Apologies in advance for the wall of text 
This thread has been at the top of my mind for the past few weeks. Full disclosure, Iâve got a foot in almost every part of this: I am one of the larger recipients in the collection (appreciate the recognition!), as well as a member/recipient of Protocol Guild (thank you for that too!!), and I also shared some data with Liam when he was putting this collection together (e.g. list of Zoom attendees). That said, I didnât see the âfinal collectionâ before it was posted on the forum.
To avoid rehashing all the points made here, Iâd like to emphasize what I see as the gap between what the OP Collective tried to reward and why it seems âwrongâ to claim this as an individual when many others are involved in protocol maintenance.
What I believe the OP Collective wanted to fund with this collection is the proactive/âgoing above and beyondâ work that was required to bring momentum to EIP-4844. Even in a world where this didnât distort incentives, itâs very hard to quantify what that âextraâ effort should represent. @terrenceâs comment highlights this tension very well.
Looking at RPGF2 broadly, the OP collective has rewarded protocol development in three ways: client teams, Protocol Guild, and the 4844 collection. These respectively received 57%, 31% and 11% of the ~1.8m $OP (~18% of the total round!) that went to protocol development.
My 2 gwei is that while there is value in the OP collective signalling (and rewarding) work it thinks should happen, itâs incredibly hard for a set of badgeholders who have little context to properly evaluate the relative contributions in an effort like 4844. How much of that âextraâ work should get absorbed by the overall client teams? How much by something like Protocol Guild? And this doesnât even get into non-client/PG contributors that are also part of the collection.
On the other hand, looking at the actual results, a ~60/30/10 split across the client/PG/4844 buckets is surprisingly good? 90% of the funds were sent to the âbaseâ protocol work, with a healthy split between individuals and organizations.
Zooming in a bit more, though, itâs not clear how well the collection itself maps to the true contributions to 4844. This gets harder to do the farther away from the main contributors you get.
Assuming the OP Collective wants to keep doing these Collections, I think itâd be much better to send the funds to a subset of âCollection MVPsâ who can then make a decision about more granular allocation. In this case, I think the Instrumental contributors (esp. if including the CB/OP ones removed from the final list) would be better positioned to then send the funds to teams/individuals/protocol guild than an external observer.
That said, there are many failure modes for this as well: what if the recipients end up taking all the funds? Or none at all, because they feel some social pressure to send it to client teams/Protocol Guild? Iâm not sure if these complexities, along with the other issues highlighted, make Collections a net negative or not, but I think itâs reasonable to experiment with them more!
On this note, here are some thoughts about the details of the collection:
- People in the Instrumental/Important buckets are likely those who did the most â4844 above and beyondâ work, and those in others are more likely to have done this âas part of their jobâ (with several caveats, ofc!). The Instrumental/Important recipients have an aggregate of
4*10+11*5=95points, out of 190 (50%). If you added back in the removed contributors, that would be90+60=150points out of 247 (60%).- That seems low to me if the idea is to emphasize extremely proactive. If not, and this is more âfunding all of 4844â, then potentially having something like 60% of funds going to PG, 30% to client teams and 10% split amongst âtop contributorsâ is reasonable.
- While the work done so far has been very valuable, and arguably created most of the momentum behind 4844, the EIP is not live yet. It has been officially included in Cancun, and IMO it might have been good to frame the grant as linked to this milestone.
- Similarly, while âgenerating momentumâ is important to go from EIP â Inclusion, to go from Inclusion â Depoloyment, a larger share of the work necessarily ends up being absorbed as part of the âday to dayâ protocol development work.
With this said, and in the spirit of my earlier point re: the social pressure of giving vs. keeping the tokens, Iâd like to send 40% of my reward to Protocol Guild. If everyone in the collection did this, it would make the split between PG & 4844 contributors 85%|15%. That seems reasonable given the high proportion of Supported and Involved members in the list.
Finally, in the spirit of RPGF, Iâd like my PG funds to be sent to the Split rather than Vesting contract. Note that Iâm less convinced this is the right approach for the PG RPGF grant itself, but for something like this collection, it seems important to highlight the backwards-looking nature of the work.