202511181600 - gardens
Main Topic
Gardens (gardens.fund) positions itself as a bottom-up governance framework for Web3 ecosystems, focused on coordination infrastructure and funding mechanisms for public goods. The project emphasizes governance mechanisms beyond simple token-weighted voting, and highlights patterns like conviction voting, quadratic voting, and streaming proposals.
This card is a starting point for understanding what Gardens is trying to build and how it differs from other governance tools.
Uncertainty to resolve: the concrete product surface area (what is implemented today vs. planned), and how governance decisions translate into enforceable execution (smart contract execution, multisig workflows, or other).
🌲 Branching Questions
What is Gardens, in one sentence, and what problem is it trying to solve?
Gardens is a governance and funding framework that aims to improve how communities allocate resources to public goods by offering coordination mechanisms and an end-to-end community experience that is intended to be healthy, intuitive, and secure.
The problem framing is that public goods are structurally underfunded in traditional private-ownership business models, and that crypto governance is a sandbox for new coordination mechanisms that can allocate capital and attention more effectively.
What mechanisms does Gardens focus on, and why do they matter?
From Gardens documentation, the initial focus includes:
- Conviction Voting: supports continuous funding decisions where support accumulates over time, often used for grants allocation.
- Quadratic Voting: reduces pure whale dominance by making additional voting power increasingly expensive.
- Streaming Proposals: aligns funding with time and performance by streaming funds rather than lump-sum payouts.
These mechanisms matter because they change incentives and reduce the brittleness of one-shot, binary token votes, especially in grants and public goods contexts where decisions are ongoing and outcomes are uncertain.