Gardens was born from the naive idea that a digital community could simply write down their vision for the world, upload it in a text file to a distributed ledger, connect it to a pool of money, and pay it out through a completely decentralized allocation mechanism. And somehow that would bring the vision to life. 

Since then we’ve learned the cold hard truth.

It works.

And it’s about to work way better with Gardens v2, an upgrade 3 years in the making.

🌱🌱🌱

For the ecosystem growth and grants nerds, Gardens v2 is a modular coordination platform giving organizations streamlined access to web3’s best funding and decision mechanisms, which they can use to invest shared resources in any number of combinations and instances and with any number of funding tokens.

For the rest of us…

Gardens grows things 🌱

Our bread and butter is Conviction Voting - AKA time-weighted voting where support grows in power the longer it’s staked. This simple feature protects communities from many common types of gaming and abuse, like last minute vote swings, or flash-in-the-pan surges in community sentiment that don't stand the test of time.

Conviction Voting (CV for short) is also a continuous mechanism by nature, needing less administrative and marketing overhead compared to seasonal allocation events.

Gardens v2 introduces two groundbreaking CV upgrades:

• Pool Types. CV instances can either be tied to funding or used for signaling alone, which can then be used to execute all kinds of events onchain or off-chain.

• Voting Weight Systems. in addition to time weight, each CV instance can customize total voting weight per member. Choose between equal voting weight for everyone (fixed), voting weight = tokens staked (unlimited), or voting weight = square root of tokens staked (quadratic).

It also has several key changes from Gardens v1:

• Council Safe. CV Pool parameters are managed from an admin Safe, rather than heavily governance intensive Decision Voting.

• Tribunal. Communities choose a Safe address to rule on disputes, infinitely composable thanks to Zodiac.

• More Networks. v2 is building on Arbtirum, Optimism, Gnosis Chain, and Polygon, with more coming.

• Community Fees. Optionally charge a fee to members that register in your community, choosing a beneficiary address to receive funds.

• Allo Protocol. the smart contract framework from Gitcoin’s Grants Stack, enabling novel and secure funding mechanisms.

• Gitcoin Passport. For sybil resistance.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the Community Covenant, the social contract that encodes the community’s vision and shared values onchain. For organizations that don’t exist for profit alone, the Covenant remains the north star that guides it in perpetuity.

What types of organizations might these be?

• Digital Ecosystems

• Open Source Software projects

• Public Goods Providers

• DAOs and Web3 Communities

• Do-ocracies of all kinds

Our mission is to fulfill the top level of our own version of Maslow’s pyramid:

Starting from the bottom with the most basic need:

1. Resilience. A democratic system must at the very least give social legitimacy to decision outcomes and a system for nonviolently removing bad leadership.

2. Ownership. A better system can then create a sense of meaning and belonging to members so that they treat the whole as their own.

3. Collective Intelligence. Finally, the best democratic decision mechanisms can be emergent - solving problems of a higher order than any individual or group within is capable of.

Reaching the top is of course not just a matter of mechanism design. Culture, information sourcing, and a host of social factors are needed. But for too long our mechanisms themselves have held us back.

The time has come for a new generation of decision-making.

🌱🌱🌱

Gardens v2 beta is scheduled for release in August 2024. Request access to our alpha demo on our website.

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