Octant Vaults: Has Public Goods Funding Made Its Way to Crypto?

--- Octant Vaults show how crypto treasuries can preserve capital, generate yield, and sustainably fund public goods at the same time. --- Public goods funding, a noble way to fund resources that include everyone’s benefit, such as roads, open knowledge, and clean air. But it’s also something only a few would want to put money into, mainly because while its ROI is low on financial profit, it’s pretty high on social ROI. And with every protocol and institution now rushing to build out Digital Asset Treasuries that only benefit a few, Octant is out there creating vaults that benefit the public goods movement. Learn more about Octant Vaults in this episode of Whitepaper by AthenaX, where we’re strictly entertainment and not financial advice. ---

“Octant proves that DeFi yield doesn’t have to choose between profit and public good.” ---

What Is Public Goods Funding?

Public goods funding, or PGF, is a fund that pays for things everyone wants to build on, but no one wants to pay for directly. Examples include open-source libraries, the Ethereum Foundation, and developer tooling. Without these, building open source would be pretty difficult. Imagine trying to build without DeFiLlama or L2Beat. ---

What Is Octant?

Octant is an infrastructure company built by the Golem Foundation that aligns itself with PGF through its own V2 vaults. Their vaults are a fork of Yearn V3 that preserve treasury principals while generating yield through integrated strategies. In essence, they automatically route treasury yields into grant funds or other donation pools to be used for productive impact with selected projects. Now, being a project built by the Golem Foundation (which ranks 8th in Ethereum reserves), Octant has evolved into a sustainable Web3 funding model that emphasizes DeFi for yield generation and donation. To date, the Ethereum community has responded positively to its V2 vaults, with reviews calling it a “self-sustaining global PGF ecosystem” that balances common good with individual rewards. ---

How Octant Vaults Work

To date, Octant and the Golem Foundation have distributed over 2.5k ETH in matching funds across epochs, staking 100,000 ETH in TVL based on reported stakes. Current rewards are around ~3.8% APR for GLM-locked positions with minimal locks. Octant Vaults are straightforward in design, with an added benefit of being part of the Golem Foundation ecosystem. Yields harvested are split into three key pools through their Payment Splitter mechanism:

Dragon Pools (community-voted rewards)
Sustainability Pools (public goods funding)
Regen Vaults (user rewards) Additionally, the Golem Foundation matches rewards for the Sustainability Pool through time-weighted ETH rewards. This is a strong signal that the Golem Foundation is aligning itself with Ethereum’s public goods ethos and intends to collaborate with other like-minded entities. ---

Who Are Octant Vaults For?

If you’re a user, you deposit assets into a vault pre-loaded with a yield strategy, and only the accrued yield is split among recipients like public goods projects, grant funding, and community initiatives. If you’re a business, the process is similar—except there may be a minimum commitment, and you can customize the split for your own public goods pools. ---

Security and Tech

On the security and technical side, Octant Vaults are forked from Yearn V3 and are ERC-4626 compliant. That’s a fancy way of saying the vault handles accounting logic and access controls in a standardized and auditable format. This also makes them compatible with Morpho, Aave, Lido, and other major DeFi protocols, allowing plug-and-play composability with institutional-grade vault strategies. ---

Funding Impact So Far

Since June 2023, the Golem Foundation via Octant Funding has supported 100+ Ethereum-aligned public goods projects through themed epochs. Part of the motivation here is the strategic importance of coordination. PGF has become the coordination layer—or the invisible hand—for capital allocation and scaling tools within the Ethereum ecosystem. Given that the Golem Foundation is a top-8 ETH holder, it’s also very much in its interest to see Ethereum succeed and improve. In its most recent Epoch 9, 275 ETH (~$1m) in grants were distributed to 30+ projects from over 450 applications. Before each epoch, a theme is applied to define which projects qualify and how much funding is allocated. Past recipients include notable public goods projects like L2Beat, Protocol Guild, Web3J, and Open Source Observer. ---

Risks and Considerations

Like most grant-based systems, PGF carries risks such as:

Misallocation
Governance capture
Grant farming PGF works best when it rewards impact after the fact, rather than open-ended promises. To mitigate this, Octant could structure funding as expense-based PGF, foundation grants, retroactive PGF, or token-based PGF. ---

Final Thoughts

I think PGF is an inevitable meta that will arrive alongside the growing hype around institutional Digital Asset Treasuries. We’re already seeing crypto DATs used as tools for TradFi, and PGF may soon become part of more sophisticated strategies—potentially even as corporate tax optimization tools. That said, because tax strategies aren’t as mainstream as growth strategies, PGF will likely remain a small but steadily growing niche within crypto. That’s all for this episode of Whitepaper by AthenaX. We’ll see you at the next reading. ---

Key Takeaways

Octant Vaults route DeFi yield into sustainable public goods funding
Built by the Golem Foundation, a top ETH holder aligned with Ethereum’s success
Vaults preserve principal while donating only generated yield
ERC-4626 compliance enables institutional-grade composability
Public goods funding may become a core crypto meta as treasuries scale