Proposal to help fund the development of Gardens v2

Giveth Proposals
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Proposal Information

Proposal description:

The Gardens Swarm at 1Hive is requesting 450,000 GIV ($4,000) from the Giveth Common Pool to help fund ongoing development of Gardens v2 - a major update to our platform aimed at making the overall experience of using Gardens much better for community members and community admins alike.

What changes are coming in Gardens v2?

Gardens v2 will decouple the concepts of a community-owned enforceable covenant with some of its hard-coded implementations like Conviction Voting, Celeste for dispute arbitration, and Decision / Tao Voting.

Instead Gardens v2 will serve as a more modular coordination mechanism that gives organizations access to custom spending strategies like Conviction Voting, Fluid Proposals, Quests/Bounties, Quadratic Funding and more, which they can invest their treasuries through in any number of combinations, instances, and funding tokens. By integrating with Allo Protocol, Gardens v2 will provide cutting edge innovation in public goods funding through allo v2’s secure & audited smart contracts.

At the core of Gardens v2’s infrastructure is a Community Covenant smart contract we’ve designed to be as simple as possible, optimized for the purpose of:

  1. encoding a community’s values / mission in an on-chain social contract
  2. linking that covenant to the various smart contracts connected to the community, and
  3. allowing people to signal support for the community through staking.

v2 will also introduce many upgrades like:

  • Improved UI/UX for Conviction Voting, including the integration of Streaming Proposals (Fluid Proposals)
  • Deployed to more networks (Gnosis Chain, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, and others by demand)
  • Dispute resolution with Safes (multisig juries) in addition to Celeste.
  • More versatile systems for governance weight, customizable for each spending strategy.
  • Additional treasury spending strategies through Allo v2 added by demand, including Donation Voting, Direct Grants, and Quadratic Voting.
  • A new look, designed to make it easier and more fun to use Gardens!

We expect to make this upgrade to be available for select beta users (especially Giveth) in March 2024.

Proposal Rationale:

In the 2.5 years since Gardens launched (and ~2 years Giveth’s GIVgarden launched), we’ve learned an enormous amount about Conviction Voting, web3 governance, community-owned economies and the nature of cryptocurrency’s underlying technology and infrastructure of cryptocurrency as a whole.

In assessing how the Gardens platform has performed, we’ve looked at the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

THE GOOD

  • Security. The platform has proven remarkably secure given the level of decentralization and amount of new technology it introduced. Common Pools of Gardens have held as much as $38M in combined token value, and in an era rife with hacks and abuse in web3 there have been 0 malicious proposals executed, and 0 successful hacks of any garden.

  • Community Ownership. The vast majority of tokens held by DAOs outside of Gardens today are in multi-sigs. Gardens has proven that it’s possible to hold and allocate funding from token treasuries with no central ownership, no roles, no permissions, and no gatekeeping, and for active community participants of all levels to have real decision making power in how funding is allocated.

  • Organizational Health and Longevity. The vast majority of DAOs that existed in 2021 are defunct today with no active contributors and little to no funds. The Gardens platform launched with 4 communities - 1Hive, BrightID, Giveth, and the Token Engineering Commons - all of which are still active today. While this is related to many factors, it shows the Gardens platform can sustain healthy communities.

THE BAD

  • No New Communities, No Growth. The Gardens platform has effectively had 0 growth beyond the communities it initially launched with, and for those communities Gardens has been ineffective at helping grow value in their Common Pools. Today there’s less than $1 million of token value in Gardens Common Pools - a 97% decrease from its peak in January 2022. This decline is far beyond what would be expected from the market conditions and lack of community adoption of the Gnosis Chain network over that time.

  • Overly Complex. Nearly everyone that attempts to use Gardens - both as a DAO participant and DAO creator - complains about how hard it is to understand and use. Gardens is not intuitive enough to be useful for most public goods funding organizations.

  • No Web3 Adoption of Conviction Voting. When the concept of Conviction Voting was introduced in 2019 it stirred a lot of excitement as a useful new way of allocating funding to the Commons. Since then, Gardens has been unable to spark the adoption of Conviction Voting beyond a small and very niche group of users.

THE UGLY

  • Gardens team has been slow / nonresponsive with support
  • Bug patches and feature requests are not addressed adequately
  • Service is unreliable
  • UI is confusing, sometimes actively encouraging unintended behavior (i.e. the too-attractive Challenge button)
  • Gardens still runs on original Aragon contracts that are now 5 years old

These findings have driven our approach to rebuilding the Gardens platform as well as restructuring our organizational processes within the Gardens swarm.

To date the Gardens Swarm has raised ~$20k for the development of Gardens v2 through a combination of funding from 1Hive, Gitcoin, and leftover funding from prior grants and donations. Gardens is still 100% community-owned, having never accepted venture capital funding. We hope to keep it this way.

v2 Resources/Documentation:

Expected duration or delivery date (if applicable):

Beta launch expected in March 2024.

Team Information (For Funding Proposals)

Contributors:

Lead Full Stack Developer: @kamikazebr
Full Stack Developer: @Kev
Lead Frontend Developer: @Mati0x
Frontend Developer: Luciano
Frontend Developer: Veronica
Project Manager: @paul
Advisor: @gabi
Advisor: @rperez89

Funding Information (For Funding Proposals)

Amount of GIV requested:

400,000 GIV

Ethereum address where funds shall be transferred:

0x1B8C7f06F537711A7CAf6770051A43B4F3E69A7e (Gardens Swarm Safe)

More detailed description of how funds will be handled and used:

The funds will be swapped for GNO on CowSwap (GIV’s most liquid Gnosis Chain token pair) at an expected price slippage for the GIV token of 2.13%

The Gardens swarm uses our own system of Basic Income to fund contributors.

3 Likes
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Thanks for dropping this year. @karmaticacid and @mitch will have to give this a good scrub :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the post Paul! This is a really great proposal and I’m glad to see Gardens v2 coming together. I appreciate your frankness in the shortcomings we’ve experienced with Gardens v1.

Giveth hasn’t been in the appetite to spend big on external proposals, however could be amenable to smaller proposals for groups looking to do work that benefits Giveth and are okay being paid in GIV.

So how might this newer version of Gardens be beneficial in this manner ? I saw a short mention of Quests/Bounties but maybe you could explain that a bit more.

Will Gardens still use AragonOS framework or something new from scratch?

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For sure - If Giveth is still keen on Conviction Voting, our v2 framework will make it much easier to spin up custom instances that you can fund with smaller amounts of GIV and set those params to optimize for smaller proposals for GIV.

Gardens v2 won’t use AragonOS - we’re rebuilding with a combination of contracts from Safe, Allo Protocol, and our own.

So if you need more than CV, the Allo Protocol v2 framework will make it easy for us to integrate other spending strategy types beyond Conviction Voting like Quadratic Funding and Direct Grants - whatever’s most useful for you guys we are happy to integrate.

We’re also very, very happy at 1Hive with our Fluid Proposals integration built by Blossom Labs. This links a Superfluid stream to a Conviction Voting proposal for streaming funding. This is how most Common Pool HNY in the 1Hive garden gets distributed now and will be part of the v2 Conviction Voting app and probably will become a much bigger part of how 1Hive funds things going forward since we’ll be able to set up hierarchical fundings streams (i.e. a top level CV instance divvying funding for things like liquidity, contributor compensation, and grants, which then funds lower level instances deciding how each of those are funded).

I’m happy to set up a call with whoever’s interested in Giveth too and we can show you what we’re building and talk over how we can make it more useful for y’all. I know blocks of texts like this aren’t super helpful for understanding what it’s actually gonna be like to use this stuff.

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Thanks @paul2 - we had a short discussion on our GOV call today… putting a poll up here for signalling on what people think

Support Gardens V2 Development with 450k GIV from the GIVgarden?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Abstain

0 voters

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Hi Giveth,

Quick update on our v2 work from the Gardens Swarm - our first big milestone is to rebuild Conviction Voting using Allo Protocol v2 with some key improvements from Gardens v1.

This rebuild is nearly done and has LOTS of really nice improvements:

  • Point Systems. CV in gardens v1 only allows for 1 token = 1 vote. In v2, communities can pick between 4 different point systems for voting weight.
    • Fixed Points: all members get the same voting weight
    • Capped Points: 1 token = 1 point, up to a capped limit of points
    • Unlimited Points: 1 token = 1 point, no limit (our current system)
    • Quadratic Points: # of points = square root of tokens staked
  • No more Abstain Proposals. Instead, community members will activate / deactivate their voting weight for a CV instance.
  • Better visualizations for proposal statuses and support. Support across funding proposals in v2 will be compared to each other in a way that more intuitively expresses how much support + conviction different funding proposals have, and how much they need to pass.
  • Add or remove support across all proposals at once. Instead of changing support proposal-by-proposal, v2 CV lets you adjust your voting weight between all active proposals at once. See prototype of this feature on youtube.
  • Choose which proposal types (Funding, Signaling, Streaming) are available in the CV instance: This opens up the ability to easily set up a CV poll, which can be used for things like a continuous election for the signers of a Gnosis Safe, or allocating token weights in a Portfolio.
  • Fix for unintended effects of the “Minimum Effective Supply” parameter: A lesser known CV parameter meant to slow-start Conviction Voting instances until enough people stake voting weight has been kicking in for mature DAOs, making it harder to pass proposals (Of the existing Gardens only 1Hive is affected). V2 has an update for this parameter that will fix this issue.

We built a demo version of this new Conviction Voting application for the Allo on Arbitrum hackathon, where it won first place in the “Best Novel Funding Distribution Tool” category.

We’re still targeting end of March for our first beta gardens v2 release, and hope the Giveth community will be able to support us with funding and feedback.

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