# Octant | Funding Ethereum Aligned Ecosystems - Nico Gallardo | ETHDam III - 2025 - Speakers: [Nico Gallardo](https://streameth.org/speakers/nico-gallardo) - Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal) - Date: 2025-10-07 - Duration: 14:20 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-U0z9nk1vPEw - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0z9nk1vPEw ## Description Welcome to the 3rd Edition of ETHDam, hosted May 9–11, 2025 in Amsterdam. This year, we brought together the brightest minds in privacy, security, and AI for a unique 48-hour hackathon + conference combo. 🌷 https://www.ethdam.com// 🌷 ------------------ Octant | Funding Ethereum Aligned Ecosystems - Nico Gallardo | ETHDam III - 2025 🎀 About the Speaker: Nico is a community builder and creative with the goal of making web3 and onchain public goods funding accessible for more people. He recently joined Octant to grow its community by bringing degens and regens together. 𝕏 Follow: https://x.com/nicnode https://octant.build/ https://x.com/OctantApp ------------------ About ETHDam & CryptoCanal ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, an education and events platform rooted in Amsterdam, expanding into Rotterdam and ZΓΌrich. Keep up with us to see updates on future events: https://www.cryptocanal.org/ Follow CryptoCanal on X: https://twitter.com/CryptoCanal Join CryptoCanal TG Community: https://t.me/CryptoCanalCommunity Join CryptoCanal Discord: https://discord.com/invite/XJVjpCqQBz CryptoCanal unites crypto enthusiasts committed to making a positive impact. Unapologetically political, we prioritize education, events, and services while championing cypherpunk values like privacy, sovereignty, and censorship resistance. ------------------ πŸŽ₯ Credits: Intro / outro by babyPRO - https://babypro.art/ ETHDam Photography by Paulus – https://concretestate.eu/ MC of ETHDam - James Campbell - he builds decentralized, end-to-end encrypted, privacy tools. Come and say hello on Farcaster https://farcaster.xyz/theref ------------------ Special thanks to our partners who made ETHDam possible: 🌹 Hackathon – Bouquet: Oasis Network https://oasisprotocol.org/ 🌷 Hackathon – Petal: Circles https://aboutcircles.com πŸ’› Conference – Gold: Zano https://zano.org/ Dash https://www.dash.org/ Bitvavo https://bitvavo.com/en 🩢 Conference – Silver: Igra Labs https://igralabs.com/hero πŸ’› Conference – Copper: Lido https://lido.fi/ DeTrip https://detrip.travel/ Cake Wallet https://cakewallet.com/ The Grid https://thegrid.id/ Calimero Network https://calimero.network/ 0xbow https://0xbow.io/ Mina https://minaprotocol.com/ JobStash https://jobstash.xyz/ Cyber Capital https://www.cyber.capital/ POAP https://poap.xyz/ Acronym Foundation (Supported our Top 10 Hackers) https://acronymfoundation.org/ 🌱 Sponsor: EF Ecosystem Support Program https://esp.ethereum.foundation ------------------ 0:00 – Introduction: The Story Behind Octant 1:00 – How Octant v1 Funding Mechanism Works 2:10 – Quadratic Funding Explained 3:25 – Results from Octant: Projects & Impact 5:00 – Challenges: Idle Treasuries & Inefficient Grants 6:50 – Unlocking Ecosystem Growth Without Treasury Drain 8:00 – Introducing the Ethereum Sustainability Fund 9:00 – Positive Feedback Loops in Ecosystem Funding 11:00 – Octant v2: Aligning Capital and Community for Ethereum ## Transcript Welcome to East to E to E to E to East. Yeah. Amazing. Uh up next uh um uh we have a tale about funding Ethereum uh aligned ecosystems. Take it away. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hey everyone, I'm Nikico Gallardo currently doing community at Octant and um yeah I'm going to talk about funding Ethereum aligned ecosystems. Um first I want to tell you a little bit of a story of like how we came to this idea um from personal or like self- project experience. Um so Octant V1 um started by having uh Golem Foundation that's kind of like uh the the foundation behind the Octant project stake 100,000 ETH um and the yield generated from these 100,000 ETH uh was divided in three uh part went to reward GLM uh lockers. Those are like that's the GLM the golem token um matching fund uh for the um for different projects public goods and uh the last part that went to uh fund our operations and growth. So I'll visualize this a little bit better and and and more simply um so that um it's more clear. So, the the Golem Foundation staked these uh 100,000 ETH and the GLM lockers, those are our octant users, let's say. Um they could either withdraw the staking rewards that was that were generated to their personal wallets or they could use these rewards to uh fund existing projects like the public goods funding public goods projects that um we pre-selected or the community pre-selected and the way this funding works is with uh quadratic funding. So who here is familiar with quadratic funding? Okay, a few people maybe like to um give a TLDDR of what Koratic funding is. Um the projects that receive donations uh from the largest amount of people uh receive a larger uh amount of funds from the matching pool. So, uh, let's say a project receives, um, a hundred $1 donations, uh, and another project receives a $100 donation by a single person, um, and we have a matching pool of, let's say, $10,000. Uh, the project that receive the donations that act as a vote um, from a 100 people will receive a way larger chunk of this uh, uh, matching pool. So um this is the same um how Octant works um except the um the donations are generated through the um staking of the GLM token um that that well through staking of Ethereum uh and the locking of GLM token. So um through throughout two years we've funded eight epochs. That's how we call our funding rounds. And we've had uh between 20 and 30 projects uh every epoch uh except epoch zero that had 10 projects. Um and in total we had 86 unique projects. actually protocol guild uh I don't know if Jake is still here but is one of the uh bigger recipients of um funding from from Octant but also we will see in a bit uh a lot of other Ethereum relevant projects and um yeah so in total we funded more than $8 million um on Ethereum that's uh around 2,600 well exactly 2,68838 ETH and um almost 1,000 ETH it has gone uh directly to um rewards for users and yeah I was uh mentioning some of the projects that we've been funding in the past these are our uh usual suspects let's say that always uh show up in our funding rounds uh you will see that most of them are very uh ethereum relevant uh so we have protocol guild we have ethereum cat herders hyperserts l2be probably um bunch of these you know revoke cash rot key funding the commons uh eth staker um and tour project that's maybe like the one that's not directly linked to to ethereum but um the these projects have been participating pretty much in almost all the all the rounds that we've been um running and um been received quite a lot of funding so thanks to all that um we are making Ethereum more sustainable uh which as uh Cheeky uh mentioned in the previous presentation is super important um especially uh how the things are going right now is um very important to focus on this but thinking a little bit beyond that we um asked ourselves like how can we enable other Ethereum aligned ecosystems to grow and by enabling this growth um how can we als also find some sort of support for the um kind of like base layer for for Ethereum itself. And um we saw in the ecosystem a couple of things um that could help us reach to this concl conclusion and also kind of like observing what uh happened with Gollum and with Octant and um how how we came to this uh this funding model. So there's really a lot of uh funds sitting idle in a bunch of treasuries in the ecosystem. Um there's you can check like uh DeFi Lama uh to see what the treasuries uh like how big these treasuries are that are really just sitting there. Um and mostly these projects fund their their grants and fund the growth of their ecosystem by um bleeding this um treasury just like giving out grants that most of the time are quite inefficient and uh because of that the growth kind of stalls uh and the funding stays unsustainable because they just keep bleeding the the treasury. On the other hand, we have a wide variety of allocation mechanisms and defy tools and strategies that uh can be used. And a lot of these projects also um kind of like wave the flag of Ethereum alignment despite not well it's hard to define what Ethereum alignment is, but there are some projects that are definitely more aligned with Ethereum than others. uh and some are waving the flag um more frequently than the others despite not deserving it. So um what we wanted to unlock with um the new version of Octant was to put these project funds to work for uh their ecosystems without exhausting their treasuries. Um the same way as Gollum Foundation was funding all these projects without exhausting their own treasury. And um we want to do this by leveraging yield generating strategies uh to fund uh grants programs and and and growth for these ecosystems. Um all these while empowering the communities maybe through um a token that the project has and u mainly with different allocation strategies that are very community centric. Um but this you know should be decided by the by the projects themselves how they want to do that and um we can with this uh mechanism we can also help projects demonstrate Ethereum alignment by funding what we call the Ethereum sustainability fund. So, uh, at least 5% um of the yield that's generated with, um, Octant V2 could go to this, um, Ethereum sustainability fund that will continue the work that has been done, um, by Octant in the past. So, we came up with this idea of uh, protocolizing what we did at Octant V1 and turn it into a sort of ecosystem growth engine. um primarily for Ethereum ecosystems or Ethereum aligned ecosystems and the value flow is quite straightforward I would say. Um the stake tokens generate yield um meaning like the the tokens of the projects um but these can also honestly can also be uh stable coins or ETH or any other um currency. And once the the um tokens are staked, this um uh token holder um can allocate the yield that's generated in the from from the strategies uh that we deploy these tokens to. And uh that once these uh tokens are allocated to different uh projects that create value for the ecosystem that should increase the value of the um ecosystem as a whole and thus hopefully represent is represented in the token value which at the same time um generates more yield uh and creates this positive feedback loop that uh grows and and makes uh ecosystems stronger. And all this as I mentioned while finding Ethereum alignment through the Ethereum sustainability fund um which is yeah as I mentioned like at least 5% of the yield generated contributed to um Ethereum what we're calling Ethereum goods like there is this big debate between okay what can we call public goods should we call it network goods we are leaning more towards okay like let's focus on um things that are beneficial for Ethereum right now Um yeah and the governance of how these funds are allocated are going to be proportional to the contribution to the um Ethereum sustainability fund. So yeah, in a nutshell, what Octon V2 is trying to accomplish is connecting capital accumulation and capital formation um well capital allocation mechanisms together. Um just you know we we already have so many DeFi strategies and protocols and we already have so many allocation um mechanisms like quadratic funding, conviction voting, um streaming quadratic funding um and just putting them together to um to fund ecosystems and Ethereum at the same time while empowering the community um through tokens or through these mechanisms. And yeah, that's uh pretty much how we achieve sustainable growth, capital formation and capital allocation together. And uh thanks to that, we can sprinkle a little bit of Ethereum alignment with it. So yeah, if you are a project that would like to use Octant um to fund your ecosystem without bleeding your treasury and also actually uh signal Ethereum alignment, please reach out. But we're also looking for um regions who want to help us allocate funds and and develop these allocation mechanisms or regions who know how to build profitable D5 strategies that the ecosystems can use. Please do reach out. Um yeah, devs in general who want to build on top of what's going to be the Octant protocol are also more than welcome. And uh yeah, we have these uh little kind of trading cards um that should explain in a more fun way what uh Octant V2 is doing. So if you want uh one of these packs, I don't have that many left. Um please come to me uh talk to me. Would love to hear your feedback and ideas. Uh I believe a lot of us here are um really big believers of Ethereum. So would love to um see if you agree or disagree or like have any other input on what we're building at Octant. Um thank you and we'll love to hear some questions from you. [Applause] There any questions for Nico? Who's using Octant at the moment? Um so we have kind of like two sides. We have the projects that receive the funding and we have the um our users that are the GLM lockers. Um well the projects there are like 86 different projects that have been using uh octin so far like as I as I mentioned like from protocol guild to last round uh we did kind of like a bit of a oneoff that we funded uh climate related projects like 20 uh different climate related projects that were uh quite impactful and we're super happy with the funding and the um lockers of GLM. So for a bit of context, Gollum was an ICO project from 2017, like one of the first ones. That's where all the Ethereum that they have comes from. And uh uh yeah, basically a lot of these people um still are still part of the community, but also a lot of newcomers that are really big believers in in funding public goods that are locking their tokens and and voting for the projects that deserve the the funds. Nice. There any other questions? No. Thank you, Nico. Really appreciate you.