Protocol Guild: L1 core developers' salaries are 50% below market, and they are being poached by high-performance new chains offering 10 times the salary.

ME News update. On April 1 (UTC+8), Protocol Guild contributor cheeky-gorilla said at EthCC[9] that the salaries of Ethereum L1 core developers are 50% to 60% lower than market peers, while high-performance new chains such as Monad and top-tier L2 projects are poaching talent with pay packages of 10x or more. He warned that once senior researchers familiar with underlying protocol logic leave, key roadmaps such as PeerDAS and Verkle trees face a substantial risk of going effectively offline. Protocol Guild has already amassed more than $100 million in assets, funded by donations from projects that benefit from the Ethereum ecosystem—including EigenLayer, ether.fi, and Taiko. These assets are allocated to 160+ core contributors via smart contracts with linear vesting over four years, with the goal of using long-term incentives to retain key talent. To ensure this mechanism continues to operate, cheeky-gorilla reiterated the “The 1% Pledge” initiative, calling on projects that profit within the Ethereum ecosystem to return 1% of their token supply to Protocol Guild. He emphasized that the health of core L1 development is the foundation of the entire Ethereum ecosystem; this spending is not charity, but a necessary cost to keep Ethereum continuously evolving. (Source: Foresight News)