Rethinking the EIP Process: Workspace for Protocol IP

Magicians Primordial Soup
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Hello Fellow Magicians,

We all know the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) process is the gold standard for decentralized innovation. But we also know the pain points. As authors, editors, researchers, and community members, we live them.

Our team at Peeramid Labs has been analyzing this process, and the data confirms our shared experience:

  • Fragmentation: Critical knowledge is scattered across GitHub, EthResearch, Eth Magicians, and various calls. There is no single source of truth.
  • Process Bottlenecks: A huge number of proposals get stuck in “review” and “last call”. The average proposal lifecycle is over 160 days.
  • High Barrier to Entry: Contributing shouldn’t require you to be a GitHub expert. This technical hurdle excludes brilliant non-developer contributors like academics and researchers, who are met with CI errors instead of simple form validation.
  • Contributor Centralization: Our analysis shows that while over 1000 distinct authors have contributed, only 22% have finalized proposals. Furthermore, 74% of those finalized proposals come from the same group of authors, indicating a significant centralization of key contributors.

This chaos slows innovation, deters new talent, and creates a drag on the entire ecosystem.

DIP.box

We believe the solution is to treat EIPs as what they are: high-value, decentralized Intellectual Property assets. And like any high-value asset, they need a professional, open-source workspace for their entire lifecycle.

We are building DIP.box: a fully open-source (GPLv2) workspace for intellectual property management. It’s a public good designed specifically to augment the EIP/ERC/RIP process and serve as an aggregation layer for protocol standards.

A prototype is already live at: https://dip.box.

Demo on ecosystem demo day:

Key Features & Goals

Our goal is to streamline the EIP editing process and revitalize the builder journey by focusing on these core areas:

  1. A Simplified Workspace (Abstracting GitHub):
  • Provide a clean interface for creating, editing, and commenting on proposals.
  • Automate the creation of pull requests, removing the need for contributors to be experts in Git forks and PRs.
  1. A Unified Knowledge Hub:
  • Act as an aggregation layer to consolidate scattered resources from GitHub, EthResearch, and Eth Magicians.
  • Provide advanced search, filtering, and cross-referencing.
  1. A Transparent & Predictable Process:
  • Implement a clear, configurable state machine for the proposal lifecycle, eliminating ambiguity about a proposal’s status.
  • Provide a dedicated “Maintainer Module” with a prioritized “to-do” list to help editors manage the review bottleneck.
  1. Onboarding for Researchers & Academia:
  • A dedicated “Request for Proposal” (RFP) module will allow the ecosystem to post challenges and bounties, creating a transparent public procurement process for research and directly connecting university students and academics with real-world problems.
  1. Robust Community Feedback:
  • Integrate streamlined feedback mechanisms (like usage-weighted scores) to help gauge community sentiment and prioritize the review backlog.

Where We Are & The Path Forward

DIP.box is a public good, and we’re committed to building it in the open.

  1. Giveth/Gitcoin Campaign: We are currently running a public fundraising campaign to fund the development of the core multi-tenant platform, the universal state machine, and the community/RFP modules. Every donation for it get’s a 3x multiplier as we are in both gitcoin categories simultaneously.
  2. Ethereum Foundation Negotiation: We have also submitted a formal grant proposal to the Ethereum Foundation. This proposal requests to fund the initial, foundational work of integrating existing Ethereum resources. This scope is specifically focused on ingesting the EIP, ERC, and RIP repositories, building the GitHub App integration, and delivering the initial Maintainer Module for EIP editors.

We Want Your Feedback

As the people who live and breathe this process, your feedback is critical.

  • What are your biggest day-to-day frustrations with the EIP process?
  • Looking at the proposed features (like the Maintainer Module, Author’s Cabinet, and RFP system), which are most important to you?
  • How can we best design this tool to serve authors, editors, and the wider community?

Directly supporting on giveth is also a great metric of community interest:

We are excited to build this for the community and would be grateful for your insights.

Thank you

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