Octant

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.

Octant recently kicked off Epoch 3, its latest reward allocation round, featuring 30 projects. This round comes three months after Epoch 2, which had a total of 24 projects in it. There are 20 projects continuing on from Epoch 2 into Epoch 3 - including Open Source Observer.

During Epoch 2, we published a blog post with some high-level indicators about the 20+ open source software (OSS) projects participating in the round. In this post, we'll provide some insights about the new OSS projects and refresh our analysis for the returning projects.

Overall, in Epoch 3, Octant is helping support:

• 26 (out of 30) projects with at least some recent OSS component to their work
• 343 GitHub repos with regular activity
• 651 developers making regular code commits or reviews

In the last 6 months, these 26 projects:

• Attracted 881 first-time contributors
• Closed over 4,646 issues (and created 4,856 new ones)
• Merged over 9,745 pull requests (and opened 11,534 new ones)

Open Source Observer is a platform for measuring the impact of open source software (OSS) contributions. We are one of the 24 projects in Octant's Epoch 2 funding allocation.

We used our dataset to take a quick snapshot of the collective impact of Octant's funding on the OSS developer community. In Epoch 2, Octant is helping support:

• 23 projects with at least some OSS component to their work
• 322 GitHub repos with regular activity
• 542 developers making regular code commits or reviews

In the last 6 months, these 23 projects:

• Attracted 556 first-time contributors
• Closed over 5,608 issues (and created 5,962 new ones)
• Merged over 10,817 pull requests (and opened 12,443)