🌍 This Week in Web3ForGood
the summer of pgf is here
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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We’re calling it now, the Summer of Public Goods Funding is officially here. This week, we’re serving up innovative new approaches to PGF from Octant, Tor, and Funding the Commons, paired with the latest Crypto Altruists podcast on new ways of funding with Gardens, to complete your holiday weekend optimistic crypto media menu. Plus, if you’re confused about what’s going on with the Clarity Act, we have a useful brief. Find it all, below.
Not a long weekend where you are in the world? There’s still a reason for everyone to celebrate… Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day! Sixteen years since someone paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas. To mark the occassion, might we suggest donating some sats to your favorite nonprofit?
WAGMI (we are going to make an impact!)
P.S. from Abeera: We focus on tech x social impact here, but we would be remiss not to mention a historic win this week. NORTH LONDON FOREVER! A toast to all our Arsenal fans, and now back to regular programming. 🔴
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
🛡️A New Way to Fund What Matters
This week, the Tor Project and Funding the Commons launched a web3-native crowdfunding round for ten nonprofits advancing internet freedom. Donations are open in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, Monero, and Golem through June 18th, with a $115,000 match pool from Cake Wallet, Zcash Community Grants, Logos, and Octant amplifying every contribution.
The round uses quadratic funding, which weights donations by how many people give rather than how much any single person gives. A project backed by a thousand donors at $10 each will out-earn one backed by ten donors at $1,000. Broad community participation signals what should be funded, rather than the judgment of whoever controls a grant budget. It’s a different theory of where legitimacy in funding decisions comes from, and one of the more interesting things web3 has put on the table for public goods.
This exciting new experiment in “web3 crowdfunding” comes at a time when new funding models are desperately needed. With USAID dismantled, EU countries redirecting overseas development budgets toward defense, and several major private foundations stepping back, the tools journalists use to receive documents from sources, the systems activists rely on to organize without being surveilled, and the observatories that document censorship in real time are all losing the grants that have kept them running for two decades.
One of crypto’s earliest uses was private funding for journalists and activists who couldn’t rely on banks, and the industry drifted from that for a long time. We hope this round is the first of many pointed back at the infrastructure that needs it most. If you have ever used Tor, sent a tip through SecureDrop, checked whether a site is blocked on OONI, or just value the free internet, consider supporting the round, here.
This is a genuinely new kind of experiment in public goods funding. Crowdfunding is not new, quadratic funding is not new, and crypto-native giving is not new, but pulling them together into a coordinated campaign for a shared cause this widely valued is something the space has not really tried at this scale before. We are excited to see what gets learned, what gets refined, and what comes next. Public goods funding has needed new models for a long time, and rounds like this one are how the space figures out which models actually work.
🌻 Octant Is for Everyone
Earlier this week, we sat in on the Funding the Commons Townhall with Octant where we had the chance to learn all about what to expect from Epoch 12. TLDR, if you are new to all of this: Octant runs on yield funding, which means a pool of staked ETH generates rewards each quarter, and those rewards get routed to public goods projects that the community votes on (in rounds called “Epochs”).
What is new and extra exciting about Epoch 12 is that, for the first time, anyone can participate with ETH, no advance GLM token lockup required. 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. In addition to these participation changes, the team demoed an upgraded, clean and easy-to-use UI. Voting will use zero-knowledge proofs for the first time, meaning participants can cast votes without revealing their wallet activity or identity. And the whole allocation mechanism has been reworked to use “proper” quadratic funding, the version originally outlined by Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig, and Glen Weyl in their 2018 paper.
Octant’s vision is for other communities to eventually run their own rounds on their platform using the same infrastructure, which would turn Octant from a single funder into a piece of public goods funding rails that anyone can plug into. Epoch 12 is a great chance to get familiar with how it works. Donate some ETH to a project you like, see the mechanism in action, and watch what gets built on top of this next. Coming soon.
🚦 Getting Clear on the CLARITY Act
The CLARITY Act is a proposed law to finally make clear rules for crypto, which have traditionally been confusing digital money and technology that doesn’t fit neatly into old categories like stocks or cash. Right now, different government agencies argue over who should be in charge, which makes it hard for companies to know what’s allowed. The bill tries to create a clear rulebook so everyone knows who regulates what.
People who support it say this is a good thing because businesses need clear rules to build useful products without constantly worrying they’ll suddenly get in trouble. They think clearer rules could help innovation stay in the U.S. and make crypto safer by forcing companies to follow proper standards instead of operating in a gray area.
Critics worry the rules might be too friendly to crypto companies and not tough enough on bad actors. Their concern is that if the rulebook is too easy, risky or scammy products could look more trustworthy than they really are just because they now “follow the rules.” So the big debate is: are we creating smart guardrails, or just making it easier for dangerous stuff to keep going?
Plus:
🌐 Aid, Rebuilt on Stablecoins: This pilot in rural Haiti tests blockchain-based stablecoin cash transfers as a safer, more transparent alternative to physical aid distribution. If successful, it could provide a scalable model for humanitarian cash assistance in fragile environments. (Mercy Corp Ventures)
🧱 Structural Funding: Why the Grant Model is Dying and What Replaces it: “The successor to the grant model is not a better grant model. It is funding that is structurally embedded in the economic design of protocols -- funding that scales automatically with protocol usage, requires no recurring governance decisions, and aligns the incentives of funders with the infrastructure they depend on.“ (Kevin Owocki, Gitcoin)
🛠️ Stop trying to be the next uniswap: For builders who want to create useful applications: “The golden rule I keep repeating: if your user needs to know they are using blockchain, you failed.“ (@benibauer3)
🪞 Why Regens Are Failing at AI (The Blunt Reality Check): “Then take the hours you claw back and use them to stand in your community, look your supporters in the eye, and build the deep, trusting human relationships that technology can never replicate.“ (Accelerating Good)
⚓ Bitcoin Hormuz payments for ship insurance will test crypto’s neutral money thesis: “The base layer continues settling while the regulated perimeter tightens around it. That window between what Bitcoin can technically do and what the institutions that price it, hold it, and provide liquidity for it are permitted to support is where the Hormuz case would land. Verified or not, it has forced that question from theory into practice.“ (CryptoSlate)
📣 Latest News
MoneyGram Becomes Tempo’s Anchor Remittance Validator in Strategic Blockchain Partnership
Tether Invests in LemFi to Power Stablecoin-Driven Remittances Across Emerging Markets
ETHGlobal changes hackathon rules; now projects don’t have to start from scratch
Global Policy, Regulation, and Adoption News
Justin Sun-Led Liberland Micronation Awards Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Its Top Honor
Iran Launches Bitcoin-Settled Insurance Platform for Hormuz Strait Shipping
South Carolina Passes Law Banning CBDCs While Protecting Crypto Users, Bitcoin Miners
Reports & Project Updates
🔈 Watch & Listen
Crypto Altruists - Episode 252 - A New Model for Public Goods Funding: Conviction Voting, Streaming Proposals, and Community Coordination, with Gardens
🚀 Opportunities & Calls to Act
Apply: ChainSecurity is hiring multiple Blockchain Security Engineers and a Business Development Engineer.
Hack: The Onchain Agents Hackathon challenges you to build onchain agents on Celo, an Ethereum Layer 2 built for the real world and designed for fast, low-cost payments worldwide. Celo’s tooling and ecosystem enable AI agents to deploy across global payments, mobile-first applications, and stablecoin-native transactions, with 15M+ MiniPay users ready to put them to work. Teams are expected to go beyond prototypes; winning agents generate real transactions and demonstrate genuine utility onchain. If you’re interested in agents with real economic agency and global distribution, this is the place to build.
Funding: Apply to the Anchor and Frontier Pools of Prezenti Grants to receive up to 25k $mUSD to support your project or AI infra on Celo.
🎪 Events
Virtual
Regeneration Pollination Solarpunk: International Day for Biological Diversity is happening May 22 - TODAY 🚨.
Regeneration Pollination Solarpunk: World Environment Day is happening June 5.
Regenerative Technology Playshop ~ Governance & Collaboration is happening June 30. 🆕
Regenerative Technology Mutual Aid Innovation Gathering is happening July 15. 🆕
IRL
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.
Decentralised Justice: Law in the Digital Age of Crowds and Code is happening June 9 in Oxford, UK. 🆕
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 TODAY May 22 🎉.
📡 On Our Radar
Dark Forest Operating System, or DFOS (pronounced dee-foss), a new platform for building your own internets, just released its first public beta. A shared desktop of apps, files, folders, and ways to talk, publish, and earn together. All of it running on an open protocol that guarantees your identity and data will always be yours.
The Regenerative Technology Assessment Tool from Regenerative Technology Project is an assessment rooted in the Regenerative Tech Stack that aims to evaluate the intentions, design, and systemic relationships of your technology across three layers and five dimensions.
Fil One is a new, simple way to use Filecoin storage. Fil One is S3-compatible object storage, fully backed by Filecoin’s verifiable, decentralized network, making it easy to use Filecoin storage for demanding workloads. If you’ve used AWS S3 or similar services, you already know how to use Fil One.
Mento’s Onchain FX Registry is an open directory of projects building with non-USD currencies onchain: issuers, FX infrastructure, and apps.
✨ And One More Thing
