🌍 This Week in Web3ForGood
yield powered pgf
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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A lot of people in Web3 talk about changing systems. Fewer are willing to test what that actually looks like when real institutions, real money, and real stakeholders are involved.
This week, we’re spotlighting one of those experiments. Abeera is joining a conversation around a live pilot exploring whether blockchain-enabled yield funding can make grant distribution more efficient, transparent, and equitable for grassroots organizations in sport for development.
What makes this interesting isn’t just the technology. It’s the bigger question: can new financial infrastructure meaningfully reduce the friction, overhead, and gatekeeping that define so much of traditional philanthropy? We’ll keep you updated as the pilot unfolds 👀
As always, we’re more interested in experiments than narratives. Interested in attending? Register here.
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
🌱 Gitcoin, Octant, and Public Goods Funding
Next up for public goods funding? Gitcoin is deploying $1M of its treasury into an Octant vault, with Octant matching another $1M of their own (read the full Gitcoin report on this, here). Yield-powered funding like this, where capital sits in DeFi and the yield (in this case, roughly $32K a quarter) gets routed into grants, is what Octant does amazingly already. So it’s exciting to see Gitcoin, another legacy player in public goods funding, get involved.
For the uninitiated, Gitcoin Grants have been a cornerstone of public goods funding for years, but lately the broader community has been openly grappling with the fact that round-by-round matching pools, which depend on fresh capital showing up every cycle, are not built to last. Watching Gitcoin lean into the sustainable model that Octant has already built feels like a real moment of evolution for a space that is in much need of a shakeup.
It is also a great example of two big players in public goods funding choosing to build together instead of in parallel. Gitcoin brings the grantmaking infrastructure, Octant brings the vault architecture and yield-routing model, both bring their own communities, and the result is more support for an approach that more of the ecosystem clearly needs. We love to see it.
Plus:
🏛️ Bad Governance Can Break Even the Best Tech, Says GoodDollar’s Sam McCarthy: “Governance is a muscle. That’s the visual I think of it in: you have to keep flexing it to be able to keep flexing it. Knowing where you can have a say, being proactive enough to make your voice heard, is hard. And it’s one of the most exciting things about this whole experiment with DAOs and decentralized governance. It’s created a space where people can flex that muscle again. They have to learn how, because life online has largely taken that ability away from us. It’s something that has to be relearned.“ (Hackernoon)
🪙 India’s CBDC Turns Welfare Payments Into Programmable Money: “India is leveraging its CBDC not merely as digital cash but as programmable, conditional money. Officials aim to reduce leakage in India’s $80 billion welfare system, yet this also enhances the state’s ability to control how money is used.“ (HRF’s Financial Freedom Report)
🔐 The zero-knowledge case for blockchain: “The deeper vision behind everything in this book is a future we call the Integrity Web — a new kind of internet infrastructure. It’s one where the systems we rely on don’t ask for our trust; they prove they deserve it.“ (Blockworks)
📣 Latest News
Ethereum Foundation hits ‘Glamsterdam’ milestones, names new protocol leads
Ethereum Foundation unstakes $50M in ETH amid treasury shift
Ethereum Foundation Launches Clear Signing Standard to End Blind Signing Exploits
Satoshi Sister Circle Graduates 30 African Women into the Bitcoin Ecosystem
Visa Accelerates Stablecoin Momentum: Adding Five Blockchains for Settlement
Payy Partners with Rain to Bring Safe & Secure Transactions to Stablecoin Card Programs
Global Policy, Regulation, and Adoption News
Senate Banking Committee advances Clarity Act to full Senate floor
Japan’s enterprise-led blockchain to issue yen stablecoin for B2B settlements
Bank of England to scale back plans for strict stablecoin rules following crypto industry pressure
Reports & Project Updates
🔈 Watch & Listen
Crypto Altruists - Episode 251 - From Savings Circles to Smart Contracts: Building Digital Infrastructure for Community Finance in Tanzania, with NEDA Labs and The Solar Foundation
Crypto Altruists - Episode 250 - The Quiet Revolution: Crypto on the Frontlines of Humanitarian Aid
Bitcoin Magazine - Bitcoin on the Frontlines of Human Rights
Bitcoin Magazine - How Afghan Women Found Freedom in Bitcoin
🚀 Opportunities & Calls to Act
Apply: IRL is hiring a Marketing & Partnerships Director.
Read: The Web3 Owners Club blog (in English or Bulgarian).
Share: Between Us is collecting stories about Bitcoin and the impact that it has had for individuals.
Funding: OpenSats, a nonprofit dedicated to funding open freedom technologies such as Bitcoin and Nostr, is now accepting applications for its spring and fall grant cycles.
Funding: Celo’s May Proof of Ship program offers a $5k USD₮ prize pool for the top 50 projects.
Funding: The Celo Communities Content Contest awards high-quality content about Celo. May edition is happening now.
Funding: Optimism is funding incentives that grow and activate DEX liquidity for collateral–borrow asset pairs used in lending.
Funding: Optimism is funding projects who need assistance with audit costs.
Funding: TheDAO Security Fund has opened applications on Giveth for Round Operators to help run future rounds. They are looking for teams building DAO tooling.
Funding: Spark DeSci Fund for Radical Researchers is a catalyst for scientific innovation and a bridge for new creators to enter the DeSci ecosystem with confidence.
Funding: Ethereum Foundation’s Glamsterdam Grants Round rewards grant proposals that help the Ethereum community prepare for and adapt to the Glamsterdam upgrade.
Funding: Filecoin Foundation awards grant funding for development projects to foster a more decentralized, efficient, and robust foundation for humanity’s information.
Build: Are you a builder or aspiring founder with an innovative idea in AI, crypto, or blockchain, looking to launch your startup? Founder School is a 10-week, cohort-based, virtual, and equity-free program designed to provide the structure, frameworks, and insights you need to go from zero to one. We believe in facilitating global scalability for the next generation of tech founders.
🎪 Events
Virtual
FtC Town Hall: Octant v2 & the Anatomy of a Funded Project is happening May 18. 🆕
Innovative Finance for Sport for Development: A yield fund pilot to reimagine grant distribution is happening May 20. 🆕
Regeneration Pollination Solarpunk: International Day for Biological Diversity is happening May 22.
Regeneration Pollination Solarpunk: World Environment Day is happening June 5.
IRL
DEAD INTERNET THEORY is happening May 17 in LA. 🆕
Global Digital Asset Forum Vienna 2026 is happening May 18-22 in Vienna. 🆕
King’s AI Summit: Workforce Futures is happening May 19-20 in London. 🆕
Gray Area Creative Code Showcase Spring 2026 is happening May 20-21 in San Francisco. 🆕
Lisbon Ethereum Community Hub Launch is happening May 21 in Lisbon. 🆕
Build, Treat, Heal: A Bay Area Fundraiser for Gaza Medical Aid is happening May 30 in San Francisco. 🆕
ETHGlobal Prague is happening May 30 - June 1 in Prague.
Edge Esmeralda is happening May 30 - June 27 in Healdsburg, California.
The Oslo Freedom Forum is happening June 1-3 in Oslo, Norway.
Featuring the Freedom Tech Track.
The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Neurotechnology and Society Conference is happening June 5-6 in Boston.
Foresight Institute’s Vision Weekend United Kingdom 2026 is happening June 5-7 in London.
ETHConf is happening June 8-10 in NYC.
FDS-8: New York is happening June 9-11 in NYC. 🆕
Neocypherpunk Summit is happening June 14 in Berlin. 🆕
State Capacity in the Digital Era, a panel discussion from UCL IIPP, is happening June 17 in London.
East Africa Adopting Bitcoin Conference is happening June 24-26 in Nairobi.
DWeb Camp 2026 is happening July 8–12 in Alte Hölle - Brandenburg, Germany.
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. 🆕
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. 🆕
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.
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 May 22.
📡 On Our Radar
Satoshi Sister Circle is an empowering leadership network dedicated to women from Africa and the African diaspora, fostering career development and opportunities within the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Figure uses blockchain technology to reduce cost, improve speed, and expand products for consumers and institutions.
Fedi leverages Bitcoin and ecash technology to support global communities, It recently integrated a swap tool called Exolix, which lets users exchange bitcoin for other digital assets, including stablecoins like USDT (Tether), without the need to create an account. For users living under financial repression or in places where exchanges require invasive identity checks, Exolix provides a more private way to move between bitcoin and other digital assets. Activists and communities can now access other digital assets without depending on centralized exchanges.
✨ And One More Thing
