Trent Van Epps is a core contributor and steward to Protocol Guild. Protocol Guild is a collection of Ethereum contributors working to boost the incentives around stewarding the core protocol by maintaining an onchain registry of its membership which allows ecosystem sponsors to directly fund the membership, their work, the public good.

What problem does Protocol Guild use Splits to solve?

Splits gives the Protocol Guild collective necessary schelling point attributes in our mission to fund core protocol contributors. Previously, there was no mechanism providing this and interested sponsors had to do their own ad hoc curation to fund a broad array of core contributors. We also use the vesting modules to create long-term contribution incentives.

How has Protocol Guild integrated Splits?

Protocol Guild's high-signal curation is made possible by the Mutable Split feature. With this we can periodically update the registry to reflect the current set of contributors & weights. More broadly, the contract architecture lends itself to iteration instead of forcing complete redesigns, eg. swapping in more trustless governance of split updates with a different set of non-Splits contracts, L2 forwarding contracts pointing to the mainnet split.

How has your experience been so far?

Splits has been a crucial part of our 1 year Pilot. $10mm from sponsors has been sent to the Guild vesting contract to date, with $5mm of that already distributed to Ethereum's core contributors via the vesting module. We haven't had any issues with the contracts, and the user interface is very well considered. The Splits team is a pleasure to work with: responsive to suggestions, thoughtful, and eager to build. We're excited to continue collaborating!