🌍 This Week in Web3ForGood
pgf for everyone
Web3forGood is a weekly publication that celebrates and critically analyzes how emerging web3 technology could be used to make the world a better place.
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Octant’s Epoch 12 kicked off this week, and the summer of pgf (public goods funding) is in full swing.
Speaking of summer, next week (June 26) will be our last edition before we take our annual summer break. We’ll be back in August! So if you have news to share, an event to get the word out about, etc., send it to us by next week to see it published before we pause.
We have a lot to be hopeful about (see below).
WAGMI (we are going to make an impact!)
What’s Inside
📚 What We’re Thinking About
📣 Latest News
🔈 Watch & Listen
🚀 Opportunities & Calls to Act
🎪 Events
📡 On Our Radar
✨ And One More Thing
📚 What We’re Thinking About
🔆 Octant’s Epoch 12
Earlier this week, Octant kicked off Epoch 12, its thirteenth round of public goods funding. From now through June 30, anyone — yes, anyone, even if you haven’t previously staked GLM — can allocate funds to one of twenty five incredible projects.
The full cohort includes Aestus Relay, BlueFilter Company, Crypto Altruists, Dappnode, Ethereum Attestation Service, ECH Institute Inc., The Ethereum Economic Zone, EthStaker, Ethereum Remix, Funding the Commons, Gili Eco Trust, Greenpill Devs, growthepie, Hypercerts Foundation, L2BEAT, Open Source Observer, Protocol Guild, Revoke.cash, Rotki Solutions, GmbH, SEAL 91, SheFi, Shutter, Solidity (Argot Collective), The Tor Project, and ZachXBT. Octant hosted a live Demo Day a few days ago to introduce each project. Watch the recording here.
A few weeks ago we wrote about Epoch 12 after previewing it at the Funding the Commons townhall. A quick refresher on the ecosystem: Octant runs on yield funding, where a pool of staked tokens generates rewards each quarter. Those rewards then get routed to public goods projects that the community votes on. Epochs are what Octant calls each of these funding rounds.
This particular epoch is the first to introduce several major changes to the system:
It uses ProperQF.
It uses zkproofs in voting.
It runs on Octant v2.
It’s open to ETH contributions (Previously, participation was limited to people who had locked up GLM, Octant’s native token, ahead of each epoch, which kept the voting community small and crypto-native.)
Basically, there is a lot to be excited about! This is the easiest entry point Octant has ever offered, and it’s a real chance to see public goods funding work the way it should. Pick a project you believe in, send some ETH its way, and watch ProperQF do its thing.
Octant is for everyone.
🌱 Hope over Hype
Our friend Drew of Crypto Altruists dropped a new solo episode last week that argues AI is getting the same treatment crypto got a few years ago, (over)hyped by some and, as a result, resented by everyone else. Meanwhile, the real world examples of how the tech truly can help people are getting lost in all the noise. If crypto has anything to teach us about AI, points out Drew, it’s that, though loud promises tend to fizzle out, often the more unglamorous tools end up changing lives, and THAT is something to be hopeful about.
I (Sam) am living in Morocco right now. A few days ago, I saw a post on Instagram advertising a workshop for local artisans to learn how to use AI to create better product photography, so that they can sell more (gorgeous, handmade) rugs internationally. At a time when most of my feed seems to be people hating on AI, this was an important, real reminder that these tools can and will change many lives for the better. Nick Allardice of GiveDirectly echoed this sentiment on LinkedIn. “If you live on less than $3 a day and your child is coughing through the night, there’s often no clinic you can call. If a teacher isn’t nearby you may have no recourse on how to learn. And if you’ve saved enough to buy your first livestock, advice on keeping it alive is often hard to come by. These are exactly the questions a good LLM could help with. Anthropic’s own research shows people around the world already turn to AI for precisely this, because they can’t reach a professional.”
As Drew puts it, hope is not the absence of hype. Hope is what is left when you strip the hype away and put people back at the center. AI and blockchain don’t need to be everything for everyone. That doesn’t mean that they won’t be something real for someone. In fact, for many people, they already are.
Plus:
💬 Crypto Has a Language Problem and It’s Holding Us Back: “If the next growth phase for crypto runs through institutions then the go-to-market motion looks a lot more like B2B enterprise financial sales than it looks like a manifesto or a meme with the latest jargon. This requires language that reduces friction instead of language that signals insider knowledge.“ (Anna Stone @TheRealStone)
💸 Stablecoins in Nigeria: A Growing Cross-Border Channel: “Stablecoins are neither a passing trend nor a complete substitute for traditional finance. They are best seen as a response to persistent frictions in cross-border payments. In Nigeria, those frictions are real, and users have found a workaround.“ (IMF Country Focus)
🤝 Growing trust in your regenerative project: “Trust is not binary and it isn’t instant. It gets built through small signals, repeated over time: a clear story, an updated post, a face behind the work, an organization willing to vouch for what you’re doing.“ (Ma Earth)
📣 Latest News
Global Policy, Regulation, and Adoption News
🔈 Watch & Listen
Crypto Altruists - Building for Good with G$ Episode 1 - A Blueprint for Ecosystem Funding: GoodBuilders, FlowState, and the Power of Streaming Funds
TED Radio Hour by NPR - How predictions took over our lives
🚀 Opportunities & Calls to Act
Apply: Nearfoundation is hiring a Web3 Product Marketing Manager.
Apply: Stripe is hiring a Content Marketing Lead, Bridge.
Apply: A brand-new, stealth-stage media and news platform is hiring a Blog Writer and A Chronically Online Crypto Journalist.
Volunteer: Devcon 8 India wouldn’t be possible without an incredible group of dedicated, passionate volunteers, from all over the world. Join the team alongside +200 committed members of the Ethereum and broader community to help create the most impactful Devcon yet.
Earn: Get 5% cashback on $CELO, Gold, ETH, and BTC with MiniPay via Squidrouter Mini Apps for a limited time. Terms and conditions apply.
Support: GrowFi’s first campaign is live on Ethereum Mainnet. They are raising $2500 to do our first swag production run. Right now you can purchase campaign tokens and earn up to 40% on your position paid out in USDC and/or physical products. For every $20 shirt sold on the platform, stakers can earn up to $10 for every future sale redeemed in $USDC or physical tshirts.
🎪 Events
Virtual
Special Non-Profit Webinar: How NTC built a membership infrastructure on monday.com for a global nature tech ecosystem is happening June 24. 🆕
Become Unstoppable: Financial Freedom Webinar by HRF is happening June 22-24. 🆕
Regenerative Technology Playshop ~ Governance & Collaboration is happening June 30.
Community Call: Deliberative & Democratic Tech hosted by Metagov x CrownShy is happening June 30.
Nature Tech Demo Day - Measuring Biodiversity Across the Value Chain is happening July 2. 🆕
Regenerative Technology Mutual Aid Innovation Gathering is happening July 15.
IRL
Bread Hangout at Berlin Blockchain Week is happening June 19 in Berlin.
ETHWomen is happening July 21-22 in Toronto.
UN Open Source Week 2026 is happening June 22-26 in NYC.
East Africa Adopting Bitcoin Conference is happening June 24-26 in Nairobi.
European DAO Workshop 2026 is happening July 6-7 in Winterthur, Switzerland.
DWeb Camp 2026 is happening July 8–12 in Alte Hölle - Brandenburg, Germany.
ETHGlobal Lisbon is happening July 24-26 in Lisbon. 🆕
DWeb Camp Cascadia is happening July 30 - August 3 on Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada.
FW:B Fest 5 is happening July 31-August 2 in Idyllwild, CA.
Liberpulco 2026 is happening August 13-23 in Liberland Ark Village, Serbia.
Crypto Commons Gathering is happening August 16-22 in Reichenau an der Rax, Austria.
Valley of the Commons is happening August 24 - September 20 in the Austrian Alps.
Boston Blockchain Week is happening September 8-10 in Quincy, MA.
The Gathering is happening September 11-15 in Portugal.
The Technoprogressive Opportunity is happening September 19-20 in London.
ETHGlobal Tokyo 2026 is happening September 25-27 in Tokyo.
TOKEN2049 is happening October 7-8 in Singapore. 🆕
Progress Conference 2026 is happening October 8-11 in Berkeley, CA.
Responsible Tech Summit: Embedding Accountability in the AI Era is happening October 29 in NYC.
Devcon 8 is happening November 3-6 in Mumbai, India.
Foresight Institute’s Vision Weekend USA 2026 is happening November 13-15 in San Francisco.
ETHWomen is happening November 17-18 in Florida.
The Africa Bitcoin Conference is happening December 2-5 in Blantyre, Malawi.
Recurring
Monthly Earth Day is a global event that happens on the 22nd every month, not just once a year. Get involved next on June 22.
📡 On Our Radar
Polis Labs is an independent, mission-driven research institute studying how free communities coordinate, why they fail, and what frameworks help them endure.
Iroh 1.0 - Dial Keys, not IPs lets any two devices connect directly and securely using cryptographic keys instead of IP addresses.
Open Bitcoin Africa is a platform where people discuss Bitcoin, Lightning, emerging protocols, economics, policy, and the opportunities shaping Africa’s digital economy.
Knovel is a platform where writers can publish directly, build communities around their work, and monetize through direct audience relationships, while readers discover books through real engagement signals like discussions, reviews, follows and community participation.
✨ And One More Thing
