- Octant is a decentralized governance platform that rewards participation with ETH
- It aims to streamline funding for public goods and ensure they receive support
- Octant uses a portion of staking rewards to distribute to the community, who can then give it to public goods projects
- The project has a large treasury from a crowdfunding round in 2016 and plans to stake 100,000 ETH
- Users lock their GLM tokens into the Octant app and receive Ethereum rewards every 90 days
- Users can choose to keep the rewards or donate them to public goods projects, with donations being multiplied from a matching pool
- The app allows for flexibility in splitting rewards among multiple projects
- Octant aims to understand what drives individuals to fund public goods and will iterate based on data and user feedback
- The app's first funding round is scheduled for October 19th to November 2nd.

- Octant allows users to lock in their native token to receive rewards for funding public goods
- Users can connect their wallet to the app and go through an onboarding process
- The app has a projects page where users can select projects they want to fund
- The allocation window determines when users can allocate their rewards to projects
- The app currently has a few metrics, including the total supply of locked-in tokens and upcoming funding windows
- The app has a settings tab where users can customize their display preferences
- Octant is researching how to incorporate decentralized governance and voting power based on donations
- The community will have a say in selecting projects for future funding rounds
- Octant plans to create a community incentives program and delegate ownership over certain aspects of the project

- The selection of projects for funding was initially done by the speaker, but they want to transition to a community-driven process.
- The current criteria for project selection are broad and simple, focusing on data privacy, open-source commitment, and non-VC funding.
- The community will have a say in which projects get funded through donations and voting.
- Octant is not the best mechanism for direct funding, but the speaker mentions a project called DRIPS that allows for upstream funding.
- The goal is to activate and expand the Golem community and engage existing token holders.
- The upcoming round on Octant will be different from the previous pre-launch event, with Octant being the main mechanism for funding allocation.
- Feedback from the first round will be used to improve future rounds, with a focus on finding the right number of projects to fund.

- The minimum funding threshold for projects will determine the number of projects funded in the next round
- Feedback is being collected to improve the process of submitting projects to Octant
- Engagement with the community may impact the distribution of funds
- Pay attention to what happens in Epoch 1 to inform future strategies
- The threshold is calculated based on the number of participating projects and the percentage of donations allocated to projects
- Gamification is being used to experiment with user behavior and project funding
- Social aspects of inspiring engagement and support are important
- Octant aims to support impactful projects in the Ethereum ecosystem
- Feedback and support are welcome
- Ethereum Cat Herders and other public goods are commended and will be supported

- Octant is a decentralized governance platform that rewards participation with ETH
- Users can lock their GLM tokens into the Octant app and receive Ethereum rewards every 90 days
- Users can choose to keep the rewards or donate them to public goods projects, with donations being multiplied from a matching pool
- Octant aims to understand what drives individuals to fund public goods and will iterate based on data and user feedback
- The app's first funding round is scheduled for October 19th to November 2nd
- Octant plans to create a community incentives program and delegate ownership over certain aspects of the project
- The community will have a say in selecting projects for future funding rounds
- The selection of projects for funding was initially done by the speaker, but they want to transition to a community-driven process
- The current criteria for project selection are broad and simple, focusing on data privacy, open-source commitment, and non-VC funding
- Octant aims to support impactful projects in the Ethereum ecosystem

Hey everyone, welcome to the fifth ecosystem project demo.

Today we're going to be talking to Octant.

Octant is a decentralized governance platform that awards participation with ETH.

It is a project by the Column Foundation And Octant's mission is to streamline the funding for public goods and to ensure they receive the support that they deserve.

Octant is doing this by taking a portion of their staking rewards and using that to distribute to the community, who then can give it to public goods projects.

We're here with James, and we're gonna be learning about their app today.

I'm the head of community at Golan Foundation and currently working on Octant.

Yeah, so as you mentioned before, Octant is a platform for experimentation, but at the core of that is community-driven funding of public goods.

And I'll explain what that means in a moment, but the high-level rationale is, we're looking for a design for sustainable yet community-driven funding.

So I'll kind of walk you through what our setup looks like here and then jump into the app, which just launched a few weeks ago.

We're definitely looking to iterate along the way.

But the current design is that we have a large treasury from a crowdfunding round back in 2016.

It raised 820,000 ETH in 30 minutes, quite substantial.

I think it's 1 of the top 5 crowdfunding sessions in the Ethereum space.

And fast forward to 2019, Our project, because Ethereum had appreciated so much, realized that we could conquer more than just the initial mission, which was a decentralized or peer-to-peer marketplace for computing power.

So Golem Foundation split off from the initial Golem network, and with it took a third of the crowdfunding funds that were in the treasury.

And so that's how we got to where we are today with the transition to proof of stake that created a really unique opportunity for us to where we're going to be staking 100,000 ETH and then using those rewards and turning those rewards over into Octin.

And so, starting with that ETH surplus, what we're looking to then create is incentives for participation and then subsequently public goods funding.

So the first part is that when you lock our native token into the Octane contract, it's the GLM token, every 90 days you're going to be presented with a Ethereum reward proportional to how much you lock into Octane.

And I'll show you a graph in a little bit about how that works.

The picture definitely helped me understand the rewards a lot more than a lot of people talking about it.

But every 90 days, you're going to be presented this reward.

Now, it's the the active participation part that's really important.

You know, there's a lot of projects out there, where all you need to do is to take a 1 time action, and then you're just going to be recurring rewards, you know, building rewards in your wallet over time.

Here you need to actually go into the Octant app and participate.

You need to actively claim them for those rewards to be yours.

Now, what you do with those rewards is what we're really interested in and what we're really looking to learn and play around with in the hopes of really understanding what would drive individuals to fund public goods.

So as I mentioned every 90 days you're going to be receiving this reward.

You can keep that reward for yourself and go along your merry way.

But what you also can do within our Octin app, and I'll show you this in a moment as well, is that you can donate part or all of your rewards to any of the public goods projects that are participating in the active round.

Now, if you choose the latter, your donation is gonna be multiplied or leveraged from a matching pool.

And so your money's gonna be going a lot further should you donate versus if you claim for yourself.

You don't have to just donate to 1 project.

You can split this up to, I wanna take 10% for myself and then divide the 90% amongst 9 different projects.

You can mix and match pretty much to your heart's desire there.

But this is what we're trying to incentivize here at the MVP stage is understand, what will drive individuals at least in part to donate to public goods.

And then we're gonna be taking that data and iterating along the way in future epochs.

So it's really important to understand just how Octim functions.

You have to lock GLM into our Octim app in order to receive rewards and then like I mentioned before you have to take action or you get nothing.

And I'll explain what happens to those rewards in a moment if you don't actually take that action.

And then the vote is not final until the allocation window.

So we have this 2 week period to where the allocation window opens and then when it closes.

And you can change your vote as many times as you want.

There's a few reasons for that, but 1 of them is that there's a minimum funding threshold that each project needs to receive.

It's a very low bar, but we're really interested to see if there are projects that are right on the cusp of not making it, and maybe there were individuals who were taking more rewards for themselves, and they see that this project is right on the threshold, will they in fact donate just a little bit more to bump them up so that they get above that cusp, so to speak.

So there's a little bit of gamification that we're playing around with there.

So This picture really helped me understand how the staking revenue operates with Octant.

So on the bottom side here, you'll see the blue graph is a function of how much of our total supply.

How much of our total supply is locked into Octant?

And the user rewards, that is the rewards that go directly to the user, is a linear distribution.

So the more you lock into the contract, the more you're going to be receiving from our Ethereum rewards.

And then this orange graph here, this represents that matching pool that I was mentioning.

So there's a really sweet spot right around 15% to about 30, 35%.

That's when the matching reward pool is biggest.

And then it starts to get a little bit smaller as we get closer and closer towards a larger supply of octant locked in because we only have a finite amount of rewards and we need to be sustainable with that because more rewards owed to people versus what we have, then obviously this becomes unsustainable.

So our community, as I mentioned before, it comes from this Golem network, or that's primarily where the initial Octane community is coming from.

And they invested into this peer-to-peer marketplace for computing power.

We're really, I guess you could say we're fairly confident that there's gonna be at least some individuals that come from this aspect of our community that are going to be looking at this project as a passive income generator.

We're actually happy with that because then for everybody who is interested in funding public goods, you're going to be able to leverage this matching pool a lot more because this orange pool here is only gonna be going to the public goods project.

So say 90% of people who participate in Oktent are more self-serving, they wanna keep the rewards for themselves, then that 10% of users who decide to donate to Public Goods, they're gonna be able to tap into that entire pool themselves so the more self-serving people are, the more powerful it is for the public it's funding community to leverage their donations in a way.

Another thing that we're really excited about within Octant is this idea of regenerative rewards.

So in a lot of different public it's funding platforms, you have to take a little bit of your capital and then it's multiplied from a matching pool.

Like Gitcoin does a great thing with quadratic funding and there's other ones as well, like Clearfund.

So if you lock in our token 1 time, every 3 months, you're gonna be receiving rewards.

You can play the game as long as you want to, and then it's your capital.

You can take that lock-in that you went through at 1 point, and you can take it out at any time.

We don't pool your funds with anybody else.

And as soon as you wanna stop playing the game, so to speak, you can take that capital and again, move on your merry way.

So we see it as less of a repeated effort here to where you don't need to continuously take more capital out of your pocket and donate to public goods.

You just need to do it 1 time in order to play the game of Octant, so to speak.

So that's why we're really excited about it.

It's really tapping into this idea of regenerative rewards.

So with a basic sort of context around how Octant works or what we're thinking with this MVP setup, let's get into the app a little bit here.

We're really excited because our first funding round is coming up on October 19th.

That's when the two-week allocation period opens and then it closes on November 2nd.

Within Octant, it's never too late to lock in our native token to receive rewards.

And I'll talk about that a little bit more as, as we're going through the app here, but if you are interested at all in funding public goods, it's never too late until that window actually opens to, to be able to participate.

So this is what happens when you come to the Octant app.

I'll refresh here because there's a little welcome screen that should pop up.

Oh, it doesn't look like it wants to, it's okay.

So what you're gonna do is you're gonna connect your wallet to the app and here's the welcome screen.

So just going through a basic onboarding process here, you just have to agree to some pretty simple and basic terms, nothing that should jump out at you there.

And then after you get through the welcome screen, you are presented here with the projects page.

And what I would encourage you to do first, if you are coming into our app for the first time, is moving over into the middle tab here, which is the Earn tab.

This is kind of what sets up everything else.

So on this wallet here, I have locked a thousand GLM.

And what you'll see here is this, there's this effective metric.

And as I was mentioning, it's never too late to lock into Octant until that, that allocation window opens.

What we do is a time-weighted sort of mechanism here.

So say there's a 90-day period before the window opens, and you decide to lock in your GLM 45 days in.

So it's a linear weighted average of when you decided to lock that capital in and how much of an effective reward you're gonna be receiving from our staking setup.

So I locked in a few days after when this, this, when epoch 1 opened.

And so you'll see obviously here that, that my effective GLM is just a little bit less than, than what my total is now, if I keep this capital locked in, for the next round.

This will then catch up to, to the total lock because I'm gonna have it locked in from day 1.

But as I was mentioning, you retain total control.

Should you want to unlock because there was some crazy appreciation of the GLM token.

And, you know, there are obviously traders that want to make a profit in a way.

If you were to unlock and then come back and lock back in, your effective donation or your effective lock isn't gonna be calculating what you had locked in before and after.

It's only gonna be calculated from what you had after.

So if you had anything locked in before and you decide to unlock, you're essentially starting over within that time-weighted process.

Now what you can then go back to is the projects page.

And this is in part why we're chatting today.

So we have 10 public goods projects here that participated in our first round.

And we have some other projects that are gonna be onboarded as well, but these are the projects that participated previously, so that's what you can see currently here.

So we have these projects here, and I wanna fund a few of these projects when the window opens.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click the little heart both on Ethereum Cat Herders and Protocol Guild, 2 great projects that you can support.

So we'll click on those and then you'll notice here there's a little to icon that that populated on the allocate tab.

So once I Move over there You're then going to be able you're gonna see these projects that you click that little heart on if I go and remove those hearts Whoops, let me go back If I go and remove those hearts, then you'll see there's nothing there.

So you need to go over into the projects page to populate the projects that you're interested in funding.

So once I have Ethereum Cat Herders and Protocol Guild, I'm going to move over to allocate.

Now since the allocation window isn't open, I don't have the ability yet, which is what it says, no funding threshold for epoch 1, but as soon as October 19th rolls around, I'm going to have some rewards to play with.

And as I mentioned before, you can break this up into as many different ways as you want.

I could donate 1% to 1 project, 99% to another, mix it up and match in any way that you see fit.

Again, any of the rewards that you are donating to these projects, then you're gonna be tapping into that matching pool.

And that's why we're really excited because from the looks of things, we were anticipating somewhere around $350,000 to $550,000 going to the projects that get above the minimum funding threshold.

So as I mentioned before, it's a really bare-bones MVP app.

And with that, we have just a few metrics right now that are located on the app.

1 of the ones that we're really excited about is the total supply of GLM that's locked in.

We haven't launched a round yet, but we already have about 14% of the total supply.

A lot of that, as I mentioned, is coming from that old Golem community.

We've been receiving some pretty solid feedback from them and a lot of them are already beginning to participate.

We're really hoping after this first round through the Octant app that we're really gonna be able to champion how effective the matching pool was for these public goods projects.

And we're hoping to cultivate an even bigger public goods funding community after this first round.

So we're really looking forward to that process.

But yeah, we have about 14, a little over 14% of the total supply locked in.

And as you can see here, our first funding window is opening in just less than a week.

We have a bunch of metrics that are currently being built by the design and dev team.

And this page should start to get built out a lot more in the coming weeks and months.

So we're really looking forward to seeing the app evolve over time.

When you go over into the settings tab here, there's a few things that you can change.

You can, you know, choose your display currency, always showing the onboarding screen.

If you get tired of this onboarding screen here, then you can turn it off.

And as you'll notice, when I refresh the page, it doesn't come up, but if it is on there, it should pop up.

So you can get rid of that onboarding screen if you wish.

And I think that is everything within the app, just because the app is pretty simple so far.

And it's really just about funding public goods and getting some data around what is effective and how we can better improve it moving forward.

This is what we're really excited about here and I'm happy to answer any questions and maybe give a little more clarity around things that maybe aren't so clear since I talk about this all day.

It's obviously all clear to me, but happy to shed light wherever I can.

Yeah, this is incredibly interesting And I love that you described it as an experiment in governance.

What role do you see like decentralized governance playing in the future of Okta?

Right now, the governance is based around how much of our native token that you lock in.

And we don't necessarily like this setup in a way.

There could be a lot of self-interested people that then would have voting power over things that really we're trying to cultivate around the public, it's funding ecosystem.

So what we're heavily researching right now is how can we take the amounts that were donated by individuals and then create voting power around that.

So say I allocate all of my rewards to public goods, creating like a one-to-one voting system from donations rather than just the GLM token locked in.

Now, what kind of governance process might come from that voting power?

Well, I think you should have a say then on what public goods projects get shortlisted into the app for the next round.

Like I mentioned, there's a minimum funding threshold and projects that don't hit it would need to reapply to participate in the next round.

So there's going to be a snapshot vote in coming rounds here to figure out which projects are the community interested in.

And So donating to public goods projects from the previous round should definitely be rewarded in having weight over the say in which public goods get onboarded next round.

We're also creating a community incentives program where we're going to be taking a part of the rewards from our staking setup and then setting up a treasury to where the community has ownership over delegating to members who are maybe doing big aspects for growth of Octant in the social space.

Maybe they're contributing in a way to the development.

You know, there's other ideas that we have as well, but we want the community to have ownership over where they see value being placed in Octant so that this is a collective effort, so to speak, rather than us steering the ship.

So we really want to hand big aspects over to the community.

And I really think that creating this governance process around who's donating to public goods is going to be pretty critical in designing that in a good way.

You have basically a built-in feedback mechanism for how people vote versus how they have voting power, which is very interesting.

You had said that you want to, in the future, give some level of control or all of the control of which projects are in the Octant funding round over to the community?

What criteria do you currently use for selecting projects, bringing new people in?

And how do you see that changing as it transitions away from the Gollum Foundation and more to the community?

When we first had this pre-launch event EPODS here that Ethereum Cat Herders and the other projects that you see on the screen here participated in.

I went around and chose each project because each project I think has made great impact on the ecosystem.

And we were a really small team at the time.

And we didn't want to really dive into very deep aspects, because you can really go down a rabbit hole in terms of like what projects should get funded and and you know where that you know that threshold is.

You know there's a lot there's a lot of projects I think that could have been on this list I just went with some no-brainers and there really wasn't more thought put into it besides that We wanted to keep things pretty simple.

But moving forward, I guess I could take a step back a little bit.

Kevin Milwaukee talks a lot about you can't really define what a public good is in a broad sense.

And so we're really interested to see how the community takes hold with this voting process because ultimately it's what the community values that they would deem a public good.

And so we already have a handful of projects that are joining us for the next round.

It's going to be really interesting to see here what happens in this allocation window, which projects the community ultimately values by donating to them and which ones they don't.

And then from there, allowing the community to take a hold of that even further with the snapshot vote that's gonna be coming up next round.

Like they're gonna have a lot of say and we have no idea how that's going to take shape.

The criteria that we have just on doing the temp check is very, very broad and simple.

They just have to be committed to, data privacy.

If they're a software project, they had to be committed to open source software.

They have to be like a, not VC funded or, you know, for profit in a VC way.

But beyond that, our exclusion criteria is very, very simple.

And we chose to keep it that way because We want the community to shape this themselves rather than us imposing a lot of our values or thoughts on it when we wanna be a community first program.

So we have to put our money where our mouth is, so to speak with that and live by that.

So yeah, we'll see what public goods in the next year maybe look like in terms of octant.

And that's more or less, like I said, gonna be answered by the community in these coming rounds.

For the community aspect, there's a lot of different communities who might be coming from different places as they try and get their projects into this funding round.

What do you see as a way of expanding access to people who want to be funding public goods, potentially using ETH in some way to contribute directly, and how does that factor into the whole voting power conversation?

Do you mean ETH in terms of Octant or do you mean ETH just in terms of public goods funding in general?

So if someone didn't have anything staked in the earn process, just using ETH or some other way to expand access to public goods funding here.

Yeah, so it's really easy to obtain our token.

So you could go to any of the decentralized swaps like Uniswap, SushiSwap.

I don't wanna pick and choose winners here.

Yeah, you just swap for the GLM token, lock it into Octant and you can unlock anytime and take it on your merry way.

We hope that GLM may be appreciated a little bit for you in a way as well so that, you know, all sides are happy here.

In terms of, well, I'm sorry, could you repeat the second part of the question there?

Like, how could people get involved or like?

Yeah, basically just the idea of if someone wanted to do some kind of direct funding, you know, using Octant as a means of providing direct funding through ETH or something like that?

Yeah, I would say I don't know if Octant is the best mechanism for direct funding but we are partnered with a project that I think would scratch that itch so to speak And I would love to give them a little bit of a shout out right now, if you haven't heard about them already.

If you haven't heard of DRIPS, it's a really, really neat application that allows for upstream funding.

So essentially we're gonna be creating a DRIPS list this round, and we are setting up a list here of the 4 major dependencies that Octant depended upon, and we're going to be taking the rewards that are donated there, those ETH rewards, and then those are going to be split amongst our drip list.

So, if you have libraries, dependencies, individuals that you have found really beneficial for you, this is a very cool and unique tool to allow you to show that gratitude and appreciation for for things that you have found valuable and you want to contribute towards.

See all Ethereum Cat Herders transcripts on Youtube

Octant Epoch One: Ecosystem Project Demo #5