Open source

Open-source projects power innovation across industries, yet they often face a significant challenge: securing sustainable funding. Retroactive funding offers a promising solution by rewarding impactful contributions based on past results, but today’s retro funding rounds are complex, time-consuming, and infrequent, making them unreliable sources of support for public goods.

This inspired us to build AutoRF during ETHGlobal San Francisco 2024. AutoRF makes retroactive funding continuous, simple, and scalable by removing the barriers that hold current models back.

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)

Messari just released their annual Crypto Theses for 2024. This year’s report included a chart from a16z’s State of Crypto 2023 showing npm downloads for three of the leading packages used by decentralized apps going up and to the right, reaching all time highs in late 2023. The report includes the following quote: “If I could invest blindly into crypto based on a single chart, it’s this one.”

There’s a lot to love about this take, but one big problem: downloads are a terrible metric for monitoring ecosystem growth.