gm Octant fam,
As we close the second round of the Octant Community Fund, we want to share a comprehensive report reflecting on the program's progress and outcomes.
A quick 101 on why we started this fund
Some important context on how and why this program was started. At the end of 2023, we ran our first community round with Shefi. The objective was to build awareness about Octant through community support for builders in a community whose values aligned with ours. Thanks to the resounding success of the round, we felt encouraged to run a second round with a more experimental growth mindset . Thus, we ran our second QF round with GreenPill. Both rounds led to awareness, meaningful growth, and more importantly, funding for projects and builders. This was especially at a time where no-strings attached funding for projects was starting to grow scarce with cutbacks on education and community funding.
While our epoch provide significant funding for projects, we don’t attach any strings with the funding. As a result, they’re not big drivers of growth in terms of awareness. We’ve thought deeply about ways to meaningfully engage with grantees, however, we’ve shied away from bigger marketing and awareness asks from epoch grantees.
This was a big reason for why we launched our Octant Community Fund. In retrospect, the title is misleading and we’re going to rebrand to Octant Growth Fund for the next iteration of this fund— because its goal is to grow Octant’s awareness and users. This pocket of funding is complementary to the public goods funding work we’re doing.
A longer-term objective of this fund is also to explore progressive decentralization, with the goal of enabling greater community ownership of the fund’s processes, over time.
So who got funded?
Octant Community Fund I
In our first cohort, we had a ~48 ETH pot divided into grantees for 3 categories: Public Goods Collaboration (opening up our process for community rounds), Marketing, and Tooling.
Our grantees were:
| Grantee | Category |
|---|---|
| PurpleDAO | PG Collaboration |
| Climate Coordination Network | PG Collaboration |
| Gitcoin | PG Collaboration |
| Lotto PGF | Tooling |
| Hats Protocol | Tooling |
| Grow The Pie | Tooling |
| Nacion Bankless Marketing | Marketing |
| Public Goods Flywheel | Marketing |
| Making Octant incentive programs by Unitap | Marketing |
| Trailblazers of Octant Podcast by Crypto Altruism | Marketing |
| Octant Grant Proposal by Yinka | Marketing |
Our council members were hand-picked by our team.
Octant Community Fund II
| Grantee | Category |
|---|---|
| From Awareness to Action: Expanding Octant’s Presence, Staking, and Public Goods Impact in Brazil by Modular Crypto | GLM Locking |
| EtherScore badges for Octant users by EtherScore | GLM Locking |
| Public Goods by Design by aesopsolo | Public Goods |
| Scout Game Funding Round | Public Goods |
| Schmoloch: Octant Coffee Talks | Marketing |
| The Fuzzy Cow Podcast x Octant Ecosystem Partnership | Marketing |
| Web3Unilag | Marketing |
| Pushing Public Goods and Octant in LATAM with Espacio Cripto | Marketing |
| Explainers for the Octant Community | Marketing |
| Zero to Hero Course education and awareness for Octant | Marketing |
| Dragon Academy | Marketing |
| Explora Octant by Crypto Conexion | Marketing |
| OCTANT Clarified: Inclusive Interactive Comprehension | Marketing |
| OAK Research Grant application | Marketing |
| Blocktrend (區塊勢) - most popular web3 podcast in Taiwan | Marketing |
Changes from fund I to fund II