Gardens is a governance framework for spending a shared treasury by conviction voting: members stake their voting weight behind proposals, that support grows stronger the longer it stays in place, and a funding request pays out once its accumulated support crosses a threshold that rises with the share of the pool it asks for (Gardens docs). The 1Hive community built it to govern its own currency, Honey, and released it for other communities in December 2021 (1Hive). A rewrite, Gardens v2, runs on seven EVM networks (among them Gnosis Chain, Optimism, Celo and Base) and is built on Gitcoin's Allo protocol (GitHub). For a DAO designer it is a working example of allocation with no voting deadline, running on public contracts with a public proposal history, and it grew out of the Aragon app that first ran conviction voting in production.

1Hive and Honey

1Hive is an open community that issues a currency called Honey ($HNY) and uses it to fund work on shared infrastructure. Its wiki says it is not a company, has no core team and has never held a crowd sale; anyone can buy Honey or earn it by contributing, and holders vote with it (1Hive wiki). Its conviction voting app for Aragon was first committed in August 2019 (GitHub).

Luke Duncan's Honey launch post of 6 July 2020 sets out the model. New Honey is issued every block into a Common Pool. Anyone can propose that part of the pool go to a beneficiary, holders stake on the proposals they support, and a proposal passes once its conviction crosses a threshold that depends on how much of the pool it requests, so a small request needs less sustained support than a large one (1Hive blog). Newcomers could claim Honey from a faucet gated by BrightID, a proof-of-personhood network, or earn it through Pollen, which rewarded participation on Discord, the forum and GitHub (1Hive FAQ).

The community ran on xDai, an Ethereum sidechain with five-second blocks and low fees, which it described as the reason social experiments of this kind were affordable (1Hive FAQ); xDai was merged into Gnosis Chain at the end of 2021 (1Hive recap, Dec 2021). By its own account 1Hive launched Celeste, Agave, Gardens and Honeycomb in 2021 and expanded to Polygon (1Hive recap, Dec 2021). Celeste is its dispute-resolution protocol: Honey holders stake to be drafted as jurors who rule on challenged actions, and it went live on 11 April 2021 (1Hive wiki FAQ; contracts). Honeyswap, a decentralised exchange the community runs on Gnosis Chain and Polygon, came out of the same period (1Hive wiki; GitHub).

Gardens v1: 1Hive's model as a template

Sacha introduced Gardens on the project's Substack on 28 May 2021 as a 1Hive initiative to let any community run the process 1Hive used on itself. A garden had three parts: conviction voting for continuous allocation; a Community Covenant, a social contract stored on IPFS that every proposal must respect; and Celeste, whose randomly drafted jurors rule on whether a challenged proposal breaks the covenant. Giveth and Agave were named as early adopters (Gardens Substack).

The platform opened on 14 December 2021 at gardens.1hive.org, on xDai and Polygon with Rinkeby for testing. It offered two kinds of garden. A Veneto garden, the kind 1Hive runs, mints a new community token into its Common Pool and applies a configurable dynamic issuance policy that mints or burns pool tokens relative to a set threshold. A Boboli garden imports an existing ERC-20 and can pay incentives to holders who bring their tokens in for voting rights. Either kind could make its Common Pool a Safe, so a garden could use Zodiac modules alongside conviction voting (1Hive). Each garden is an Aragon DAO built from a garden template (1Hive/gardens).

Giveth's GIVgarden on Gnosis Chain is a v1 deployment that publishes its parameters. 1Hive's own v1 garden still handles its Common Pool proposals (gardens.1hive.org). The conviction arithmetic in the v1 app, including the per-block decay that ties a half-life in days to a chain's block time, is covered on the conviction voting page.

Gardens v2: communities, pools and the Council Safe

The team announced v2 as "an upgrade 3 years in the making" and scheduled its beta for August 2024 (Gardens blog). Its repository was created in November 2023 and is licensed GPL-3.0; it depends on Allo Protocol v2, The Graph and Safe (GitHub). The earliest proposal the Optimism deployment records is dated 26 September 2024 (Optimism subgraph).

v2 arranges a deployment in three layers. An ecosystem forms around any ERC-20 token, permissionlessly, and has no management rights over what sits inside it (docs). A community inside an ecosystem is also permissionless to create; it is bound by a Covenant and run by a Council Safe. Joining means signing the covenant and depositing a registration stake in the community's token, and a council can add a community fee paid to a beneficiary it names, of which a percentage goes to the Gardens platform as a protocol fee (docs; contract). A pool is a conviction-voting instance inside a community, and only the Council Safe can approve a new one (docs).

Pools come in three types. A funding pool holds tokens that proposals request in set amounts, and anyone can execute a proposal once its conviction reaches the threshold its size requires. A signalling pool attaches no on-chain action, and a community reads its standings or wires them to another contract. A streaming pool pays beneficiaries continuously through Superfluid, at a rate that rises with conviction (docs). The documentation still marks streaming as coming soon, but the contracts define it as a third proposal type (ICVStrategy.sol) and GoodDollar Builders opened streaming proposals in May 2026 (Celo subgraph).

Each pool sets its own conviction parameters: a growth rate expressed as a half-life in days; a minimum conviction for the smallest possible request; a spending limit, as a share of the pool, above which no proposal can pass; and a fixed minimum threshold that protects a new pool before much voting weight is active (docs). Each pool also chooses how stake becomes voting weight: fixed (equal for every member), capped, unlimited (one token, one vote) or quadratic, where weight is the square root of tokens staked (docs). The contracts add a fifth, custom system that reads weight from an external registry (ICVStrategy.sol). That choice per pool lets one community run quadratic weighting for grants and one-member-one-vote for an election. For sybil resistance the Gnosis Chain deployment carries a Gitcoin Passport scorer and a GoodDollar identity check (subgraph config).

The contracts still measure conviction in blocks: the conviction and threshold functions take the number of blocks since the last update (ConvictionsUtils.sol). The app converts the half-life a council enters in days into a per-block decay using a block time it holds for each chain, for example 5.2 seconds for Gnosis Chain and 1 second for Celo (chains.tsx). A pool's advertised half-life holds only while its chain keeps that block time.

Governance: who decides what

Members decide allocations. A member activates governance in a pool and spreads voting weight across proposals, changing it at any time; there is no quorum and no closing date, and a proposal executes when its conviction crosses the threshold set by its requested amount, the pool's balance and the total weight active in the pool (docs; ConvictionsUtils.sol).

The Council Safe decides everything else. It writes the covenant, creates funding and signalling pools, updates pool parameters, sets the community fee and, where the community has enabled it, can remove members it considers malicious (docs). When it removes one, the contract sends that member's registration stake to an address the council names; a member who leaves on their own gets the stake back (CommunityMemberFacet.sol). The v2 announcement presents this as a deliberate change from v1, where parameters moved through token-holder Decision Voting, which it calls governance-intensive (Gardens blog). The docs state the consequence: governance inside a community can be centralised in its Council Safe (docs).

Disputes go to a Tribunal. Each community names a Safe address to arbitrate its funding and signalling pools. Any member who believes a proposal breaks the covenant can dispute it by posting collateral, the Tribunal has one week to rule, and a disputant who loses forfeits the collateral (docs; docs). In v1 that role belonged to Celeste's drafted jurors; v2 lets a community choose any Safe, which the team describes as composable through Zodiac (Gardens blog). 1Hive still routes its own challenges through Celeste (1hive.org).

Gardens has no protocol-wide governance token. The project runs its own community, Gardineros, on Optimism; its members vote with $GARDEN, issued on Juicebox, and in 2025 they used a signalling pool to set how Celo Public Goods funding was streamed to communities on Celo (Celo forum).

Adoption and current status

The repository's deployment config lists about 200 community contracts on mainnets: 53 on Arbitrum, 42 on Base, 38 on Optimism, 36 on Celo, 23 on Gnosis Chain, 8 on Polygon and 3 on Ethereum (networks.json, read 2 Oct 2026). Most of those queried have a handful of members, and several are named as tests. Communities with an identifiable organisation behind them, as the project's subgraphs reported them on 2 October 2026:

• 1Hive on Gnosis Chain: 73 members, $HNY staked; its latest proposal was created on 28 September 2026 and one executed on 21 September (subgraph).
• GoodDollar Builders on Celo: 47 members, funding GoodDollar's open-source contributors (GoodDollar forum); a proposal executed on 14 September 2026 and another was created on 30 September (subgraph).
• Greenpill Gov Guild on Optimism, 54 members, and Bread Cooperative Network on Gnosis Chain, 14 members: both executed funding proposals in August or September 2026 (Optimism subgraph; Gnosis subgraph).
• ReFi DAO Garden and Greenpill Brasil on Celo, with 32 and 29 members; Greenpill Brasil runs 18 pools (subgraph).
• Gitcoin Grants Garden on Optimism, 100 members, which ran Gitcoin's GG23 community round on Gardens; its latest proposal dates from October 2025 (subgraph).
• Communities registered as Superfluid DAO on Base, 839 members staking $SUP, and Blockscout on Gnosis Chain, 383 members; Superfluid DAO's latest proposal dates from December 2025 and Blockscout's from May 2025 (Base subgraph; Gnosis subgraph).

Two Gitcoin rounds ran on Gardens. Paul Glavin's proposal for a GG22 round in September 2024 reported 10 communities building on v2 and more than 80 asking for access (Gitcoin forum). The GG23 round that followed moved fully from quadratic funding to conviction voting: it raised $60.7k, including $30k in matching from Gitcoin, 1Hive and Celo Public Goods, funded 21 communities and drew 104 participants, and members joined by signing its covenant and staking 1 $GTC. Its retrospective calls complexity the round's greatest challenge, with participants reporting friction in the interface (Gitcoin forum, Jun 2025). In August 2025 Celo Public Goods began streaming 80% of the 3,374 $CELO that Gardens had earned in its Support Streams programme to funding pools on Celo, for three months (Celo forum).

Gardens v2 is under active development: its repository was last pushed on 1 October 2026, and its most recent commits, in September 2026, integrate Markee, a paid message board, so communities can earn revenue from it (GitHub). Between March and September 2026 the repository published 13 security advisories, six rated high, most of them in the streaming and dispute code (GitHub advisories). The v1 code changes rarely: the v1 interface was last pushed in March 2025, the conviction voting app in January 2023, and the Aragon template is archived (gardens-ui; conviction-voting-app; gardens-template).

1Hive remains active and uses both versions. Its site, rewritten in June 2026, sends Common Pool proposals and major Honey governance to its v1 garden, uses its v2 community for focused pools covering contributor rewards, liquidity, citizenship and council elections, and keeps Celeste for disputes (1hive.org). It now sets Honey the goal of becoming a reserve asset for public development (1hive.org). In September 2024 its treasury held more than $600k, according to the GG22 proposal, which named 1Hive's funding Safe as the source of that round's matching pool (Gitcoin forum).

How Caper approaches this

Gardens and Caper both move away from the one-off token vote with a deadline, in different directions. A Gardens pool never closes: support builds while it stays in place, a request passes once its conviction crosses a threshold that rises with what it asks for, and any number of proposals run side by side. A caper decides one proposal at a time: members rank its options, a winning action needs a supermajority of the weight cast, and the caper's own market then gets a window in which selling can veto it (Proposals). Gardens suits a steady flow of small grants better: a small request needs little sustained support, nobody has to turn up on a particular day, and a community can choose quadratic or one-member-one-vote weighting pool by pool, where a caper weighs each ballot by the member's tokens and voting record (Voting). Where Gardens relies on a covenant and a Tribunal Safe to strike an abusive proposal, a caper prices objection in its market, and a member who has voted can leave with a share of the treasury without asking anyone (Leaving a caper); a member who leaves a Gardens community gets back their registration stake, with no claim on any pool (rage quit and exit rights compares the two approaches).

References

• 1Hive wiki – Welcome to 1Hive
• Luke Duncan, “Honey” (1Hive blog, 6 Jul 2020)
• 1Hive – FAQ
• 1Hive wiki – FAQ (Celeste launch)
• 1Hive – Monthly Recap December 2021 (14 Jan 2022)
• Sacha, “Introducing Gardens” (Gardens Substack, 28 May 2021)
• 1Hive, “Welcome to Gardens” (14 Dec 2021)
• Gardens, “Introducing Gardens v2”
• 1Hive/gardens-v2 (GitHub)
• gardens-v2 – networks.json (deployed communities per chain)
• gardens-v2 – ICVStrategy.sol (proposal types and point systems)
• gardens-v2 – ConvictionsUtils.sol (conviction and threshold)
• gardens-v2 – CommunityMemberFacet.sol (registration, leaving, removal)
• gardens-v2 – chains.tsx (per-chain block times)
• gardens-v2 – Gnosis subgraph config (Passport and GoodDollar sybil contracts)
• gardens-v2 – security advisories
• Gardens documentation
• Gardens docs – Communities
• Gardens docs – Conviction pool types
• Gardens docs – Conviction parameters
• Gardens docs – Dispute
• Gardens v2 subgraph, Gnosis Chain (queried 2 Oct 2026; Optimism, Celo and Base subgraphs at the same path)
• Paul Glavin, GG22 community round proposal (Gitcoin forum, 21 Sep 2024)
• Paul Glavin, Gitcoin Grants Garden GG23 retrospective (Gitcoin forum, 6 Jun 2025)
• Paul Glavin, Celo Support Streams to Gardens funding pools (Celo forum, 6 Aug 2025)
• GoodDollar – Builders Pool (GoodDollar forum, 5 Sep 2025)
• 1Hive – Navigating core community infrastructure (26 Jun 2026)
• 1Hive – Why Honey? (26 Jun 2026)
• 1Hive/conviction-voting-app (GitHub)
• 1Hive/gardens-template (GitHub, archived)
• 1Hive/gardens – v1 template, subgraph and connector (GitHub)
• 1Hive wiki – Honeyswap