Why $1.35 Million for a climate round beats $10 Million in a spray-and-pray strategy

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So much in the world of crypto is here one day, gone tomorrow - but effective applications of the power of blockchain can still surprise and offer hope. The community-activating sustainable growth engine of Octant is one of the most powerful examples of this.

In April 2025, Octant distributed over $1.35 Million USD (298.67 ETH) to 20 climate projects through an experimental funding round that brought together funding innovation, community governance, and environmental action.

In this piece, we’ll go into the basics of Octant, including how a funding round works and the role of community governance in funding. Then, we will explore details of how Octant’s recent climate-themed funding round was conceptualized and delivered, what went well, and where learnings were gained. And, we will discover why capital allocators with big treasuries might want to take some of that hard-earned yield and roll it into a themed round.

The Octant team announced the climate round in January. A themed round curated by experts in environmental funding, for the first time at Octant.

This case study was authored by @lorepunkdoteth and edited by Mashal Waqar.

The Octant v1 Model

The Octant epoch model for v1 is to lock tokens ($GLM in their case) and get ETH rewards that come from Golem Foundation's staked ETH returns. A big portion of the ETH goes towards funding impactful projects in Ethereum.

Epoch 7 was run on Octant v1.

The Octant v2 Model

The Octant v2 model takes learnings from v1 epochs and is scaling up what's possible with it. A whole suite of products that are split into two categories: capital accumulation (vaults, DeFi yield) and capital allocation (streaming Quadratic Funding (SQF), quadratic voting, and direct allocations). These tools can be flexibly used by Ethereum ecosystems and projects.

Octant v2 launches later this year.Why a climate round?

The Octant team had run 6 epochs before the climate round. While they've been quite experimental in each epoch’s design, the primary focus has been on funding impactful projects in the Ethereum ecosystem.

It might seem a little off-track to allocate even a gwei to climate, rather than spending that money on improving your project’s ecosystem or contributing to Ethereum public goods. But, the benefits in terms of mindshare, alignment and community engagement for your project can be significant.

That’s why there’s a solid history of successful climate funding rounds in crypto, including a series of seven rounds organized by Gitcoin from 2021-2023. In 2024, Gitcoin’s climate advisory team “graduated,” becoming the Climate Coordination Network, which partnered with Gitcoin for a “decentralized” climate round. Octant established a relationship with CCN during their 2024 Octant Community Fund partnered round series, when they worked together to design a climate funding round.

Timing was a big impetus for launching a themed funding round on a real-world issue. 2025 is a critical inflection point in the evolution of Octant itself: the advent of Octant v2, a major new offering for Octant and expansion of the company’s capabilities and mission.

Builders know: no matter how good an app or protocol is, onboarding real users is key - and the hope for this round was to step onto a larger stage.

The decision to organize a climate epoch came after a cycle of continual variations and improvements over eight funding rounds, from Epoch 0 through to Epoch 7, the climate round.

This epoch was the first experimental epoch from a theme perspective, according to the team. The Octant team went back to the drawing board to understand and think through - in their planning for v2 - what would make sense from a user perspective and from a learnings perspective when it came to onboarding to Octant.

They were thinking about: what would resonate with users. The team took a bet, that climate was a theme that everybody could agree needed funding. In the past, you’d have regular Gitcoin climate rounds but that hasn't been the case for some time.

The goal of the round? Not just to support great, impactful projects - but to use the narrative power of climate to help get the word out about Octant’s sustainable growth protocol, in the lead up to the v2 launch.

The themed epoch dovetailed with another part of Octant’s onboarding strategy in the lead-up to v2 launch: a partnership with @SheFiOrg. Founded by Maggie Love, SheFi is a community of over 3000 women, all of whom have taken an eight-week course designed by Maggie and regularly offered to new cohorts. SheFi courses have a cohort-based approach for active participation in learning about web3 and building a career in the industry.

As part of the partnership with SheFi, Octant gave the cohort’s participants some $GLM tokens. Instead of passive learning, they wanted to introduce Octant to the community in an engaging way. And what better way to join the community than to participate in an epoch?The only requirement was that each user needed to allocate ETH rewards in two consecutive epochs. This meant there was a whole cohort of people who were first time voters along with some more experienced users.

The climate theme really resonated with the cohort, many of whom were first-time voters with some also being first-time crypto wallet users., For a lot of them, climate was a values-driven entry point into crypto as an industry, and in terms of being able to do good.

How To Design A Climate Round

• Finding the right partner for a themed round is key to success. Part of this because selecting the right climate projects to compete for funding is always a challenge. The Octant understood they weren't climate experts, so they worked with the Climate Coordination Network - the team which spun off from Gitcoin 2024 and organized the climate rounds at Gitcoin back in the day played a crucial role in delivering a successful climate epoch.
• Inviting CCN to curate meant tapping into its experience; since its inception, the network has given $4.5 Million in funding to hundreds of projects, including over $1M crowdfunded through its rounds. CCN's collaboration involved curating the round’s grant seeking participants, as well as providing advice and support to funding hopefuls, ensuring a coordinated approach to messaging, marketing, and the activation of communities.
• Working with the CCN as applicant recruiters and curators amplified Octant’s ability to shape the round and find projects that would not only create impact, but also reflect a mix that matched Octant’s goal of appealing to audiences beyond the usual epoch participants. They had decided internally that they wanted to do a mix of crypto-native and traditional climate projects. This was the first time quite a few of these projects were participating in a crypto round.
• Aligning profit and social impact = powerful persuasion. The ability of participants to support projects that they felt passionate about, without using up any of the original locked funds highlighted the thoughtful incentive design of Octant that resonated with users. Learnings from Octant v1 epochs have influenced decision-making in Octant v2, which is a suite of products and that will allow any Ethereum ecosystem to flexibly earn and allocate capital to their community and projects.
• In the climate realm, the power of web3’s offer - transparency, verifiability - are crucial, and can be some of the missing links from traditional funding. One of CCN's strength was having a pretty large network of projects that they knew and had at least some experience with in terms of reputation and credibility.

Curating For Impact

Effectively measuring impact is a crucial part of Octant’s vision for sustainable growth, and partnering with CCN enabled Octant pivotal access to their skills in impact evaluation, earned through experience in donating to hundreds of climate and regenerative projects. “We have a really good understanding of what kinds of ideas really make an impact, and out of that, it allows us to help somebody such as Octant really weed through projects. Even though a project might make some impact, you can just see - like, ‘this isn’t something that has that potential to scale and grow, and make a real dent in this massive problem.’ What we find in the climate side of crypto is that you have a lot of great dreamers, people who are very passionate. That doesn’t mean they always have the best solutions, but that’s startups in general,” Jon said.

To kick things off, the CCN team asked Octant: if this round turns out to be super successful, what would that look like for you? “What we heard from Octant was that they wanted to fund projects that are truly making a difference,” he said. We talked about scalability: while smaller, localized projects are certainly important, if they aren’t doing something to scale - sharing that knowledge with the next community, and the next, and the next - it wouldn’t work.”

From this, and with the understanding they should choose traditional and web3 grantees, CCN sifted the field with a simple, two-fold heuristic: what are you doing, and is this solution going to make a difference for climate?

To distill meaning out of the concept of making a difference for climate, the CCN “leaned a lot on carbon,” Jon told me - but didn’t exclude other approaches, like the water cycle.

They also wanted to be sure that if a project were to receive a substantial amount of money - at the round’s end, 20 projects received a share of over $542,000 - that they could do more than simply pay operations: they could scale. “Does this seem like the kind of founder that can take $50,000 and go make a difference? That's important, too. There's plenty of projects that, if you gave them $50,000, they would waste it away because they're not really focused enough and ready to take that funding and make a difference,” Jon explained.

That involved thorough diligence on team members, including in direct interviews. “Who are they? Do they seem qualified? If they’re an oceans project, do they have ocean experts on their team? And, also, the strong builders. It showed in some of the interviews - the founders that you can tell are incredibly driven and really know what they’re doing,” he said.

After selection, CCN supported the grantee projects throughout the round, helping selected projects produce sixty-second videos on climate for a release around Earth Day. They also helped with onboarding the projects’ supportive communities, and showcasing applicants on well-attended Twitter Spaces aimed at introducing projects to Octant users.

Outcomes and Learnings

For a full breakdown of the epoch’s results check Octant’s metrics page.

This insightful article by @TrinityMorphy of @CC_ReFi_News also offers a good unpacking of the round’s voting outcomes.

Learnings from the Octant and CCN team:

• Donors didn’t prefer web3-native climate projects, they preferred global, short-term projects sometimes even if those projects did not have a revenue stream.
• Meaning can drive donations. Projects that got voted in the top 7 are Blue Filter, who’ve created water filters that are helping Palestinians get access to clean water, and GEN Ukraine, a grassroots network of over 60 ecovillages across the country, formed in response to the war and ecological crisis. There was a clear preference for real-time, relevant projects that were making a difference.
• Keeping track of how funds make a real-world impact. Monthly or quarterly check-ins with these projects and understanding updates and roadblocks can help donors and allocators really understand what that impact looks like.
• Getting climate metrics and onchain is more difficult than a digital public good, where you can go and search and see their GitHub and their onchain activity. Accounting for that beforehand helps with measurement and evaluation later.
• Real-world or digital, funding rounds can act like mini accelerators for projects. When grantees succeed, that’s a powerful benefit for both communities.
• Getting the criteria for selection to be even more specific is a good idea. Having more specific calls to avoid room for interpretation otherwise there's a wide variance in project applications.
• Accounting for project onboarding and round-specific onboarding particularly is important. For the epoch cohort, onboarding users and walking them through wallet signing (for verification), ETH withdrawals, epoch and quadratic funding mechanism explainers took considerable resources and time. The Octant team has since accounted for bigger onboarding periods for themed epochs.
• Support post-funding is crucial for cohorts. In an epoch context, helping builders understand how they can market to to a crypto-native audience, seems to be of interest to builders.

What's next for Octant

The climate round's success validates the meaningful ecosystem growth through a specialized round without giving up on community agency. This epoch was an example of how curation and partnership combined with community allocation can effectively direct resources to high-impact projects.

Octant v2 offers ecosystems and communities the ability to run themed rounds with full flexibility.

While some of the products on the roadmap for this year are on the capital accumulation and yield side, the allocation component of v2 will allow ecosystems to flexibly allocate. Essentially, a replicable model for funding rounds and allocations where partners can balance community governance with domain expertise.

If you're interested in learning more about Octant v2 or are interested in running capital allocation rounds or using impactful vaults, get in touch here.

Disclaimer: This is not financial or tax advice. Octant content is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This article is not tax advice. Do your own research.

💌 P.S. Catch up on our streams!

We kicked off September with two really excited streams on X. In case you missed them, here they are for you to watch back.

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