202511181600-gardens
🎯 Core Idea
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.