---
title: "Giveth (GIV)"
url: "https://caper.network/wiki/daos/public-goods/giveth"
updated: 2026-08-25
license: CC-BY-4.0
license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Giveth (GIV)

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| **Name** | Giveth (GIV) |
| **Type** | [Public-goods / donation-platform DAO](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/fundamentals/types-of-daos) |
| **Founded** | Second half of 2016, by Griff Green, Jordi Baylina and other members of the Ethereum White Hat Group ([Giveth history](https://github.com/Giveth/giveth-docs/blob/HEAD/whatisgiveth/history.md)); the [Giveth GitHub organisation](https://github.com/Giveth) dates from 15 November 2016 |
| **Tokens** | **GIV** (1bn minted, ERC-20) · **gGIV** (wrapped GIV, used in the GIVgarden) · **rGIV** (non-financial reputation token) |
| **Governance** | Three venues: [conviction voting](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/conviction-voting) in the GIVgarden (1hive Gardens on Gnosis Chain) · rGIV reputation voting on an Aragon deployment · GIV/GIVpower token voting on [Snapshot](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/voting/snapshot) (`giv.eth`) |
| **Products** | giveth.io donation platform (zero platform fee) · GIVbacks donor rewards · GIVpower project curation · [quadratic-funding](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/quadratic-voting-and-funding) rounds · DeVouch attestations |
| **Chains** | Ethereum mainnet, Gnosis Chain, Optimism, Polygon (the [GIVbacks-eligible set](https://docs.giveth.io/givethmatchingpool)) |
| **Notable for** | The MiniMe token contract; the July 2017 Parity multisig white-hat rescue; running the OSS quadratic-funding rounds for [Gitcoin](/wiki/daos/public-goods/gitcoin-dao)'s GG24 |
| **Status** | 🟢 Active — most recent Snapshot proposal opened 29 July 2026 (checked 2 August 2026) |

**Giveth** is a donation platform and a DAO built around one deliberately awkward economic idea: that the person who _gives_ money away should be rewarded for it. Where [Gitcoin](/wiki/daos/public-goods/gitcoin-dao) concentrates on allocating a matching pool well and [Protocol Guild](/wiki/daos/public-goods/protocol-guild) on paying a fixed set of maintainers, Giveth takes the demand side: it charges no platform fee on donations, then pays donors back in its own token, and lets token holders stake to decide which projects that reward flows to most generously. The result is a public-goods DAO whose governance surface is unusually wide — three separate voting venues, a working-group budget cycle, and an attestation layer — and one of the longest continuously-running organisations in the sector, with an origin story that predates the word "DAO" being used the way it is now.

## From the White Hat Group to a donation platform

Giveth was founded in the second half of 2016 by **Griff Green**, **Jordi Baylina** and other members of the Ethereum White Hat Group — the same people who had just spent the summer working through the fallout of The DAO. Their first output was infrastructure rather than a product: the [MiniMe token](https://medium.com/giveth/the-minime-token-open-sourced-by-giveth-2710c0210787) contract, a [Vault](https://medium.com/giveth/the-vault-contract-open-sourced-by-giveth-fe2261f7b91b) contract, and a [MilestoneTracker](https://github.com/Giveth/milestonetracker), all open-sourced ([Giveth history](https://github.com/Giveth/giveth-docs/blob/HEAD/whatisgiveth/history.md)). MiniMe — an ERC-20 that keeps a historical record of every holder's balance, so a snapshot at any past block can be read on demand — became a standard building block for token voting across the ecosystem.

The group's most-cited moment came on **19 July 2017**, during the Parity multisig incident. By Giveth's own account, its developers used the same vulnerability an attacker was exploiting to drain 500 at-risk wallets into a secure account before the attacker could reach them, rescuing 47,000 ETH in the first pass and over **$208 million** of crypto in total, then rebuilt secure wallets and returned the funds to their owners by 31 July, declining donations for the work. The same year the team declared itself a _Decentralized Altruistic Community_ and reorganised on [holacratic](https://www.holacracy.org/) lines — circles, weekly governance meetings — a structure that survives today as the DAO's Working Groups and Chapters.

The consumer product arrived in two waves. The original 2017 DApp eventually shipped as **Giveth TRACE** in July 2021; a rewritten platform launched as **Giveth.io** in March 2021 with peer-to-peer donations on mainnet and xDai (now Gnosis Chain). The token economy — announced by Green at The DAOist in Paris that July — followed as the **GIVeconomy**.

## The GIVeconomy: GIV, GIVstream and GIVbacks

**1 billion GIV** were minted at the launch of the GIVeconomy. Only **100 million** were liquid immediately; the remaining **900 million** were committed to the **GIVstream**, a continuous release running until **23 December 2026** ([GIVeconomy docs](https://docs.giveth.io/giveconomy)). Anyone who claims GIV from any part of the economy also opens a stream of further GIV that drips out over the remaining term — a vesting design that ties reward size to how early you participated rather than to a cliff schedule, and one that is now within months of fully unlocking.

**GIVbacks** is the demand-side mechanism. Donate at least **$5** in an eligible token to a _verified_ project and Giveth returns **50% to 80% of the USD value of the donation** in GIV, with the exact percentage set by the receiving project's GIVpower rank. Rounds last two weeks and each round has **1 million GIV** available; if donations exceed that budget, every donor is scaled down proportionally rather than the round closing early ([GIVbacks docs](https://docs.giveth.io/givbacks)). Giveth itself takes **no platform fee** on donations, so GIVbacks is the platform's entire economic pitch to a donor: give, and get a claim on the platform's governance back.

## GIVpower: paying people to curate

The supply-side counterpart is **GIVpower**, and it is the part of Giveth most worth studying as a governance mechanism. Staking GIV in the GIVfarm mints GIVpower **1:1**. Stakers may then lock for between **1 and 26 rounds** of two weeks each — up to a year — and locking multiplies both the staking APR and the GIVpower by `√(1 + N)`, where _N_ is the number of rounds locked. Ten rounds gives a multiplier of about **3.32**; the maximum 26-round lock gives about **5.20** ([GIVpower docs](https://docs.giveth.io/givpower)).

That is a square-root time-lock curve, and the contrast with the linear-decay curve of [vote-escrow tokenomics](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/vote-escrow) is the interesting part: a square root pays most of its bonus in the first few rounds and flattens after, so it buys commitment without making the longest lock overwhelmingly dominant. Holders spend GIVpower by **boosting** up to **20 projects** at a time. Ranks are recomputed each GIVbacks round from the _average_ GIVpower behind a project across the previous round, and the rank sets the donor reward: the top-ranked project yields up to **80% GIVbacks**, an unranked verified project **50%**.

So GIVpower is a [curation market](/wiki/economics/curation-markets) in which the curated good is a discount on somebody else's donation. It gives stakers a reason to research projects that has nothing to do with a proposal vote, which is a rare answer to [voter apathy](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/voter-apathy): the work is continuous, the reward is continuous, and no ballot has to be scheduled for any of it to happen.

## Three governance venues, one DAO

Giveth splits decisions across three systems rather than routing everything through one contract ([governance process](https://docs.giveth.io/governanceprocess)).

**The GIVgarden** runs on [conviction voting](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/conviction-voting) via 1hive's **Gardens** framework on Gnosis Chain, and is where treasury requests land. Members wrap GIV into **gGIV** and stake it behind proposals; conviction accrues the longer a stake sits. Its published parameters are a **30-day** conviction growth, a **2.50%** spending limit per proposal, **5%** minimum conviction, a **5,000 GIV** action deposit and a **10,000 GIV** challenge deposit, with a **7-day** settlement period. Non-financial questions use **Tao voting** — binary, delegable, with quiet-ending protection against last-minute flips — at **90%** support required. Challenged proposals escalate to **Celeste**, a decentralised court, as the final backstop ([GIVgarden docs](https://docs.giveth.io/givgarden)).

**rGIV** is a non-financial reputation token held by DAO members, voted on an Aragon deployment with plain yes/no mechanics and a five-day window. Only rGIV holders may propose or vote there, which keeps operational decisions inside the contributor body rather than the token market. That venue looks dormant in practice: the client URL the governance docs publish for it, `optimism.aragon.blossom.software`, returns NXDOMAIN as of 2 August 2026, so the live governance load is carried by the GIVgarden and Snapshot.

**Snapshot** carries community-wide signalling and budget ratification in the `giv.eth` space, where GIV held _and_ GIV staked in GIVpower both count toward voting power. As of 2 August 2026 the space has run **73 proposals** for **315 followers**, with a five-day voting period ([snapshot.org/#/giv.eth](https://snapshot.org/#/giv.eth)). Two things stand out in the live data. First, a documentation gap: the governance docs state the quorum is **1 million GIV**, while the space's own Snapshot configuration returns a default quorum of **10 million** — a tenfold difference between what the docs tell a prospective voter and what the voting client enforces. Second, turnout: recent proposals close with roughly **10 to 29 voting addresses** apiece, including a July 2026 request for 8.5M GIV to extend GIVpower rewards to February 2027 that drew ten. Voting _power_ is in the hundreds of millions and quorum is never the binding constraint; the number of distinct humans is. That is the same concentration pattern documented across [token-weighted DAOs](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/token-weighted-voting), and it holds even where the token is explicitly earned by giving money away.

## Working Groups, Seasons and the Advice Process

Operationally the DAO is split into **Working Groups** — currently Dapp, GIVeconomy, DAO Ops, Quadratic Funding and Fundraising — each owning its own budget, goals and contributors, plus skill-based **Chapters** (Development, Design, Comms & Marketing, Product, devOps) that cut across them and hold no budget of their own ([DAO structure](https://docs.giveth.io/daostructure)). Working Groups run in **Seasons** of three or six months; at each boundary a lead posts what the group achieved and what it plans next, with goals framed at three ambition levels — **SHRINK, SUSTAIN and GROW** — and GIV holders vote on which groups to fund. It is a clean, legible instance of the [working-group](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/membership/subdaos-and-working-groups) pattern, and the three-scope framing is a neat trick for budget votes: the electorate picks an ambition level rather than haggling over a single number.

Before anything reaches a vote it must clear the **Advice Process**: every legitimate proposal starts on the [Giveth forum](https://forum.giveth.io/) and must sit open for feedback for a **minimum of five days**. A proposal may shorten or skip that window in a financial emergency, but only with a written disclaimer explaining why — and the docs warn plainly that doing so lowers its chance of passing. Conduct is governed by a signed **Community Covenant**, which is also the reference document Celeste rules against when a GIVgarden proposal is challenged.

## Quadratic funding, and running GG24's OSS rounds

Giveth has run [quadratic-funding](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/quadratic-voting-and-funding) rounds on its own platform since 2023, matching donations to verified projects out of a pool held by the `donation.eth` multisig, a **7-of-15** signer set managed by core contributors ([matching-pool docs](https://docs.giveth.io/givethmatchingpool)). Matching-fund distributions are ratified on Snapshot after the fact rather than executed automatically, which puts a human ratification step between the QF calculation and the payout.

In October 2025 Giveth operated the **open-source software rounds of Gitcoin's GG24** — the first round of "Gitcoin 3.0", which spread roughly $1.8M across six domains using six different allocation mechanisms at once. Giveth ran two of them (Developer Tooling & Infrastructure, and Interop Standards, Infra & Analytics) against a **$300,000** matching pool, drawing **$36,657** in crowdfunding from **1,286 unique donors** across **3,042 donations** ([GG24 OSS QF retrospective](https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/gg24-oss-qf-on-giveth-retrospective/24890)). The grantee count depends which Gitcoin document you read: the [results thread](https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/gg24-oss-quadratic-funding-results/24782) lists **55** projects in the tooling round and **23** in the interop round — 78 in total — while the retrospective counts **64** funded projects. Every other figure agrees exactly across the two: $29,739 + $6,918 in donations, 2,361 + 681 individual donations, and 200,000 + 100,000 USDC of matching.

The retrospective is candid about what those numbers mean. The crowdfunding-to-matching ratio came in at **12.22%**, below GG23's 15.88% and GG22's 19.43% — every dollar of matching pulled in fewer donor dollars than the round before. Donor _count_ beat three comparable 2025 Giveth rounds, but donations per donor fell to 2.36, and the round's much tighter eligibility (64 projects, against 235–496 historically) is named as a cause alongside a general slowdown in public-goods funding. That slowdown is the same one visible in the [pause of Optimism's Retro Funding](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/retroactive-public-goods-funding) in January 2026, and it is the backdrop against which every funder in this section is now operating.

## DeVouch: attestations as a legitimacy layer

**DeVouch** is Giveth's answer to the question every grants platform eventually hits — not "is this donor a real person" but "is this project what it claims to be". It is built on the [Ethereum Attestation Service](https://attest.org/): recognised _Attester Groups_, defined as sets of addresses holding the same attestation from the same issuing authority, publish **vouches** and **flags** against projects, and DeVouch indexes those signals across [Gitcoin](/wiki/daos/public-goods/gitcoin-dao), Giveth and [Optimism](/wiki/daos/networks/optimism-collective) Retro Funding in one place ([DeVouch docs](https://docs.giveth.io/devouch/what-is-devouch)). Anyone may attest, but only groups on the indexed list are surfaced — Optimism's RetroPGF badgeholder schema is the worked example, and new groups are added through the public repository.

It is a deliberately different shape from the identity-side approaches catalogued under [Sybil resistance](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/membership/sybil-resistance-in-daos): rather than scoring the wallet that donates, DeVouch scores the grantee, and it does so with reusable, portable, public attestations instead of a platform-private review queue. For a funder deciding whether a project deserves a matching multiplier, that is the cheaper half of the problem to attack.

## Published as machine-readable grant data

Giveth is one of the few grant programmes whose rounds are published in a standard machine-readable shape rather than only as a website. It is one of three systems carried by [DAOstar](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/analytics/daostar)'s OpenGrants gateway, which aggregates grant programmes under the [DAOIP-5](https://github.com/metagov/daostar/blob/main/DAOIPs/daoip-5.md) grants-management schema alongside Octant and the Stellar Community Fund. Read from [the public gateway API](https://grants.daostar.org/api/v1/grantPools?system=giveth) on **9 August 2026**, Giveth publishes **10 grant pools** – among them Giving Season, Meta Pool APAC and a $250,000 Buidl on Polygon round – each carrying its funding size in a structured `totalGrantPoolSize` field, plus an `io.giveth.systemMetadata` extension for the fields the schema does not cover. That is what makes a Giveth round directly comparable with an [SCF or Octant round](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/retroactive-public-goods-funding) without scraping either, and it is the practical payoff of a funder doing the unglamorous work of publishing to someone else's schema.

## Where Giveth sits

Among the public-goods funders in this directory, Giveth occupies the retail-donor end. [Gitcoin](/wiki/daos/public-goods/gitcoin-dao) is a mechanism laboratory that allocates matching pools; [Protocol Guild](/wiki/daos/public-goods/protocol-guild) is a time-weighted split contract for a known set of maintainers; [MolochDAO](/wiki/daos/public-goods/molochdao) is a small, ragequit-protected grant committee. Giveth is the one trying to make the _ordinary donation_ economically attractive, and to fund itself by governing who benefits from that subsidy.

The design deserves its scrutiny in both directions. It is a genuine experiment in paying for attention to public goods continuously rather than in scheduled votes, and GIVpower is one of the better-specified curation mechanisms running in production. But the honest reading of its own numbers is that it has not escaped the pattern: participation concentrates, turnout is a handful of addresses, and the GIVstream that funded the whole reward economy runs out in December 2026. What Giveth does next — with the stream exhausted and the crowdfunding ratio falling across the sector — is the more informative thing to watch than anything in its documentation.

One recent line of funding came from a peer's ending rather than from donors. When the [Token Engineering Commons](/wiki/daos/public-goods/token-engineering-commons) closed its redemption window, 70 of 724 eligible wallets had claimed and roughly a third of the treasury was left on the table; the TEC's [final results post](https://forum.tecommons.org/t/tec-claims-process-final-results/1551) names Giveth as the destination for that residue. The transfer resolves first-party against an Optimism RPC node - **41,537.590536 DAI** and **11.494624 rETH** in block `153675651` on 2 July 2026, into a thirteen-owner Safe holding 2,699,249 GIV. It is a small sum against the GIVstream, and a useful precedent for the sector: a wound-down DAO's unclaimed assets went to another public-goods funder by a vote taken before the wind-down began, rather than to whoever still held the keys.