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The Argot Collective: A Credibly Neutral Home for Ethereum Core Infrastructure
We are excited to announce the formation of the Argot Collective: a non-profit, democratically organized, research and development group focused on maintaining free and independent software related to Ethereum. The founding members of the collective will be made up of around 25 current Ethereum Foundation employees, specializing as compiler engineers, verification experts, and programming language theorists. The projects we are currently responsible for - most notably Solidity - will move into a new home with us and we will continue to maintain and develop them inside the Argot Collective.
We believe that Ethereum requires dedicated individuals focused on its core infrastructure, working free from commercial pressures and supported by long-term funding. Our mission is to provide a positive environment for these individuals, fostering the sustainable maintenance of free, open software over an extended period. We believe that the most impactful and powerful uses of Ethereum are those that expand the commons, eliminate rent extraction or exploitative profit seeking, and empower those underserved by existing economic structures. We have an explicitly non-profit and open source mission, and aim to be a balancing force against overly finance-driven entities within the space, whilst also serving as a positive example of values aligned governance models.
Over the last year, we've been working as a functionally autonomous group within the Ethereum Foundation, exploring our future governance mechanisms and preparing for independence. We are thankful to the Ethereum Foundation for fully supporting us in this exploration phase. We expect to transition into our own legal entity in the first half of 2025.
Projects
Our initial focus will be on the following projects:
- Act: Formal specification language for smart contracts
- Ethdebug: Standardized debug info format for the EVM
- Fe: Smart contract language
- Hevm: Symbolic execution engine for the EVM
- Solidity: Smart contract language
- Sourcify: Open-source and decentralized source-code verification service
While we expect to both retire and launch new projects in the future, we are fully committed to the long term maintenance and development of Solidity for as long as it is considered useful by the community.
Governance
We believe that authoritarian structures fundamentally conflict with our core values; we intend to operate in an entirely non-hierarchical and fully democratic manner. In order to avoid voting fatigue, individual members have a high level of autonomy regarding day-to-day operations. For important decisions we use a consent-based mechanism, and contentious decisions can be settled via voting. We will have a completely flat salary structure, with each member earning the same hourly rate irrespective of role.
Our governance structure is derived from the framework implemented at the Enspiral Foundation. We expect to publish detailed documentation on the specifics of our governance processes in the near future, as well as our learnings from this experience.
Transparency
Financial and organizational transparency is one of our core values. The Ethereum community should not have to rely on opaque, unaccountable, self-interested organizations. We are committed to operating in a highly transparent manner. We expect to publish:
- Financials and budgets
- Roadmaps
- Governance frameworks
- Funding terms
Funding
We will be seeded with a grant from the Ethereum Foundation. We expect this to cover our needs for the next 5-10 years. These funds will be subject to a smart contract enforced unlock schedule, ensuring their availability over the long term.
Our strong preference is to achieve long term sustainability via a combination of staking income and grants. If it is required, we may also engage in limited consulting work, following the successful example of existing open source focused collectives like Igalia. We will take care to structure this work in such a way that our neutrality and independence is not impacted.
We will only accept new funding that is aligned with our core values. We categorically reject the following funding models:
- The sale of equity stakes or influence over our governance
- Token sales
- The development or operation of closed source projects or services (e.g. Open Core / "Fair Source" business models)
- The monetization of closed / siloed data
Why Are We Moving to a New Organisation
Subtraction is a core part of the philosophy of the Ethereum Foundation. The members of the Argot Collective are strong advocates of democratic governance and organizational transparency. The intersection of these values led to an internal agreement that the Ethereum ecosystem would benefit from a new organization with a technical focus and an explicitly egalitarian governance model. Prior to the formation of the Argot Collective, the Ethereum Foundation was one of the only credibly neutral homes for core infrastructure. We believe that the addition of another organization that can fulfill this role will strengthen the diversity and decentralization of the ecosystem. We expect to continue to collaborate productively with the Ethereum Foundation to push the space forward.
Timelines and Future Plans
We have been operating in a non-hierarchical and fully democratic manner as an autonomous sub-group within the Ethereum Foundation over the last 12 months. This has allowed us to develop and work on our processes and build out independent infrastructure. We are in the process of designing and establishing our legal structure and expect to achieve full legal autonomy in the first half of 2025.
Over the next few months we expect to publish:
- Our governance framework
- Our legal structure
- Terms and technical structure of our grant from the Ethereum Foundation
- Our roadmaps and future plans
Closing
We are very happy to be sharing our plans publicly, and look forward to continuing our contributions to Ethereum in our new home. We want to thank the Ethereum Foundation, and the other collectives and organizations we have reached out to in the past months, for supporting us in this endeavor by sharing their knowledge, expertise and resources with us. Check our twitter, farcaster or blog for updates, or meet up with us in person at Devcon.