Cowrie Research

gardens-v2

4 min read

Gardens v2

  • Name: Gardens v2
  • URL: https://app.gardens.fund/
  • Category: modular governance framework / conviction-voting public-goods infrastructure / multi-pool treasury coordination stack
  • Tags: ethereum-ecosystem
  • Summary: Gardens v2 packages the 1Hive / Commons Stack conviction-voting lineage into a reusable governance framework. The important move is not protocol novelty; it is modularization. Communities can run separate funding, signaling, and planned streaming-style pools with different vote-weight systems and threshold settings instead of forcing every decision through one treasury vote. That makes Gardens v2 a useful note for studying where authority really sits in public-goods allocation stacks: not just in token balances, but in pool design, parameter choice, and execution defaults.
  • What it does:
    • Lets communities create governance pools inside a broader ecosystem/community structure rather than governing only through one global treasury contract
    • Supports funding pools for discrete token allocations, signaling pools for non-executable or externally executed sentiment signaling, and documentation for streaming-style funding built around continuous allocation concepts
    • Supports multiple voting-weight systems including fixed, capped, unlimited/token-weighted, and quadratic models so communities can change how stake translates into influence
    • Uses conviction voting so support accumulates over time rather than relying only on one-shot proposal snapshots
    • Exposes configurable conviction parameters such as conviction growth, minimum conviction, spending limit, and fixed minimum threshold that determine how quickly proposals gain force and how hard they are to pass
    • Runs across multiple EVM networks and depends on adjacent infrastructure including Allo Protocol v2 and Safe, which is a reminder that Gardens is an orchestration layer rather than a self-contained protocol
    • Publishes an open-source app and contracts stack so communities can launch or adapt the framework rather than only consuming a hosted grants product
  • Key claims:
    • The docs explicitly frame Gardens as a “bottom-up governance framework for web3 ecosystems” whose initial focus is Conviction Voting, Quadratic Voting, and Streaming Proposals; that framing is more important than the app surface because it signals a coordination-system ambition rather than a narrow grants-tool ambition
    • The v2 repo README says communities can create multiple governance pools with customizable parameters and voting mechanisms. That is a major design shift from a single-treasury DAO model: practical power sits with whoever defines pool boundaries, proposal types, and terms of use
    • The conviction-voting docs define conviction as time-accumulated support and describe conviction growth as a half-life parameter. This matters analytically because it slows flash majorities and rewards persistent support, but it also pushes real authority into parameter tuning rather than only token balances
    • The funding-pool logic described in the docs makes requested amount part of governance difficulty: larger asks require more conviction, while the spending-limit parameter sets the region where a proposal becomes impossible because even full voting weight could not clear the threshold
    • The fixed-minimum-threshold safeguard is especially revealing because it shows the framework does not fully trust emergent stake participation; low-activation pools can be overridden by a hard floor so that thin turnout cannot cheaply drain funds
    • The docs distinguish signaling pools from funding pools, which makes Gardens useful as a governance-control-plane project rather than just a treasury router. A community can use the same framework to express social preference, authorize spending, or eventually stream funds continuously
    • The repo README lists Allo Protocol v2 and Safe as dependencies, while the docs describe planned streaming-style funding. That is the useful frame: Gardens v2 is not a base protocol so much as a governance wrapper around other execution and treasury components
    • As a corpus entry, Gardens v2 is useful because it shows how conviction voting moved from the Commons Stack / 1Hive lineage into a more productized app framework with clearer choices around pool type and vote-weight design
  • Whitepaper: No canonical standalone Gardens v2 whitepaper surfaced in this pass. The strongest primary materials were the official docs and the official gardens-v2 repository README; see ../whitepapers/gardens-v2-primary-sources-2026-05-09.md.
  • Sources:

Internal linkages

  • Historical lineage: 1hive

  • Closest constitutional and mechanism-family peer: commons-stack

  • Pool-and-strategy substrate underneath much of the funding stack: allo-protocol

  • Last reviewed: 2026-05-25 UTC

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