Episode 252 - A New Model for Public Goods Funding: Conviction Voting, Streaming Proposals, and Community Coordination, with Gardens

For episode 252 of the Crypto Altruists podcast, we’re excited to welcome Paul Glavin, a contributor to 1Hive and Gardens, a bottom-up governance framework for Web3 ecosystems. Gardens provides coordination infrastructure and funding mechanisms designed to help communities fund public goods in a way that's healthy and sustainable.

In today’s discussion you’ll learn:

🗳️ How conviction voting – a time-weighted voting mechanism where support grows stronger the longer it's held – is changing the game for community coordination

💸 The power of streaming proposals, where funds continuously flow to contributors over time, rather than though one-off grants

🌱 How communities like GoodDollar and Bread Cooperative are using Gardens to fund public goods in a more open, transparent, and sustainable way

‍

‍--Key Takeaways--

🗳️ Conviction voting flips the script on traditional governance: Most voting mechanisms force decisions into single, time-boxed windows. Conviction voting works differently: the longer you support a proposal, the stronger your voice grows. This creates continuous signaling rather than rushed, last-minute decisions. Conviction voting rewards patience and genuine alignment over quick coordination and concentrated power.

💸 Streaming funds make sustainable resourcing possible at any scale: Traditional grants are one-off: apply, wait, get a lump sum, then scramble for the next round. Streaming proposals flip that model. Funding flows continuously based on ongoing community support, working for everything from small open-source teams to massive treasury allocations. When funding is continuous, contributors can focus on building rather than constantly fundraising.

🥱 Governance doesn't have to be a burden: Governance is often administratively heavy, complex, and boring. Low participation isn't surprising when voting feels like a chore. Gardens breaks decisions into digestible pieces, allowing individuals to participate in the ways they want and vote on the things they care about. The goal is governance that feels less like a committee meeting and more like something people actually want to show up for.

--Full shownotes with links--
www.cryptoaltruists.com/blog/crypto-altruists-episode-252-a-new-model-for-public-goods-funding-conviction-voting-streaming-proposals-and-community-coordination-with-gardens

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--DISCLAIMER--
While we may discuss specific web3 projects or cryptocurrencies on this podcast, do not take any of this as investment advice and make sure to do your own research on potential investment opportunities, or any opportunity, before making an investment. We host a variety of guests on this podcast with the sole purpose of highlighting the social impact use cases of this technology. That being said, Crypto Altruism does not endorse any of these projects, and we recognize that, since this is an emerging sector, some may be operating in regulatory grey areas, and as such, we cannot confirm their legality in the jurisdictions in which they operate, especially as it pertains to decentralized finance protocols. So, before getting involved with any project, it’s important that you do your own research and confirm the legality of the project. More info at cryptoaltruists.com/disclaimer

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today you'll discover how conviction voting, a time-weighted voting mechanism where support grows stronger the longer it's held, is changing the game for community coordination, the power of streaming proposals where funds continuously flow to contributors over time, rather than through one-off grants, and how communities like Good Dollar and Bread Cooperative are using gardens to fund public goods in a more open, transparent, and sustainable way. Welcome to CryptoAltruist, where we explore the intersections of Web3 and social good to the stories of impact-driven builders and offer actionable insights to empower your journey into the world of blockchain for good. I'm your host, Drew Simon. Now before we dive in, please remember that this is not financial or legal advice, and always do your own research on any of the projects or investment opportunities that we discussed. Welcome back to the Crypto Altrist Podcast, and thanks so much for joining us today. If you spend any time in Web3, you've probably experienced governance fatigue, endless proposals, low voter turnout, whales dominated decisions, and funding models that feel more like one-time lottery wins than sustainable support. It's a problem that plagues DAOs and communities across the ecosystem. Gardens provides coordination infrastructure and funding mechanisms designed to help communities fund public goods in a way that's healthy and sustainable. At the heart of Gardens is this concept of conviction voting, a mechanism where community members signal their preferences continuously rather than casting votes in a single time box session. The longer you support a proposal, the stronger your conviction grows. It's a model that rewards patience, long-term commitment, and genuine alignment over quick coordination and whale dominance. We're also going to explore streaming proposals where funding flows continuously to contributors rather than arriving in a single um sum. It's a fundamentally different way of thinking about how communities resource ongoing work. And we'll talk about what it actually means to make governance engaging. Because if participation feels like a chore, people won't show up. And Gardens is trying to change that. So let's dive in. Paul, it's so good to have you here today on the Crypt Ultras Podcast. You know, I'm a big fan of Gardens. Uh, got to see it uh live in action uh throughout uh Good Builder season three, which has been fun. And I'm excited to dive deeper now and to kind of learn about what you're building and what the future holds. So thanks for taking the time to be here.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to talk.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, um, kick things off, would love to introduce you to listeners. So maybe you can just share a little bit about yourself, your journey to web three, and how you came to work at gardens.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

Yeah, um, I've I've been working on gardens for five years now. I I joined the gardens team right before launch in uh uh 2021, April. Um so before before my world on crypto, I worked in web 2 uh kind of growth and operations for a few different startup companies. Um I started getting excited about crypto. First back in college, um yeah, the uh Bitcoin I thought was a really cool concept back then, um, but wasn't really involved in crypto or anything. And then uh 2017 was when I started paying more attention to it, and I uh saw that bubble back then that uh was like piqued my interest. And I said, this looks like there's a lot of um hype about this, but once the uh the hype dies down, I'm I'm like I'm interested now and I want to dive in. And so like 2018, 2019, when that kind of uh slowed down a little bit is when I was really uh interested and researching a lot and looking at what kind of projects were out there. Um, the thing that hooked me was the element of public goods. Um, and back then I was seeing that there was um a lot of other people kind of thinking in this way. Um, Gitcoin and give it. Um back then it was token engineering commons. Uh these were a lot of people who were thinking about like the application of cryptocurrency for public goods. Um and that is that to me was like um exciting in how potentially meaningful it could be for the world. And I notice even today it seems like people kind of associate public goods with charity. Um, but the the way bigger public goods provider in the world is governments, and that's a much better way to think about uh what cryptocurrency is. It's kind of an alternative system for people who are unhappy with their governments. And really, in this space, if you're interested in working in crypto, really you're interested in building better public goods than the existing public goods providers are offering us. Um but that's kind of muddled by all the other issues of um like first of all, we have our own public goods and we can get into these later, but um yeah, we've got to solve our own public goods problem before we can even attempt to solve the world's public goods problems. But that's that was kind of my mental approach coming into uh crypto. And Onehive was uh where I first kind of landed as a project that I was contributing to. Uh and the thing that excited me about One Hive was it was really the first project to have a complete economic model around that. It had a token with dynamic issuance, it had a judicial system, an Aragon court fork. Everything was self-sustaining and and uh truly kind of like native to the network. Um, so that was how I first got into it. Onehive, um, that was first uh built by some guys from Aragon that got a grant to kind of build this conviction voting mechanism, uh, which became Onehive's governance model. Um, and then Gardens became that governance model that was applied for any community to be able to spin up a conviction voting um community for themselves. So yeah, that was 2021. And I've been on Gardens ever since.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

Yeah, I mean, that sounds really interesting. And it's cool to hear kind of the history of how this all came to be because I knew that it was created by one hive. I didn't really know the background, so that's really cool. And you gave a bit of kind of an overview of kind of what gardens is at a high level, but maybe do you mind just kind of giving an intro to kind of the mission? Um, you talked a little bit about the problem you're trying to solve, but what is the actual product that you've built?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Yeah, Gardens is a community governance platform. Uh, we really pioneered conviction voting and have made it a model where anyone can create a community and set up any number of conviction voting instances. Um, our we're in our second version of Gardens. The first version that launched in 2021 was basically one instance of conviction voting for your entire treasury. Um, and what Gardens v2 was that launched in 2024 is a modular version of that. So, as a community, you can create all these different instances. They can all be tied to a different token, they can have their own parameters, you can have different votering voting requirements and waiting um points for each of those instances. And that lets you kind of create like the way more rich environment of like an actual organization that's making many different decisions across many different working groups, um, being able to have that kind of granularity uh while keeping it transparent for everyone that's involved.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, that's really cool. And I think that like it might be helpful for listeners if we could dive a little bit into this concept of conviction voting. I've had a couple of guests on the past that have talked about it uh that are building products that use conviction voting in one way or another. And it's a really powerful tool, you know, for community coordination and it's really being tested in a lot of different ways here. So maybe you could break it down if you could simple explanation. What exactly is conviction voting and why is it such a powerful tool?

SPEAKER_01 7:31

Yeah, the simple description is that it's time-weighted voting. Um, so in a in a conviction voting decision, um when you support a proposal, your support on that proposal grows conviction over time. And that that's really the only kind of difference between that and any other traditional voting model. Uh, but the things that that kind of opens up are really interesting. Uh, first, like the the concept of a continuous decision where there's not a deadline that you're you're kind of deciding for. There's just something that people need to constantly be signaling um in the community for conviction voting enables that. And um, yeah, I think uh lower friction voting uh probably the applications of it are um make more sense when you uh when you think about them like on an application by application basis. Um so like a a type of continuous decision would be uh, for instance, a community's roadmap, and that's not something that's going to have like a moment that people are deciding on it. It's something that people want to always be kind of in agreement with about what the community is doing and why they're there. Um but because of that continuous nature, you you wind up in a situation where you're not asking everyone in the community to rally to read something or or understand something in a specific moment and come together and make a collective decision about that. It it allows for this kind of ability for people to passively interact with the governance in their community and come in on their own time and make decisions when they're they're available or when they're interested. Um, so that's kind of like the continuous aspect of it. But it also turns out that even for the traditional voting of like there's a deadline and people need to make a decision on that deadline, it also helps with a lot of the classic governance abuse situations, the number one being a last minute vote swing. Uh, so some someone with a lot of voting weight is holding their vote until the last second, and they actually decide on behalf of the community because they have enough power to do that, and they just vote and uh on top of there being a a uh like kind of uh power issue with that, there's also just the issues of a community not being able to confidently plan for its future because it doesn't know what the outcome of something is going to be. That's something that you can gain with this time-weighted uh the element of conviction. Is it you're in some ways it's kind of like future archy where you're seeing the future before it's coming because as you're looking at the support across various proposals, you are seeing where the decision outcome is going to be in a week or two weeks, um, but it hasn't quite been executed yet. And with that extra time, you have the ability to change it. If if someone is abusing it, if there's a whale that's making a decision on other people's behalf, then um then people can can dispute that proposal, send it to arbitration, or they can adjust their weights, or they can rally people to say, hey, we need to change this decision. Um so yeah, there's like a lot of really powerful safety features and transparency features of being able to delay the effect of a vote um before it's actually executed. Um and then like separate on the issue of whales, that's kind of that's a uh a separate issue of of like how is the voting weight distributed for a specific decision. And on gardens, we have customization for that where you can have a pool where everyone's voting weight is the same. So there is no whale that is able to influence the decision more than others, or you can do one token, one vote. And we kind of see it as a way to um to kind of cater that to the specific decision when when like maximum democracy is better than something where you want fixed voting weight, when it's something like really sensitive maybe to the treasury of the community, and maybe you don't want everyone to have the same weight. Maybe you want the people with like a lot more of their life savings on the line to be uh weighted more in that decision. So yeah, we just want to enable each decision to kind of handle all of those different situations that they're gonna face.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting too because you know, there is one thing I like about this is there is no like one size fits all model to voting. And I like that you allow for those kind of like different parameters and kind of customizing that, you know, based on the needs of the of the organization or the project. It just really flips the idea of kind of voting on its head, this concept of conviction voting. And I know it can be really hard for some to wrap their heads around myself included, you know, but it's it's really quite powerful. Maybe we can talk about how it kind of ties into uh streaming proposals because I think that's a really another really interesting component of what you have here. Um, and that is where you know funds flow continuously rather than as a one-time allocation, like a grant or something like that. So can you walk us through how this works and kind of how it ties into the conviction voting?

SPEAKER_01 12:39

Yeah. Yeah. So in traditional conviction voting funding requests, someone is requesting a specific dollar amount of funds and and and it's a binary, either that passes and they get all of the funding, or it doesn't pass and they get none of the funding. And for specific types of proposals, that works really well. Um, one hive has an expense reimbursement pool and that works perfectly for it, where someone is posting their receipts and they've paid $300 of tech subscriptions for that month, and uh and they're either getting all of the money back because they're reporting this correctly, or or they're not getting any money back. And uh so that works great for those types of instances, but then streaming conviction uh I think is a better fit for more of the types of funding situations, especially from a public goods provider or a community that's trying to build shared wealth together. Um, and that just takes the amount of conviction that you have on a proposal and adjusts a super fluid stream based on that conviction. And so I I think a lot of people already understand the benefits of streaming funding to uh especially for grants, but for for any type of payment, like a salary for a worker at a company, that would be that's like something that people don't need to be excited about crypto to see that, like, oh yeah, that would be really nice if I didn't get paid every two weeks. Um, so that has benefits on its own. And and then kind of uh in this like triangle of ways that you can protect a a pool and and kind of balance the the issues related to time. Uh streaming is helping with with the actual distribution of funds. And then you have quadratic, quadratically weighting people's voting weight, which is this really cool way that we found on how how we kind of like strike the balance between this fixed voting is really bad for all these situations, one token, one voting is really bad for all these other situations. But quadratically weighted balance is the ability to have more people have more say, but also have uh people with more ownership in that collective have more say. Um, so quadratic is solving one element of this, streaming is solving another element of it, and then conviction is the kind of the third uh point of that triangle that the the conviction itself is solving for the the governance support issues that are related to like when someone supports a proposal, if that's getting executed immediately, you have a lot of security issues. There's there's if funding is getting immediately affected by someone supporting a proposal, then um then there's money that's that's going. And even if even if it is being streamed, it's something that's nice to avoid. And conviction is is the element that can solve that. So yeah, the with streaming voting, we now have the ability on gardens to set up a streaming conviction quadratic pool, which is like mumbo jumbo for anyone that's not an enormous governance nerd. But is something that is will truly work for something as small as a group of contributors for an open source project, even if it's just three or four of them, and as large as an enormous treasury that's trying to find out how to distribute the 5% endowment expenditure that's coming out of its $100 million treasury between all of the different aspects of its ecosystem. So it's like, yeah, we're still in private beta with this, but I'm I'm really excited when we can finally publicly launch this in the next couple of weeks.

SPEAKER_00 16:17

Yeah, for sure. Well, and you know, it's uh it sounds complicated, quadratic conviction, but I think you do a good job of like simplify it, simplifying it and like abstracting that complexity away. And for those just listening for context, uh I'll include some links in the show notes around quadratic funding so you can learn more on quadratic voting. Essentially, it's a mechanism that enables kind of the projects or the or whatever it is, the public good that has more widespread community support to get a greater share of um kind of voting power matching funds, whatever it looks like. So you think of like one person uh donating $10 versus 10 people donating $1, you know, so seeing the more kind of widespread support. But I'll include um some links with some better ways of explaining it than I just did. Um, but we don't have to dive into that right now because we have so much to cover, of course. But I think another thing that you mentioned there that I think is really interesting around the streaming funds is um I like this dynamic element too, right? Because I think one of the challenges with like these kind of voting mechanisms is like, you know, let's say you're in uh a crowdfunding kind of situation where you're voting for projects by allocating funds, and you know, the project that gets the most funds gets the most matching or something like that is like, you know, you get one chance to do your vote and allocate your funds, but a lot can change throughout the voting period, a lot can happen. And so I know that there's this concept that's really being tested a lot around dynamic voting and allowing people to change their votes uh over time, same conviction voting, but that being tied into changing funds. And so an example being with good dollars and their good builders program is that you know, I was a mentor, I had funds to allocate votes to allocate to different projects, which would determine how much funding they got. And I could change those at any time as I saw updates come in, milestones, let's say, oh, Guardians just released this new milestone. I think that that's really awesome. I'm gonna allocate more votes to them, you know, now and maybe take votes away from this other spot where I haven't seen progress. And so it's really quite a game changer and really cool and also like puts a lot of um emphasis on the projects to really kind of uh keep going and at a sustainable pace and and to kind of find that like motivation to do that. Um, but talk to me about dynamic kind of voting, dynamic funding, and how that ties into all this and um kind of how you've seen that practiced so far.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

Yeah, I I think that there's uh so much benefit to being able to update your vote during a during a decision. Um I think that that's kind of like a no-brainer to to me that you would uh not stick someone with their kind of initial opinion on something. Uh but as especially as it released to conviction voting, that's kind of the critical element of it. All of the security benefits of being able to to time delay a vote come from the fact that people can change their their opinion and they can see that how other people's support has uh has been distributed and and realize that they disagree with how that's playing out and and update their um update their support accordingly. Which it it also in a way enables things like ranked choice voting, the the benefits of so a ranked choice voting is uh you have a set of proposals, you rank them one to ten. Uh your first is the one that you would like to win, but it if that one's not going to win, then your the there's an algorithm that allows the your second one to become the one that you're supporting. And it kind of knocks them all down until it says, like, okay, this tenth one is the one that I really don't want to have happen. And uh so that's that's another mechanism, but with conviction voting, because you have that dynamic element, you can kind of on the fly make those decisions of like, well, I wanted this one to win, but it's not, it's it's not winning. And this one that I really don't like is getting a lot of support. Um, so I'd like to remove some support from that one. Um, but the the the final element that's kind of the fail-safe for all of this is the disputability. So being able to say, like, this is not just my preference that I don't want this proposal. This is a fundamental issue with our covenant. Um, like our community's social agreement has said that we are not going to do certain things like this and this. And this proposal is abusive because someone's trying to steal money or they're they're trying to fund something which is completely antithetical to why that group of people is working together. Um, so that's that's when you hit the dispute button, that's like the fire alarm. The the proposal stops. If it's streaming, then all of the streaming funds will then start going into escrow and it'll await the decision of of this arbitration. Um and and on Gardens, you set arbitration as a multi-sig. So that multi-sig has the authority to say whether there was a violation of that community's trust code. Um but yeah, all that is to say that I think dynamic voting is like for a richer governance area, definitely.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

Yeah, definitely. And as someone who's based in Canada and our election systems are on first past the post, I can say I definitely would like to explore other systems, especially ranked choice voting, to make things more fair. Uh so yeah, no, it's it's interesting, right? Because yeah, uh, there's so many different mechanisms that are being tested out here to really kind of you know look at making this process uh not only more fair, but also more efficient and making sure that the right decisions are being made. And you know, I'd love to see kind of how some communities are maybe using this in practice. Uh, might be interested in kind of highlight some case studies. And I know some of them being, you know, good dollar, bread cooperative, among many others. So tell me like what kind of organizations are using this model, how are they using it? What does that look like?

SPEAKER_01 21:45

Yeah, um, we have a pretty healthy mix of um yeah, ecosystem growth like good dollar and bread cooperative, um, chapter based organizations like Green Pill Network and ReFi DAO and um Open. Source software projects, uh, One Hive being the biggest one, definitely. Um, there's some pop-up cities, uh, there's some kind of like broader ecosystems, like safe. Um, and so yeah, but I think uh if you're gonna like look at one case study, I think one hive is probably the best just because the the people governing there have the most experience with conviction voting and are kind of most culturally adapted to it. Uh I think I've it there is a learning curve for other communities to to kind of intuitively begin to see why you would use conviction voting. Um and one hive is has the benefit of five years of doing that and is is making all kinds of like pretty all of the decisions in the in that community are made on gardens. Um yeah. So and and one hive setup is um so its treasury has a fixed uh expenditure rate um of 15% that is flowing into a gardens pool that is then the kind of primary funding source for all of the different initiatives at at One Hive. Um the Treasury itself is managed with a signaling pool. Uh so that's that doesn't have on-chain execution, but people will create a proposal that will say something like uh we should um swap $30,000 worth of our Ethereum for this other token. And so the the Treasury itself is able to be uh communally uh voted on. Um, but then all that that treasury is also secure in that um it it's not up for for proposals to uh request funding from that for like a grant or for expenses that are not gonna le help with the sustainability of the project, basically. But yeah, the there's there's a bunch of other governance decisions that I could go through, but that's that's like a good high-level overview.

SPEAKER_00 23:58

Yeah, no, that's really interesting for sure. And I think that like, yeah, I mean, we could go into so much depth in this interview, and I recognize that I'm probably not uh giving it the time it deserves to really dive into these concepts. Um so I will include resources in the show notes as well from your docs and also like you know, some of the content we've created around these different concepts to help folks really understand it. Um, but hopefully this gives a good high-level overview. And I think it's really kind of um just interesting to uh to hear about how it's being used in practice. And I've been exploring some of the different projects, and you have quite a diverse group there, which is really cool. So I think that like one of the value ads that you bring to this is um maybe to take a step back here, uh, governance can be challenging to maintain. It can, some might find it boring, burdensome. You know, it's not always the most fun and engaging, right? But I think a big part of what you're doing is really trying to like change that up and like make it more fun, make it more empowering, make it more engaging. Um, so how are you doing this? How are you walking through like the approach you're taking to the user experience to really, you know, make it less of a chore and something that people really want to participate in?

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Yeah. Um, I will say that this is the worst thing that we're doing. Gardens, if there's one thing that we're not doing well, we are not making it intuitive and fun and like easier for people to onboard and make decisions. Um, that said, for any group of people, there there are that kind of core group of people who care so much about it that they will do anything to to govern that that community. So we're kind of reliant on those people being the people that come in and and make the decisions. But to some extent, that winds up being the right people to to make decisions. And usually they're pretty well connected with the other people and and their problems that are not interested in governing necessarily, but care about the community. Um but yeah, I think um we're right now in the in the process of of working with um a UX expert on of bringing our kind of uh interface into the uh something that can be more mainstream digestible. Um and and yeah, I I think that that's the separate question there of like the yeah, the the friendliness and making it intuitive and easy and and not creating any friction for people to uh participate if they would like to. Um and then um maximum participation, um which I I kind of pump the brakes on for at least a lot of types of decisions. There's definitely a lot of governance initiatives that seek to um have people make decisions whether or not they're really interested in making those decisions. And um I I I much prefer the this modular setup where you can kind of break it up into piecemeal and and just get the the sections of the decision making to the specific people that actually care about that decision and and not forcing or incentivizing, that's the other word, is like can should we reward people for making decisions? And and that's where I like strongly oppose. I don't think we should be paying anyone to vote or like having any incentive other than you care about the outcome of the decision be the reason that someone is interacting with the governance system. So um, but there are some decisions where where everyone in the community cares about it. And if everyone in the community cares about it, they should all have really easy access to make those decisions and have them execute. So yeah, I but I think Gardens has still some work to do to be at that, a lot of work to do, actually. But we'll get there.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

Well, I think like a lot of Web3 projects is something that's like, you know, being in such a new space and testing new concepts, like yeah, you gotta kind of test the concept first and then build from there. And I think um, yeah, you're you're doing a lot of really cool things to like take away that complexity. And I'm excited to see what comes from working with this UX person as well. That sounds really uh really interesting. And you know, you talked about something there around like the people who really kind of care about the decision or who are really invested, you know, being the ones that vote. Um, what are your thoughts on like um approaches that involve like delegation and people being able to delegate their votes to representatives and stuff like that? What's your thoughts on like that kind of approach and what role you could see that playing in the future?

SPEAKER_01 28:23

Yeah, um I believe that with modular conviction voting, you do not need delegate voting. Um everyone who should have the influence over the decisions are directly the people that should be able to influence those decisions. And a delegate sets up a different power structure that looks a little bit more like a traditional government lobbying and like some people have undue influence on the system that aren't necessarily directly connected to the problems that they're making those decisions on. And uh they're they're kind of incentivized to um gain power um because of the the various good things that can come for them out of that. Uh so yeah, I think um I I much prefer governance systems where we move away from delegation and and move towards direct participation with safeguards so that um the the people are are able to make the right decisions and not be overtaken by anyone that's uh coming in and maliciously trying to influence that.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

Yeah, definitely. And I think like evidence of that is a lot of the governments we see today. I mean, my government here in Canada is like a you know, I have a delegate, you could say a representative that, you know, we vote into power and is supposed to represent us, but are they really doesn't feel like it most of the time, right? And so yeah, I think that that you know can be seen by many people probably listening in their you know daily life as to why maybe you know that isn't the best system. So it's cool that you're uh experimenting with these alternatives. And you know, we've covered a lot of concepts. Um, and I have a couple more questions I want to uh pick your brain on before we wrap up. But you know, for those that are interested in kind of diving more into gardens, learning about it, kind of uh you know, getting set up to launch their own uh community on gardens, what does that look like and what's kind of the first step to do that?

SPEAKER_01 30:19

Yeah, uh we have we have documentation, which is probably a good place to start, docs.gardens.fund. Um, you can also probably learn a lot just by going onto the app and and clicking into the communities and and seeing the decisions that are getting made. Um but um outside of that, so that there is there's a lot of really good uh kind of old documentation now on conviction voting and the mechanism. Uh so that was uh that was a block science. Uh Michael Zargum is the kind of lead creator of the the mechanism of conviction voting. And that well, that was I think in 2019. Um that he he wrote that paper. Um but then in between 2019 and 2021, when One Hive was getting started, um, there's a lot of good articles between OneHive and Javeth and Token Engineering Commons that was talking about um the the mechanism. And it's still to this day, a lot of it's like the best kind of digestible materials on that. Um yeah, and then uh the the other ways to I think to learn more would be uh following Gardens on X and Farcaster and um going in the Discord. Discord is still where most of our community activity is.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

That's awesome. Well, and I'll include all those links folks listening can follow along and get involved. You guys have great docs as well, which is very helpful. Um, as I was looking through them, preparing these questions. Um, you know, one of the things I came across and that we spoke about was a new product uh that you're working with a couple partners on, I understand, uh, called Marquee. Uh, what is it? Um tell me about it. How does it connect to the garden ecosystem?

SPEAKER_01 31:55

Yeah, uh Marquee is a digital message that you can embed on your website, and anyone can pay to change that message. Uh this this was born out of you know, gardens is infrastructure for public goods. Um, it's also very much a public good itself. Uh it's uh aside from being open source, it's also governance, and governance uh doesn't have a good business model. Um we've we've like run the numbers on like theoretically, if we're gonna charge a fee on people staking their governance tokens, how much do we need in governance stake? And it it's an unrealistic, unachievable number. And uh we we were like, okay, we need to find legitimate business models that can fund garden's work. Uh it's been 90% grant funded to this point. And and so Marquee was this kind of way of like, okay, we we have we have activity, we have people that are coming onto this um site, uh, we have valuable digital real estate. Um, and on top of this, this is real estate that we can also offer to the different communities within gardens. And so we um conceived Marquee as a digital message that we can put on the gardens app uh for us to fundraise for ourselves and then also allow communities to embed it within their gardens page and be able to raise funding for their own garden through that or or or whatever operations that they're doing. And so yeah, that was that was the concept that uh Marquee was born from. And uh we we launched that, we launched an MVP of that a couple months ago. And so yeah, you can people can go to marquee.xyz and create a marquee message, integrate it into their website, and you you just select a beneficiary address and um people can pay to to change the message. And yeah, I I the uh the distinction, so uh it's it's most comparable obviously to like Google ads or Facebook ads to the the traditional ad buying models of the internet, which was my work before crypto actually. Um but the difference is that we kind of have these within web 3, especially, we have these small, really passionate communities. So there's there's not enough eyeballs for this to to make sense for for a traditional ad buyer to want to go after. And uh so you're not going to get uh demand from the types of companies that would be using that would be buying that type of message. Um, but because you have this really passionate group, you have this um this, I would call it the public good benefit of um of what it means to have your message on that site. Um, but I think the the thing that it feels most similar to me is um like a donation to a school where you get your name on the building. Um so the the yeah, people are are willing to spend a lot more money for your your marquee message on your site because they know it's going to something that they care about than they would if it was strictly a like I need this many, this many eyeballs to get this many sales in my product. Um but that said, that's like our kind of like initial entry point, and and we feel that we have a there's a lot of demand for this. There's a lot of communities in the space that are looking to raise funding, and and this is kind of a no-brainer way to do that. Um, but if we can succeed with enough people, then eventually we can get a distribution that that is actually interesting for people beyond just uh more altruistic um payments, really.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

Yeah, yeah, for sure. That's interesting. Yeah, and it's cool the way you explained it with the school too. That makes complete sense. Um yeah, I think you're right. Like, you know, this is something that I think really would thrive in a web 3 kind of community, you know, right now, rather than uh, you know, something else, just because, again, of that energy of that kind of uh competitive feeling within the community sometime as well. Um, so I think that yeah, that's definitely a really interesting one that I'll be following. And, you know, you spent a lot of time building in Web3, whether it was on Marquee or Garden since 2021. Um, you know, I'm curious, like throughout all this, what have been the biggest lessons you've learned about, you know, building in Web3 and any kind of challenges or key takeaways you got from your experience that you would share with others?

SPEAKER_01 36:23

That's a really good question. It's been unbelievably challenging. It is I think if I had known how hard this work would be back six years ago, I might have had second thoughts about jumping into it. And it's like I I absolutely see issues with mental health and so many like many different things that are vying for your attention and um and and so much that you can work on, um, but but also so much fragmentation in uh kind of the impact of the work that you can do. Um so yeah, I think um my my strategy and and what I've kind of stuck to and and I think has worked to some extent is just kind of picking the thing that you're you're really have a lot of conviction in and trying as hard as you can to focus on on that on that specific thing. And yeah, the the the other thing being the the people are the things that matter the most. The the the relationships and and the other people who care about this stuff are uh it's like infinitely better if you can have a group of people that are working on something that's um maybe not like exactly the specific thing that you want to work on versus like you alone trying to build something that only you care about, you're it's way less likely to have like a meaningful impact on anyone outside of your immediate circle.

SPEAKER_00 37:53

Yeah, definitely. Absolutely. Uh well put. Um, and I think especially when we're in like a you know an online community, the uh imports of relationships you know grow even more. I think you know, you need to support each other. It is an always moving space. Um, so uh yeah, um great advice. And you know, I'm curious because like, you know, you've been uh experimenting with so many different mechanisms that are really challenging by or challenging traditional governance concepts. So I'm curious, like for those that have you know been a part of these funding cycles, that have seen the stress that comes with, you know, grants and um whether it's a funder or a community or a nonprofit that wants to explore new methods for governance and allocating funds, um, what would you want them to know? Like, what one thing would you want them to know about what's possible with these mechanisms?

SPEAKER_01 38:40

That's a phenomenal question. I'm not sure they have a good enough answer to actually address like the level of the issues that that touches on. But yeah, the in the nonprofit sector, there's the the there's no guarantee of income. And you're in the US, for instance, we've had significant reductions in a lot of the traditional grant programs that used to be federally funded, and people don't really have have control over that. And the the only way to kind of make up for that funding is for people to donate. And um, so uh yeah, the my my recent way of thinking through this problem is that our so our issue with traditional governments is that we are kind of bound, uh like especially from if you're thinking about at a pretty large national level, there's there's a geographic monopoly of um like someone is in charge and and no one else is in charge. So you're you're very much kind of at the the mercy of the the people who are running your geographic area. Uh in our digital space with digital governance, we have this uh optionality. You're not geographically bound to be governed or or to choose to govern. And um and I I think that has the chance to make a lot of really interesting kind of like competitive dynamics that should actually approve those systems. Um, but when I think about creating those organizations, um what what needs to happen is you need to have a hybrid public good, private good. Uh I guess the word we use for them is ecosystem, but you you need a fence around your organization that uh is doing both um public good and private good-based work. This is if you want to have public good value that you're creating. You need to be able to combine that with traditional businesses that sell products and services and are profitable, and you're able to drive some of that revenue towards the public goods of the ecosystem. And and the people that are in the best spot to do that stuff are like network-level crypto organizations, like you're running an L2, you people with substantial treasuries. Octin is in this place, they have a really substantial treasury and they can do a lot of good for public goods. And they're also thinking about this private good thing in combination with that. Um, but those are kind of the the like level of a governance entity that is kind of able to curate that environment where you can get both of those. Um, because yeah, on your own, if you're only doing a public good, you're really going to struggle to get funding pretty much for as long as you're on your own doing that. So you need to somehow be connected into a larger ecosystem that values your work, that is has the financial means to have you keep doing what you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 41:47

Yeah, definitely. And you know, I think it's just been it's been such an incredibly like challenging time for anyone that's seeking out funding uh, you know, in the last uh couple years uh for grant funding, especially those working in public goods and humanitarian contexts. There has been a lot of cuts and everything. So yeah, I think that this has been a perfect case study for folks on the importance of exploring these different mechanisms because we've come to realize that you know we can't rely on those kind of traditional methods of funding. So yeah, I think you're spot on. And I hope those listening along will check it out, uh, start, you know, experimenting, learning about what this can do for you and and uh you know diving in because yeah, I think there's so much opportunity that comes with this. And I'm you know really excited I had the chance to learn from you today and learn about that. And you know, we'll make sure to include all the links in the show notes, of course, for those listening along. Uh, but thank you so much, Paul. It was a pleasure having you here today, learning from you, and uh thank you for taking the time to share your work.

SPEAKER_01 42:38

Thanks for yeah, this was this was really fun talking with you, and I'm a big fan of the show and and uh all the people that you're working with. So excited to talk more.

SPEAKER_00 42:49

And that was Paul Glavin of Gardens. What stands out to me is how intentional Gardens is about solving real problems. Governance fatigue is real, low participation is real. The unsustainability of one-off grant funding is certainly real. And rather than accepting these as inevitable, Gardens is building mechanisms that address them directly. Conviction voting is a powerful idea. The longer you support something, the stronger your voice becomes, rewards patience and genuine commitment over last-minute coordination or whale dominance, and it gives smaller token holders real agency to shaper resources flow. Streaming proposals take that a step further. Instead of the boom and bust cycle of traditional grants, contributors receive continuous funding that reflects ongoing community support. It's a model that feels much more aligned with how real work actually happens. So for listeners who want to learn more about gardens, explore the communities building on it, or launch their own, we've included all the relevant links in the show notes. And if you've been burned by traditional governance, if you sat through endless votes that went nowhere or watched funding dry up after a single grant cycle, I'd encourage you to take a look at what Gardens is building. So a huge thank you to Paula for sharing this work with us today and for helping us build a thriving public goods ecosystem. And that wraps up today's episode of Crypto Altras. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Much as I did. If you're inspired to explore more stories at the intersection of Web3 and Social Impact, be sure to visit us at CryptoAltruist.com for articles, resources, and more. And if you love what you heard, it would mean the world if you could rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast. Your support is huge in helping us reach more listeners like you and keeping the platform going strong. Thanks again for joining us, and I look forward to having you back for the next episode. Until then, let's keep showing the world the good of crypto.