Web3 Developer Tooling: The OSS Infrastructure Layer 2024

Frequently Asked Questions

01.Why should a capital allocator track open source infrastructure funding?

Open source infrastructure funding signals which protocols and tooling projects the ecosystem itself considers durable enough to pay for retroactively. Optimism's Retroactive Public Goods Funding round 3 distributed 30 million OP tokens to over 500 contributors in January 2024, a direct market signal of which infrastructure the builder community values. Allocators can read these funding flows the same way they read venture syndicate participation, as a peer-validated quality filter.

02.What is Protocol Guild and how is it funded?

Protocol Guild is a funding mechanism that pools ecosystem contributions and distributes them, largely through vesting token splits, to the individual engineers who maintain Ethereum's core protocol clients and specifications. It began as a pilot in 2022 and by early 2024 had drawn pledges of ecosystem token allocations from multiple projects, addressing the structural problem that core protocol maintenance is unpaid work relative to the value it protects.

03.Did crypto's developer base shrink in 2023?

Yes. Electric Capital's 2023 Developer Report, released 17 January 2024, recorded monthly active open source crypto developers falling 24 percent year over year to 22,411. The decline concentrated among newcomer developers, who fell over 50 percent, while developers with more than a year of tenure grew as a share of the active base, a composition shift that changes how allocators should read the headline number.

04.What regulation applies to infrastructure projects serving EU users in 2024?

The Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, Regulation 2023/1114, entered into force in the European Union on 29 June 2023, with the crypto-asset service provider authorisation regime becoming applicable from 30 December 2024. Open source tooling projects themselves generally fall outside its direct scope, but any commercial service built on top of that tooling and serving EU residents must plan for the later compliance date.