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 message, on April 1 (UTC+8), Protocol Guild contributor cheeky-gorilla stated at EthCC[9] that the salaries of Ethereum L1 core developers are 50% to 60% lower than market counterparts, while high-performance new chains such as Monad and leading L2 projects are precisely poaching talent with compensation packages of 10x or more. He warned that once senior researchers familiar with the underlying protocol logic start to leave, key roadmap items such as PeerDAS and Verkle Trees face a real risk of stalling. Protocol Guild has already accumulated more than $100 million in assets, sourced from donations by projects that benefit from the Ethereum ecosystem, including EigenLayer, ether.fi, and Taiko. The funds are allocated to 160+ core contributors via smart contracts, distributed linearly over four years, with the goal of using long-term incentives to retain key talent. To keep this mechanism running, 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 L1 core development is the foundation of the entire Ethereum ecosystem; this investment is not charity, but a necessary cost to sustain Ethereum’s continuous evolution. (Source: Foresight News)