To drive network growth - web3 ecosystems need novel funding mechanisms that help grow a network of diverse + high quality dApps, infrastructure and public goods. 

The teams, communities, and founders that build and maintain these public goods need funding that corresponds to the value that they’re bringing to the ecosystem.

Our implementation of Conviction Voting improves on existing systems of grant funding specifically for established public goods projects that need ongoing funding for products / services they’re building. It does this by algorithmically encouraging bottom-up governance of grant funding, and by reducing governance and administrative friction that bog down most other allocation methods.

We chose Conviction Voting as our first funding mechanism because we believe it’s the most proven and underserved funding mechanism in web3. However, our v2 platform design is optimized for running many different types of funding mechanisms and many instances of the same funding mechanism running at the same time. We did this by:

- Simplifying and modularizing the Community Covenant contract
- Using Allo Protocol v2 as our funding mechanism framework, which lets us easily implement other Allo funding mechanisms to our platform as we grow.

By the end of 2024 we are aiming for the following growth metrics

- 5+ ecosystems with active gardens communities
- 10+ active gardens communities
- 500+ active community members
- $100k distributed through gardens v2 Funding Pools
- $1M+ TVL - measured in Funding Pool token balances of all gardens v2 communities

The ultimate mission of Gardens is to help communities and public goods builders allocate resources more efficiently and with greater ROI. Gardens v1 was a launchpad that let open source software projects in web3 experiment with a new robust + flexible funding mechanism - Conviction Voting. Our goal with gardens v2 is to expand its usefulness beyond just the pioneers of web3 to all open source software projects, and then eventually to anyone building Public Goods in both the digital and real world.

Gardens is 100% community-owned, with all our funding to date coming from 1Hive funding proposals, grants, donations, hackathon winnings, and the visibility and support of our passionate users. We’d like to remain community-owned forever.