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 said at EthCC[9] that the salaries of Ethereum L1 core developers are 50% to 60% lower than market-competing roles, 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 who understand the underlying protocol logic start to leave, key roadmap items such as PeerDAS and Verkle trees will face the risk of a substantial shutdown. Protocol Guild has currently accumulated more than $100 million in assets, sourced from donations by projects that benefit from the Ethereum ecosystem, such as EigenLayer, ether.fi, and Taiko. These funds are allocated to 160-plus core contributors via smart contracts in a four-year linear vesting structure, with the goal of using long-term incentives to retain key talent. To keep this mechanism operating continuously, cheeky-gorilla reiterated the “The 1% Pledge” initiative, calling on projects that profit from 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 investment is not charity, but a necessary cost to sustain Ethereum’s continued evolution. (Source: Foresight News)