Octant

Octant is a sustainable funding platform for the Ethereum ecosystem, initiated by the Golem Foundation. It generates yield by staking ETH and uses that yield to fund public goods projects. Users can lock GLM to participate in governance and decide how funds are allocated. The v2 upgrade introduces vaults, allowing other DAOs or organizations to turn idle treasury assets into yield and fund their own ecosystems.

Its core strength lies in sustainability: only staking yield is spent, never the principal, enabling long-term operation. It also uses quadratic funding, where community votes determine distribution, making allocation more equitable. V2 adds tools like the Atlas project registry, an AI assistant, and zero-knowledge voting to lower participation barriers.

The market pain point is that traditional grant programs rely on donations or foundation funds, which are limited and often dry up. Many notable programs, such as Aave Grants DAO and Gitcoin, have scaled back or shut down. Octant addresses this by providing a self-renewing funding stream without touching the principal.

In the past six months, Octant v2 fully launched, and Epoch 12 ran from June 16 to June 30, 2026. It was the first round to fully apply quadratic funding. The round distributed 81.86 WETH in matching from a 200 WETH pool across 25 projects, with 209 votes. However, the matching amount was notably smaller than earlier epochs, which distributed several hundred ETH, raising concerns about reduced funding power.