - Trent spotlights ZKP2P as a promising project using cryptography to simplify onramps from Venmo, Zelle, and Cash App. - He explains ZKP2P leverages TLS notary and is early but could broaden accessible on/off-ramps. Transcript: Trent Van Epps There's one project I'm a big fanboy of. It's called ZKP2P and they use magical cryptography to do some incredible things. Typically, when you're onboarding from the traditional banking system to any kind of blockchain, you need to go through an exchange, you need to create an account. They have a lot of control over how you onboard into this ecosystem. And again, this project ZKP2P, it uses this magic cryptography to allow you to onboard from many, many different locations, including traditional payment apps like Venmo or Zelle Or Cash App. It's a lot more accessible. You can on-ramp and off-ramp in pretty incredible flow. They're still building it. It's still early. So if you go and try it out after this, be prepared for some bugs. But it's a really cool project that leverages what's called TLS Notary Under the Hood, which is kind of built into modern browsers. I won't get much more into the details, but I love that project. And if anybody is curious about some of the stuff I've talked about with regard to capture and coercion in open source software, one of the case studies I often return to is a book by Benjamin Birkenbein, and he's writing about corporate involvement in the Linux ecosystem, specifically Red Hat. ([Time 0:26:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cd99ec47-dbf2-4838-83f7-ece6ccc8bbd9))