Octant
Octant started life as a simple game where users get rewarded for donating to good causes. We designed and built it in a couple of weeks with the Golem Foundation team for use at their booth at ETH Warsaw in 2023. It has since developed into one of the leading web3 public goods funding platforms.
The way it works is quite simple. Lock some tokens into the smart contract powering the Octant app and earn rewards. The longer you lock, the more you earn. Every 3 months an allocation window opens, you choose as many public goods projects as you like, and divide your rewards between them and yourself very easily using a slider.
The funds for rewards come from 100K ETH staked by the Golem Foundation. Match funding is applied so even small donations can have a sizeable effect on the amounts projects receive.
One of the core design challenges was that the project started as an experiment, and so we expected that large changes would be the norm. Our solution was to make it as tile-based and modular as possible, so the app could adapt to any kind of funding, rewards or allocation ideas.
The slider-based mechanism to divide donations & personal rewards was one of the trickiest to get right, but the app's overall ease of use seems to have found the right balance.
Octant is the most exciting new project in the public goods space… I loved the clean UI and overall experience of 3 step checkout.@TheDevanshMehta
We named the project and built a simple brand around it, based on the initial idea of the project as an experiment in governance mechanisms.
An Octant (or reflecting quadrant) was a major innovation in celestial navigation for its time, something that helped early explorers find their way in an unknown world. We explored marks that played with different meanings for the word, which can refer to the celestial instrument, or to the arc of a circle divided into eighths.
We worked with Jeff Phillips on a 2D simple line style illustration set to give the brand a friendly, approachable face. Animation house 21_19 helped out with an early promo video for the project. Stuart Wade came on board later to help us out with animations for community POAPs and social media.
The landing page we put together was fairly simple, with a main page explaining the basic concept at a high level, and a token page where visitors can check prices and learn a bit more about GLM, the token required to use this version of Octant.