Our new home for Gardens: https://gardens.1hive.org
Go ahead, put your farming experience to work, take a shovel and plant the seeds of the public economy.
Today we are introducing the Gardens platform, the economic engine for common goods to flourish. Each Garden gives its community powerful tools to experiment at the edges, create currency policies, allocate shared resources, and make decisions bottom-up. Everything while keeping the system credibly neutral, accountable, and self-improving.
Important actions in the Garden are bound to the community’s mission, values, and rules. And they’re protected by a dispute resolution protocol in case bad actors want to abuse the system.
We are long into the network effects that the Gardens platform will provide for its communities. Even at this early stage, we started seeing examples of DAO2DAO collaboration between Gardens, creating more resilient communities.
We released with support on xDai, Polygon, and Rinkeby (for testing). With plans to include Arbitrum or Optimism soon. You can access the platform at gardens.1hive.org.
Why Use Gardens
DAOs are a leap forward in human coordination progress. They resemble communities more than companies, and when digital communities have capital, it turns out they’re quite powerful.
The governance structures of early DAOs however don’t always take advantage of this. Influence in most DAOs unintentionally (or intentionally) gravitates to a select group of people that control its direction. For the Average Joe, their influence is limited to their number of votes.
Gardens however allow Average Joe in a community to actually do stuff, while still protecting the community from abuse. This “bottom-up” governance comes with efficiency costs, but for many DAOs the benefits are huge.
Who Should Use Gardens
Centralized power is completely fine for many organizations. Even in the cryptocurrency space. If leadership is capable and benchmarks for success are clear (like users and revenue), centralized organizations are probably better than decentralized ones.
Many other organizations are better off with bottom-up governance, like:
- Those concerned about security and longevity. Communities at risk of governments deciding they don’t like them, or communities that want to outlive their team of leaders.
- Organizations with passionate members. Those intrinsically motivated to make that community better. This can be done by a centralized organization or company too, by dedicating a portion of their treasury to a Garden.
- Communities that build public goods, where the value a community creates is subjective to those who share its wealth. In a pre-DAO world, these communities are charities, clubs, government agencies, activists, religions, or a neighbor who takes time out of her day to clean broken glass off the sidewalk.
How To Create A Garden
Common Pool
Each Garden has a Common Pool with tokens held collectively by the community and which are available for distribution via proposals.
During creation, the Common Pool can be configured to be a Gnosis Safe, allowing communities to use Gardens while still tapping into Zodiac DAO modules.
Types of Gardens
We currently support two types: Veneto Gardens and Boboli Gardens.
Veneto Gardens
The type of Garden that 1Hive uses. It comes with a powerful dynamic issuance policy that can be fine-tuned during creation. Gardens that collectively allocate resources productively should expect to see increases in demand for their token outpace issuance, either because their token is being removed from the circulating supply (fee capture or supply sinks), or because demand for their token increases from its utility (output or perceived value).
When a community launches this type of Garden, they also create a community token. This token grants voting power to vote on proposals that allocate shared resources from the Common Pool.
The key features are:
- A configurable amount of community tokens is minted and sent to the Common Pool.
- A pre-distribution of initial tokens can be made by the Garden summoner to accounts within the related community.
- A configurable Dynamic Issuance Policy, that mints and burns the Common Pool tokens relative to a specified threshold.
Boboli Gardens
Under this type of Garden, you have more flexibility in the sense that you are importing an existing token that may already have its own supply policy and rules associated with it. Once imported, this token is used to attribute voting power over the Garden's shared resources.
One key difference between this type of garden and a Veneto Garden is the governance incentives. The incentive can be used to reward users who choose to import their existing ERC20 token into the Garden in order to gain governance rights within that Garden.
The community creating the Garden is encouraged to:
-
Allocate a portion of their treasury to the Garden Common Pool.
-
Send tokens to the incentive contract to reward users who choose to import the original token in exchange for governance rights in the Garden.
…
As a final note, in both types of Gardens,
Common Pool funds may consist of the governance token, or any
ERC-20token.
Gardens Deep Dive
The main components of a Garden are Conviction Voting, Community Covenant, Celeste, and Decision Voting.
The Role of the Covenant
You can think of the Covenant as a constitution or decentralized social contract.
On a practical level, a Covenant is a document, stored on IPFS, which explains what a Garden is about in plain English. It establishes values, rules, and customs, and is used to protect the Garden from malicious actors without sacrificing the agency of its members. It should be designed as an essential resource in moments of conflict and a contextual reference for Keepers to rule on a proposal that has been challenged and escalated to Celeste, the dispute resolution protocol of the system.
The key idea here is that a covenant allows an organization’s actions to be governed by a subjective set of rules; rules which are either impossible to encode into smart contracts, or which would otherwise result in a complicated and slow-moving organization.
For example, here's an extract from 1Hive's Covenant:
1Hive is a community of activists seeking to build a future that is more free, fair, open, and humane.
1Hive is also an economic protocol, similar to Bitcoin or Ethereum, where a digital currency, Honey, is issued and distributed programmatically. Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, the 1Hive protocol does not narrowly define the set of activities that are valuable but instead relies on community members to guide the distribution process by creating and staking on Honey distribution proposals.
The goal of the 1Hive protocol is to foster a healthy community economy by allocating a steady stream of Honey towards development, maintenance, and improvement of the common goods that bring the most value to the 1Hive community…
Anyone interacting with the 1Hive community has to abide by this Covenant.
You can use the Covenant to create behavioral expectations within community spaces such as Discourse, and Discord.
Another extract from 1Hive’s Covenant:
Examples of behavior that contributes to a positive environment for our community include:
- Demonstrating empathy and kindness toward other people
- Being respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences
- Giving and gracefully accepting constructive feedback
- Accepting responsibility and apologizing to those affected by our mistakes, and learning from the experience
- Focusing on what is best not just for us as individuals, but for the overall community
This allows community moderators to refer to the Covenant as a guideline. It also ensures that these guidelines cannot be changed in the community without the community's approval.
Participation
Gardens are community-driven organisms. Community members are encouraged to participate in the sense-making of the DAO by submitting, discussing, and staking on proposals. In Gardens there are three kinds of proposals: Suggestion, Funding, and Decision.
Suggestions and Funding proposals
Suggestions and Funding proposals use the Conviction Voting component.
Conviction Voting allows proposals to be created and considered continuously and simultaneously. Participants can signal their preferences for the proposals they support, but they are not able to “double count” their influence across multiple proposals.
When members start supporting a proposal, the support (or conviction) does not immediately apply but instead must charge up over time according to an exponential decay function or half-life.
Suggestions, including the abstain proposal, are proposals that do not request funds from the common pool. They can be used to draw collective attention to specific issues, without committing or requesting funds be allocated to the issue.
Suggestions can accumulate support, but they will never pass. Instead, supporting a suggestion will increase the amount of support required for all other funding proposals to pass. So if you think the community is spending money unproductively, support the abstain proposal, or create a new signaling proposal that makes the case for how you think the community should actually be allocating resources. This can have a meaningful influence on the behavior of the system.
Funding will have an activation threshold and can be executed by anyone once enough relative support has accumulated to that proposal. When executed, the requested amount of the community token will be transferred from the Common Pool to the beneficiary address, so long as it isn’t disputed with Celeste.
For a deeper dive on Conviction Voting, check out this cadCAD model exploring the mechanism.
Decision proposals
Decision proposals use the Decision Voting component.
Funding and Suggestion proposals are the primary means of governance within a Garden, however, occasionally there is an unavoidable need to make a discrete decision. For example, upgrading smart contracts or adjusting the parameterization of a policy.
In these instances a more traditional voting process is used, where a discrete action is proposed and voted on in a binary fashion. Votes are open for a fixed period of time, and if quorum and support thresholds are reached the vote passes, and the action is executed.
Decision proposals include one-level delegation, allowing token holders to give their voting powers to a delegate who will cast votes on their behalf. A voter however does not give up full control. The delegates are forced to vote early in the voting period and if the token holder sees that their delegate has voted contrary to the token holder’s will, they can veto their vested portion of the delegate’s vote and cast their vote themselves. Both a delegate and a token holder can only vote ONCE.
What’s Next
We are just starting to explore the powerful network effects that are emerging from the public economy. Our focus will be on continuously improving the Gardens platform and services, optimizing for the resilience of its communities.
A few of the ongoing discussions:
- Conviction Voting v2 with support for multiple Gardens tokens that allow even more DAO2DAO coordination.
- BrightID Gatekeeper to add a Sybil resistance layer to certain Gardens actions.
- Plug-and-play Bonding Curve for Gardens tokens.
- Profile migration to Ceramic and IDX.
As a closing note, we would like to thank everyone that made this platform possible. If we made it this far it was only because we are “standing on the shoulders of giants”:
- Aragon project
- Aragon One team
- Commons Swarm team
- 1Hive
- BlockScience
- BrightID
- Cold Truth Culture
- Agave
- Giveth
- Token Engineering Commons