Looking back at Octant's funding to open source in 2024
Octant is an important funding partner for OSO and dozens of other open source projects in the Ethereum ecosystem. Since 2023, Octant has contributed approximately $5 million (in ETH) to over 60 projects.
Octant has a novel way of funding open source. Users of the Octant platform lock GLM tokens into a staking contract. In exchange, they gain voting rights and earn ETH rewards. Every quarter, Octant runs an "epoch" where users get to allocate a portion of their staking rewards to projects they care about. This allocation determines how a larger staking pool from the Golem Foundation is allocated across a set of projects.
In 2024, Octant supported 47 open source software teams across four epochs. The funded projects have been diverse in scope, ranging from privacy-focused tools like Tor to ecosystem analytics platforms like L2Beat to up-and-coming organizations like the GreenPill Developer Guild.
This post explores some high-level trends in developer activity over the past year. As these projects have different missions and objectives (and not all are open source software projects), one should not attempt to directly compare their impact or productivity. Nonetheless, we hope these insights can highlight ongoing contributions, identify growth areas, and provide additional context on what each project has been up to.