Octant

• Name: Octant
• URL: https://octant.build/
• Category: public-goods funding protocol / staking-yield governance experiment / capped quadratic funding platform
• Tags: ethereum-ecosystem
• Summary: Octant is a yield-routing governance system, not just another grants app. Locked GLM determines participation budget, users steer that budget during allocation windows, and a separate matching pool is resized and weighted by locked-ratio policy plus anti-sybil scores.
• What it does:
  • Lets users lock GLM and earn epoch-based rewards in ETH, with reward eligibility based on an “effective deposit” that is time-weighted over the epoch rather than a simple end-of-period balance
  • Uses allocation windows where users can direct their rewards toward public-goods projects, and in some product flows also toward themselves via withdrawals
  • Calculates matched funding separately from user budgets, combining staking-derived proceeds with patron rewards and applying capped quadratic funding to project allocations
  • Applies uniqueness-weighted matching: Octant’s funding logic uses user UQ scores in the quadratic formula and exposes anti-sybil status through Gitcoin Passport-based score bands
  • Caps project-level matched rewards so one project cannot absorb more than 20% of the total matched pool in the default CQF implementation
  • Exposes patron mode as a distinct governance surface for users who want their rewards auto-routed across all projects instead of making individualized allocations
  • Splits epoch economics into multiple buckets including individual rewards, operational cost, community fund, matched rewards, and leftover amounts, making the budget policy itself a mechanism worth comparing
• Key claims:
  • The official repo README frames Octant as a community-driven platform for experiments in decentralized governance, developed by the Golem Foundation to test user control, voter engagement, and community funding in a live environment
  • The client copy is unusually explicit about the user mechanism: rewards are calculated on a weighted average, more GLM locked earlier earns more, and any GLM unlocked during an epoch stops counting toward rewards for that epoch
  • The Deposits.sol contract comments reinforce that time sensitivity directly in the core locking primitive: locking is most capital-effective at the end of an epoch and unlocking at the beginning, which shows the protocol is intentionally shaping user timing behavior rather than merely passively holding balances
  • The matched-rewards service encodes a three-regime policy surface based on locked ratio thresholds (IRE and TR): below the lower threshold Octant distributes the full staking-derived match plus patron rewards; between thresholds it tapers the staking-derived match; at or above the upper threshold it falls back to patron rewards only
  • The capped quadratic funding module makes Octant analytically richer than a simple matching pool. It squares the sum of square roots of amount * user_uq_score, then caps any single project’s matched allocation at 20% of the available matched rewards
  • The user-management docs show Octant’s anti-sybil layer is not cosmetic. Gitcoin Passport-derived UQ scores are bucketed into values such as 1.0, 0.01, or 0.0, and those scores feed directly into matched-funding outcomes
  • Current product strings show Octant v2 is live and that migration from v1 requires unlocking GLM from v1, approving GLM, and re-locking in the new system, which matters because the mechanism is being actively reworked rather than frozen as a historical artifact
• Whitepaper: No canonical standalone whitepaper surfaced in this pass. The strongest primary materials were the official site/docs plus the open-source repository and code-level mechanism docs; see ../whitepapers/octant-primary-sources-2026-05-09.md. For the named operator and funding boundary above the mechanism, see ../whitepapers/golem-foundation-primary-sources-2026-08-12.md.
• Sources:
  • https://octant.build/
  • https://docs.octant.app/
  • https://github.com/golemfoundation/octant
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/golemfoundation/octant/master/README.md
  • https://github.com/golemfoundation/octant/blob/master/ARCHITECTURE.md
  • https://github.com/golemfoundation/octant/blob/master/contracts-v1/README.md
  • https://github.com/golemfoundation/octant/blob/master/contracts-v1/contracts/Deposits.sol
  • https://github.com/golemfoundation/octant/blob/master/backend/v2/matched_rewards/services.py
  • https://github.com/golemfoundation/octant/blob/master/backend/v2/project_rewards/capped_quadratic.py
  • https://github.com/golemfoundation/octant/blob/master/backend/v2/users/router.py
  • https://github.com/golemfoundation/octant/blob/master/client/src/locales/en/translation.json

Internal linkages

• Adjacent foundation / funding-source boundary: golem-foundation.
• Closest public-goods funding comparison: clr-fund.

Protocol / company / foundation boundary

• Keep this note on the mechanism layer: GLM locking, effective-deposit timing, patron mode, matching-pool sizing, capped quadratic funding, and Gitcoin-Passport-derived uniqueness weighting.
• Use golem-foundation when the sharper question is who funds the experiment, maintains the official repo and app shell, and decides how the branded Golem governance experiment is staged.
• That split matters because Octant’s public allocation math is not the whole story. The live funding source, rollout shell, and named experiment owner sit above the contracts and allocation windows.

Control surface

• Practical authority does not stop at the matching formula. The meaningful leverage also sits in funding-source dependence, app maintenance, migration / rollout decisions, and the official experiment shell around project admission and allocation flow.

• Read Octant as a governance-funding mechanism with a named foundation still wrapped around it, not as a fully detached neutral grants primitive.

• Last reviewed: 2026-08-12 UTC