The Gardens platform exists today through the tireless work of a globally distributed cast of core contributors and a growing network of partners, researchers, funders, communities, and users. Plus our incubating DAO, 1Hive

⚘GARDEN now gives these people a voice.

TL;DR

• You can get the ⚘GARDEN token here on Juicebox

• 62% of tokens minted in Juicebox are held in reserve for community distribution, meaning money represents 38% of the community's voice - the Golden Ratio.

• With ⚘GARDEN you can join our newly launched community on Gardens, help govern the platform by signaling support for new features, and get funded to build a new feature yourself.

• If the Juicebox campaign reaches its goal (100 ETH), we'll launch a tokenized endowment that can fund Gardens in perpetuity, and open the door for financial speculation on its growth.

• We'll then establish liquidity for ⚘GARDEN itself, targeting a stable value backed by the endowment. With no financial upside, the only reason to hold ⚘GARDEN is to have a say in platform governance.

• If the Juicebox campaign doesn't reach its goal in 1 year, contributors can redeem their ⚘GARDEN from Juicebox.

What the heck is Gardens?

Gardens grows things

Specifically, it's an open source platform built to help communities harness collective intelligence so they can make good decisions and allocate shared resources effectively, helping them grow and thrive at whatever it is they do.

What kinds of communities?

Open source software projects, web3 ecosystems, pop-up villages, public goods maintainers, activists, political parties... really any collective with a shared vision and the need (or at least want) for decentralization.

But for any good microprocessor to work, it needs a healthy source of power, which is to say that Gardens communities work best when they have a healthy governance token, something many communities on Gardens don't yet have.

With ⚘GARDEN, we addressed many of the common pitfalls of governance tokens, and we're building it in a way that other Gardens communities can easily replicate.

A governance token actually built for governance

In the world of private goods and services, pairing voting rights with speculative equity works fine. Everyone's aligned on the same goal: profit.

But most of the world's organizations don't exist strictly to make money. For them, revenue is needed to support a higher-level, non-financial purpose.

Enter ⚘GARDEN, an ERC-20 that exists strictly to:

• Harness collective intelligence, so the platform can reach its north star - which is to help the people using Gardens grow and thrive.

• Distribute liquid ownership of the platform, to all people who create value for it and care about its future.

We can solve issues of plutocracy and vote-buying through our governance mechanisms, rather than naively pretending Gardens tokens don't have economic value.

The future of ⚘GARDEN

$ETH accumulated in the ⚘GARDEN campaign on Juicebox will be held until it reaches its goal, the minimum fundraising amount for us to be financially viable.

If this happens, we'll launch a tokenized endowment using the proceeds, opening the door for investors to speculate on the economic growth of Gardens, without jeopardizing ⚘GARDEN's ability to source good decisions for the community. We can also use it to back a stable price for ⚘GARDEN, effectively tying the governance token to platform's economic value. You can read more about our 2-token model here.

If the Juicebox campaign doesn't reach its goal in 1 year, ⚘GARDEN holders can then redeem their tokens for the accumulated $ETH.

⚘GARDEN Token Mechanics

The ⚘GARDEN token is issued on Juicebox v4 with these parameters:

• Fixed Exchange Rate: 1 ETH = 2,000 ⚘GARDEN (no bonding curve)

• Golden Ratio: 38.2% of token issuance distributed to Juicebox contributors. 61.8% reserve rate distributed to the community.

• Reserve Distribution: Reserve ⚘GARDEN will be distributed to the community using mechanisms aimed at getting them in the hands of those who care about the future of the platform, and who are best suited to make good decisions on its behalf.

• Redemptions: If the campaign doesn't reach at least 100 ETH within 1 year, redemptions will be enabled and contributors can reclaim their ETH.

• Establishing an Endowment: If the 100 ETH goal is reached and payouts are ratified by the community, payouts will be enabled and go out as follows:

  • 60% to launch the community endowment

  • 20% added as liquidity for ⚘GARDEN

  • 15% to compensate contributors

  • 5% for platform growth initiatives

• Multi-Chain Access: Available on Optimism, Arbitrum, Base, and Ethereum thanks to Juicebox v4.

• Legal Entity: A Swiss Association.

Our Growth & Impact

Gardens has been steadily growing since our pre-beta v2 launch in Fall 2024. We now have:

• 100+ Communities created on Gardens

• 800+ Unique Members participating in governance

• 11k Transactions processed

• 6 Networks supporting Gardens communities (Optimism, Arbitrum, Gnosis Chain, Polygon, Base, and Celo)

• $100k+ allocated through proposals

Our growth metrics are available here on Dune: https://dune.com/paul2/gardens-v2

The Path Forward: From Seedlings to a Sustainable Ecosystem

⚘GARDEN is the fuel we need to grow a platform that puts communities and users first - creating as much value for as many people as possible.

With ⚘GARDEN we can:

Grow our network
Reward contributions to the platform
Source good decisions from the community
Prioritize healthy decision-making over speculation
Connect the community to the platform's economic growth

We hope the token serves as a blueprint for other Gardens communities (and public goods builders of all kinds) to follow.

So whether you're interested in supporting the Gardens platform as a contributor, helping shape it through governance, or simply want to financially support our mission, ⚘GARDEN is a great path to get started.

⚘

Links

• Gardens App: https://gardens.fund

• Telegram: https://t.me/+dDPiCb3UJRA5ZmNh

• Discord: https://discord.gg/zdPMxcVAXW

• X / Twitter: https://x.com/gardens_fund

• How to grow using Gardens: https://1hive-gardens.notion.site/How-to-grow-using-Gardens-84be339e761d462085dcb27db12d1c4c

Our Team

Gardens is built and maintained by a core group of open source contributors:

Gardens v2 Core:

• Gossman - Full Stack

• Mati - Frontend

• Felipe - Smart Contracts

• Lucho - Frontend

• Kevin - Full Stack

• Thiago - Brasil - Growth

• Ro - Full Stack

• Paul - Project Lead

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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