Ethereum L1 core developer salaries are 50% lower than the market; Protocol Guild calls on projects to donate 1% of their tokens

Gate News, April 1, at EthCC[9], Protocol Guild contributor cheeky-gorilla said that the salaries of Ethereum L1 core developers are 50% to 60% lower than market peers, while some high-performance new public chains and leading L2 projects are precisely poaching talent with salary packages of 10x or more. He warned that if senior researchers who understand the underlying protocol logic leave, key roadmap items such as PeerDAS and Verkle trees will face a real risk of effectively stalling. Protocol Guild has already accumulated more than $100 million in assets, sourced from donations from projects that benefit from the Ethereum ecosystem, such as EigenLayer, ether.fi, and Taiko. These funds are allocated to 160+ core contributors through smart contracts with a four-year linear vesting schedule, aiming to retain key talent with long-term incentives. 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 L1 core development is the foundation of the entire Ethereum ecosystem; this investment is not charity, but the necessary cost to sustain Ethereum’s continuous evolution.