On June 30, a grants round on Ethereum closed, and the single largest payout went to an organization many bitcoiners consider their own critical infrastructure. The Tor Project topped a list of 25 grantees, and the round pushed its all-time total from the program to roughly 148.7 ETH and the third-largest sum any project has received from it, ahead of portfolio trackers, security teams, and core developer collectives.

By Bitnodes' global estimate, close to one in four Bitcoin nodes runs as a .onion service, and Bitcoin Core has shipped with built-in Tor integration for years. When the network's node operators want privacy from their ISPs and from surveillance of the peer-to-peer layer, Tor is the tool they reach for.

In its latest reported fiscal year, the Tor Project raised $7.28 million, and about 35% of it came from the US government, down from 53.5% two years earlier. Diversifying away from that dependency is a stated goal, and money from the Bitcoin world already plays a part, with OpenSats among Tor's newer backers. 

It was the 13th run by Octant, a funding platform that, according to DAO Times, has now moved more than $9 million to public goods projects, and every dollar of it came from Ethereum staking rewards.

Octant is run by the Golem Foundation, and its design is closer to a university endowment than to a grants committee. The foundation keeps 100,000 ETH staked and pays grants exclusively out of the staking yield, without ever touching the principal.

The voting uses quadratic funding. Under this mechanism, a project's share of the matching pool is calculated from the square of the summed square roots of its individual donations, so the count of donors carries more weight than the size of any single donation. A project backed by one large check and a project backed by the same amount from many small donors end up with very different matches.

A researcher Andrey Sergeenkov, who has analyzed the funding data across Octant's rounds, told us that community donations account for about 4% of the money moved and steer where the other 96% goes. An average $19 donation brings a project roughly $500 in matching, and every 10 additional donors add about $5,000 on average, regardless of how much each of them gives.

One of his examples involves an on-chain investigator ZachXBT. He raised $1,100 from 95 donors, and the matching pool added $128,000 on top, a 116x multiplier on what the crowd put in.

Voters signed ballots off-chain with their wallet keys and sent them to a sequencer, which published everything to Ethereum as blob data. From that moment the 209 ballots were public, and anyone could check the signatures and see who voted for what.

After the round closed, a program re-ran the election inside a zkVM. It verified every signature, dropped superseded ballots, enforced voter budgets, and computed the allocation, producing a Groth16 proof that exactly this computation ran on exactly those ballots. A smart contract verified the proof, wrote the results on-chain, and opened payouts. Any tampering with the math or the inputs would have made verification fail, and the operator had no way to alter or delay the outcome. Blockchain analyst Edward Moon published a step-by-step walkthrough of the pipeline on HackerNoon for anyone who wants to go deeper.

Bitcoin's commons run on donations. OpenSats moves roughly $1 million a month to open-source developers, and Brink pays Core engineers from donations and corporate sponsorships. Both depend on donors staying generous through the cycle, and they don't always. Brink's donations fell 58% in the 2022 bear market, exactly when developers needed stability most.

Octant's model has no such dependency, because staking yield arrives in a bear market at the same rate as in a bull one. Bitcoin has no protocol-level yield, and that is a deliberate design choice with real virtues. The trade-off it creates is plain, though. The most cycle-proof funding for shared infrastructure right now comes from the chain that has yield to give.