Conviction Voting for 24/7 Democracy with Paul Glavin
I spoke with Paul Glavin, contributor to 1Hive and founder of Gardens v2, a platform for communities to manage assets democratically using conviction voting. 1Hive was one of the first projects in the crypto space to explore alternative governance mechanisms on Gnosis Chain which is the chain where we've build Breadchain Cooperative. We discussed what conviction voting is, how to better fund public goods in crypto with it and the learnings so far. I also wrote about conviction voting and 1Hiv...
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My focus has always been on public goods funding with crypto. I didn't really believe it. I didn't think that that was, like, possible that an organization could be decentralized. You're effectively punishing your future self with how badly you want a decision in the moment. You're not being rewarded for your past self's decision that you have stuck with over time. Basically, the only reason that you should hold a broken stone is because you care about what the community is doing and you want to have a a say or you wanna have ownership, then now those decisions are getting made. If you want to be in a community, you have to act like a community. That means dealing with the types of issues that communities deal with. Yeah. At the end of the day, it's the quality of the people that are gonna decide whether they're a community or not. What we really can do in crypto is make public goods much better funded and much better managed than they are today. And so we call all of these public goods where the world is failing us and where we can step in and use these people and this technology to to make it significantly better. And that's our opportunity in this space.
Hi, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socials podcast. I'm Josh, and I'm here with Paul Glavin, who is the founder of Gardens v two, which is a really interesting governance application developed under OneHive, which uses this interesting voting mechanism called conviction voting. It's also a mechanism that I wrote about in my book, Blockchain Radicals. So I'm really interested and excited to have, Paul Glavin here to talk about what they've built and, yeah, what what conviction voting is and what is interesting about it. So yeah. Hey, Paul. How are you doing? I want to give an introduction to to our audience about who you are, where you come from, and maybe start talking about maybe, like, the the history of OneHive and what it is.
Yeah. I'm Paul. I am, as you mentioned, the founder of Gardens v two. I have been a contributor at OneHive since, 2021. That's about how long that I've been a full time contributor in this, capital allocation decision mechanism space of of crypto. My my focus has always been on public goods funding with crypto, And One Hive was the the, like, kind of first organization that I found that, like, really captured, my interest in, what, what I thought could be most powerful and useful for the the world about crypto. So that that's kinda, like, how I came into this space. The OneHive, history is in 2021, or a little before then in 2020, there were some developers from Aragon who had read about conviction voting from block science. Michael Zargan was the original theorist, and then he worked with the common stack, on kind of building out a model for what a richer signaling mechanism might look like. And, some of the guys got really excited about this were some developers and contributors to Eragon at the time, and they put together a proposal, to to found One Hive. They got a grant from Eragon, and they built out a governance framework using conviction voting, and then also a, subjective oracle that they built called Celeste. And and they crafted really this entire framework all around this, this decision mechanism, which was truly decentralized and could enable bottom up governance. So this like, as you can imagine, this was an enormous task for them to do back in this time. They had really smart developers working on it. On top of tooling, I imagine. Right. And back in 2021, we didn't have l twos. We didn't have, like, the scaling infrastructure. The UX of crypto was, like, 10 times worse than it was today, and it's still not great. And they the OneHive built on the xDai network, which at that time was, like, kinda felt like a test net. But it was the one place that you could experiment with things like on chain governance that was cheap enough to to actually build it. But because this network was undeveloped, they needed to, do a Uniswap fork, which they made called HoneySwap. The the Celeste the subjective oracle was a fork of Aragon Court, and they also, some of the contributors forked Aave, the lending protocol. And so, like, literally building the infrastructure for the Xdai network from scratch, One Hive kind of basically built this little, this little kingdom on Xdai network. This is, like, way back in 2021. So I came in, in 2021. When I when I first found OneHive, it had the Honeytoken. It had the conviction voting common pool where people could request funding from this common pool for whatever they wanted. And when I saw that, I was instantly, like, this is really cool. This is, like, a a fully functioning economic protocol that, can fund anything, and my brain was immediately going towards public goods applications of that funding. And, the other element to it, which I did not understand at that point, was the DAO element. And when I first came into OneHive, I had kind of heard about this concept of a DAO. I didn't really believe it. I didn't think that that was, like, possible that an organization could be decentralized. But I remember coming into, the Discord at OneHive, and I saw that there's a meeting scheduled. And, this this meeting it was the first call that everyone went on in in OneHive, and it was, a meeting between One Hive, the Gardens team, and, the the ETH trader subreddit, which was launching a token, x moons, and and they wanted to to to launch a garden for x moons. And and so they had an open call, and I, who had never talked to anyone at One Hive before, was in this call and was hearing them discuss, like, the potential details of a a partnership between these organizations. And that was, like, the first moment of, like, oh, shit. This is, like, this is actually the the these guys, at least, are really trying to to be open and transparent and have, like, a different type of organization. And then I had a lot of conversations with the contributors at that time, and they clearly this was, like, intrinsic. They believed that this is the way that an organization should run. And and, like, that is such a huge piece because when the technology is not there yet, it really took the, like, individuals caring about that being, like, a core piece of like, a core value of the organization for it to actually work that way. So that was, like, the beginning beginning of me being, like, the DAO pills, I guess.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was, like, definitely 2021 was definitely a moment I feel with with DAOs for sure and, like, the kind of the the the start of it, and it can be, I think yeah. I imagine that experience in particular being like, oh, wow. Now I'm part of this conversation all of a sudden. You know, whenever you know, in day to day life, you don't feel like you're part of conversations about, like, partnerships or something like that, or you may not I mean, if that's not part of your job, you know, you don't feel like you're a part you get to be a part of that conversation.
Mhmm. And the immediate assumption is that the real decisions are being made behind, you know, in private chats between people and that, like, that there there is a a power dynamic somewhere that you don't have access to. Right. And, yeah, it made it feel like that wasn't the case, that you could come into this organization. And if you had ideas and, like, work ethic, you could do what you wanted, and it could come to life. Mhmm. But then you can imagine all of the downsides of that. Like, all of the nightmare of decentralization, like Right. Destroying everything at the same time.
Sure. Yeah. Now that we're, you know, a few years out of that, I think we people are starting to, hopefully, I assume, take in the lessons of of what it means to then you know? Or that it it it's a good you know, definitely a good idea to organize essentially in in many ways, but it comes with its own, you know, its own set of pros and cons. And that's a different kind of thing to traverse than, like, a traditional kind of centralized corporation or something.
Mhmm. Yeah. Specifically, as it related to OneHive in this time, the dynamic in in the DAO was that you had the Gardens working group, which was kind of the core of the developers from Aragon who were super smart guys. They they understood, like, the the PhD level theory behind this mechanism of conviction voting, and you would talk to them. And you understood that they these were really intelligent people that are, they're they're, like, you know, on on a different level to to some extent. The greater one hive dynamic was that, you know, dGen crypto had discovered this, like, exciting new organization, and there there had been a a faucet for the governance token back then, which a lot of people came into. And and, like, there's this a flood of hundreds of people and and, like, all these ideas and and, like, the people who are all over the over the place and this, obviously, the focus on price, people wanting the the price of the governance token to go up. And and the the main other initiative going on at OneHive at the time was HoneySwap and and the liquidity farming that they were doing. And so that was, like Mhmm. Alongside Gardens, I was also I I came in my background is in growth and marketing in web two, and so I came on as a as a growth and marketing contributor. I was helping both at Gardens and also with the honey swap farming, and, like, two different teams, two totally different dynamics of of, like, the type of people who are contributing and, and and, like, the goals of the platform. And and I I learned, like, just as much from both of those, like, especially about, you know, decentralized exchanges, AMMs, the the, like, the Uniswap protocol. Like, that was something that did not interest me going into crypto. I I didn't, like I I I either, like, thought that didn't matter or I just considered it a degenerate thing. But, like, actually digging into the weeds on that, that was another realization of, like, this is critical infrastructure. This is also, like, really innovative and, like, enabling people to to to make swaps with a smart contract and not needing to, like, find another person to buy yourself from. Like, having having a a one party, single party trade, that's, like, not something that's ever been possible before. So, like, what does that open up for us now? Right. Yeah. Yeah. That was that was kinda, like, the dynamic in in one hive at that time.
Yeah. I remember the HoneySwap being because I I remember, you know, when I was first using xDai, which, by the way, is the same chain that that Breadchain uses, now called Gnosis Chain. But back then, it was called xDai, I think, just xDai chain, which is a side chain of Ethereum. I remember HoneySwap being, like, the place you had to go to in order to, to swap anything on, on xDai at the time. And I remember having to use it, I think, because I was, like, swapping things for, for token engineering commons and maybe a couple of other different, groups then. But, yeah, it definitely felt like it was his own almost like separate ecosystem that One Hive was kind of spearheading a bit in building that infrastructure, for kind of, like, the basic things that you do in crypto. And I can imagine, you know, a group developing, a decentralized exchange and a group developing kind of, like, a more governance oriented application could have different ethos ethoses, like, in what they're doing and how they're building and and all that stuff.
Right. Yeah. Compare that to some people who forked another protocol that are trying to get as many tokens as you can get on the network. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, like, just as valuable. It but it's just, like, totally different mindset of I was like Right. Right. Yeah.
Yeah. And then So I guess now
okay. Right. Yeah. Well, like, the the, like, long story short, after that is, like, xDai loses the growth rates to other side networks at first. Polygon came onto the scene. Polygon talked to HoneySwap and asked them to deploy, and their the the attitude, at least within one hive at that time was that, like, don't worry about Polygon. Like, xDai is like, we have a lot of really good builders and a lot of, like, really good infrastructure here now. This is where the growth is gonna happen. So they ignored Polygon. Polygon, of course, had, like, a much stronger growth focus and exploded in value, and that kind of left xDai in the dust. And then, like, in the meantime, all of the l twos were getting built, and people were kind of seeing into the future that, like, okay. L twos are actually gonna be kind of where Ethereum scales. So, like, all that kind of just drew attention away from xDai and all of these projects, including one hive. So by the time Gnosis was coming in and and merging slash buying xDiet and making it Gnosis chain, there, like, there had already been a, like, big recession of builders and growth on the xDiet network and within one hive. So, like, yeah, by then, it it had kind of sealed the fate that that at least One Hive in this infrastructure wasn't going to be, like, the the basis of an enormous economic boom the way that Right. Right. That, like, quick swap wound up But so Polygon.
Yeah. So, I mean, so right now, I think it sounds like HoneySwap is, I think, more or less deprecated at this point. But what is the yeah. I guess, what is what is one hive today? How would you describe it to people? What would you describe as, like I think what's also interesting is, like, the ethos of the project.
Right. The ethos has stayed the same. The the people who are still contributing care mostly about a decentralized organization that, can incubate, like, basically, web three platforms. Gardens was the only working group that stayed active during this entire time. So we we were kinda busy building Gardens v two, and One Hive had, like, many different attempts to try to coalesce around a vision and keep, like, keep keep momentum to to try to build something, OneHive specific. But I I think, like, one half did collect some treasury during all this time, and and so it has funds now. And there's but there's not a clear direction. But with Gardens v two, we have like, within our working group, we've always had these ideas about ways that we can, integrate One Hive with Gardens v two. And so over the last, like, two or three months, we've been adding more governance pools that are, like, kind of forming the basis for how OneHive can make its next decisions, which has been, it that's it's been really fun to build that. Mhmm. And, like, Gardens v two is really useful for a lot of different organizations, but OneHive, like, is somehow the the, like, most the best suited, the, like, most in line organization to take advantage of its its ideas. So the like, the the the most recent pool that is, active in the the v two for one hive is road map consensus. So anyone can create a proposal for their, like, specific road map of the deliverables that OneHive is going to do in the next however long. And and so we'll be able to get a decentralized consensus on, like, what exactly we're doing at OneHive, which is, like, based on an initiative to do the same thing back in 2021. But that just came at, like, a time when there was too much, like, diverse interest going in different directions, and people couldn't Right. Rally around anything. But my my prediction is that that will get one hive organized again towards, like, an actual thing that it's doing. Mhmm. So I think I think it'll be more clear what OneHive is in the next couple months. Right.
I'm super curious how that how that goes. Oftentimes yeah. I mean, it sounds like almost like a way of just getting, like, feedback on what kind of people want out of the org like, an interesting way of kinda, like, signaling, you know, what people want the organization to become. But, maybe I think it would be interesting now is to kind of talk a bit about Gardens and what exactly Gardens is. Or, you know, there was Gardens. Now it's Gardens v two, which is the one that's, you're spearheading to build, and we've been playing around, I've been playing around with it a little bit and kind of playing around with the, especially, conviction voting mechanisms. But, yeah, maybe I'll leave it at that if you want to explain kind of what Gardens is and what you guys are doing, you know, conviction voting for.
Okay. Yeah. So Gardens v two is a modular conviction voting tool. Our, so, taking a step back, Gardens v one, it was the one hive framework. It applied so that any organization could spin up their own one hive style DAO for their treasury. It was built under the assumption that a community's entire treasury would be managed by conviction voting. That's something that we eventually learned is not, not like conviction voting is a mechanism. It's part of a tool set. A community wants to have many different tools in its tool set. And and so our mindset going into Gardens v two is that we wanted to preserve a community as a group of people who are agreeing to a social covenant. And that's kind of like the core keystone piece of architecture for for one hive is the covenant. Yeah. And if you join the community, you're agreeing to the covenant. It's like the terms and conditions, except more important than that because it's a subjective mission. It's like your constitution. So, we we wanted to preserve that as the center of a community, but then we wanted them to be able to spin up many different instances of, conviction voting because that's our our, like, wheelhouse. But our our vision is to enable that covenant to be tied to many different types of mechanisms. But so so our first iteration of Gardens v two is a covenant with a governance staking token, and people, when they join the community, they stake the the ecosystem staking token, and then they get access to the governance pools that are connected to that community. And so one community can set up any number of instances of these decisions. They it can be capital allocation. It can be some kind of on chain event, and any type of decision that you would want to your community to be making.
Right.
Yeah. So the the conviction voting element of it, conviction voting is time weighted voting. You stake support and proposals, and your your support needs time to reach its full, weight. So, the the theory behind it, it like, there's some very interesting articles that came out when conviction voting was first theorized, and the concept is a richer signaling mechanism. You know, people being able to, express not just whether they support something, but how much they support it. And to be able to measure someone's conviction, meaning, have they supported that proposal a lot over a long period of time? Because if so, then we can feel a lot more confident that that's something that the community wants to execute. So conviction voting is designed to enable that kind of richer decision make making. And and but, like, very simply, it is just time weighted support. And and so, like, the, probably, like, the easier way to think about how that winds up be becoming useful for a community is the types of, protections that gives you from a governance decision. So, the, Michael Zargam, the the theorist behind conviction voting, he he likes he compared it to, like, electrical systems and biological systems where anytime you have a time weighted element, you're you're denoising. You're you're creating a more stable, system that's able to ignore extreme swings in, in in whatever your environment is and kind of, like, persist with, whatever is, like, going to stand the test of time. And so within governance, the where we see that, being really valuable is in preventing things like last minute boat swings or, like, flash in the pan sentiment, that is more based on, like, a fad or or, like, a short term thing. And and and so now the question now that we have Gardens v two and now that we have modular conviction voting is, like, how do we structure decisions to take advantage of that strength of conviction voting? Because, yeah, it it has its strengths and weaknesses, and there's there's some implementations that are are probably going to work really well, and we just need to find them and fine tune those within Gardens.
Yeah. So maybe kinda like to to review a bit because for some people, that might have been it could be quite a lot. So so Michael Zargam, friend of the podcast, invented kind of or kinda theorized, you know, conviction voting, and OneHive, was one of the first or Gardens was one of, like, the first, I think, instances of, making conviction voting real. And, basically, conviction voting, as I kind of, like, understand it, is, like, you have some tokens that are maybe, like, a governance token that you use to vote on things. So the more governance tokens you have, the more votes you have. And in standard kind of, like, you know, say, DAO governance, there is, like, sort of the amount of tokens you have is equal to the amount of power you have. And so, like, you can buy a ton of tokens, and you could put it you know, you can, like, change kind of entire, decisions about what a DAO is doing if you, like, own enough of them. Conviction voted voting kind of adds the caveat where it's not just about the number of tokens you necessarily have, but the amount of time that you're willing to stake those tokens towards a particular proposal. So if I have, you know, a 100 tokens, you know, it's not just that my voting power is a 100 because I just vote, like, yes on a proposal, but my vote is the 100 that I put in there. And then by keeping it there over time, there's, like at least in the, you know, the UI of of of Gardens, you see, like, this, like, thermometer type of looking bar where you see it kinda, like, slowly go up over time. And, of course, the more people that put their their tokens stake it onto a particular proposal, the faster, you know, you'll reach the end of, like, the, the thermometer, the the the the gauge. And then that will kind of, like, elicit that the it'll signal that this this proposal has passed, for example. I I studied neuroscience in school, and so the comparison of a of an action potential is what what I kind of read into some of Michael Zargan's work. I thought it was really interesting as, like, a potential way to to think about governance and, like, yeah, all the things that you said kind of helps mitigate the kind of real, you know, human issues that come with governance, to kind of put a kind of, like, slight, you know, pump the brakes a little bit just in case things are, like you know, it's not just about having a ton of tokens, but also do you have conviction that this is a good proposal, which I find really fascinating.
Yeah. I so one thing that people sometimes, confuse with conviction voting or and so there's this idea of of, like, a v token, a a locked governance token, where you can multiply your governance power by locking your tokens for a certain amount of time. That and and some mechanisms that are designed that way are are even calling themselves conviction voting, and I think it's really important to just distinguish that it's the the the mindset behind choosing to lock your tokens ahead of time for a certain amount of time to multiply governance power is not taking advantage of the benefits of time weighted voting, because you're you're effectively punishing your future self with how badly you want a decision in the moment. You're not being rewarded for your past self's decision that you have stuck with over time. And so it like, it's it's really important that any conviction voting mechanism uses that style and and not the v token style. And then one other one other thing I'll add is, the so one of the really cool features with Gardens v two is that we have custom voting wait strategies. So we have one token, one vote, which is how it's worked in Gardens v one. But with these modular conviction voting pools, you can you can customize those to be you you can have quadratic voting. You can have fixed voting where everyone in the community has the same voting weight. We also have a capped one where it's one vote up to a limit. So that, like, further gives you flexibility in, like, how to structure the democracy of of how those decisions are getting made.
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The so, Breadchain, which maybe you can talk a little bit more about, but the the one of the things about my understanding of what Breadchain is that's really interesting is the idea of a governance token that's essentially a fixed, a fixed value. Like, it the over time, it seems to me more and more like the best the best governance token has a stable value because the but, like, getting decision making power with a token is really important, and you're you're being you're a node in the brain of a collective group that is needing to make decisions. And if if you if you, poison that, that system with speculation, you can get really unhealthy, like, types of decision. Basically, the only reason that you should hold the token is because you care about what the community is doing and you want to have a a say or you wanna have ownership in in how those decisions are getting made. And it seems like a stablecoin Right. Like, the safest way to do that.
Yeah. I mean, I think in in in the Breadchain case specifically, so in case people don't know, Breadchain is a project that I that I cofounded, and the Bread token is, pegged to the US dollar. And Bread is basically a token that helps fund the ecosystem, and it also functions as kind of, I wouldn't say voting power in itself per se. But when you hold bread, you gain voting power that you are allowed to vote on, in a very, very narrow scope. That narrow scope is simply being able to decide what is the distribution of yield that is accumulated to the various member projects. So if you hold bread, you know, if you hold a 100 bread for this voting cycle, which is thirty days, then in the next thirty day voting cycle, you'll have a 100 voting power. And so we've kind of, like part of the purpose of what we were doing was sort of, like, we wanted to make a system that didn't involve any sort of speculative token and keep the it stable as possible. Of course, you know, you can argue that that just means that people who have more money have more say. And I think that is a fair fair thing to say, but I think we we do things to mitigate that, which is, you know, half of the yield is based on the vote and half of the yield is based on an even split. So it's not like a 100% decided by simply someone's the amount of money someone owns. And also the scope is only for deciding that distribution. And so, basically, if, you know, you can kind of if you cheat the system as in, like, one member project has one billionaire backer, the way that the system is set up is so that it's not if that billionaire backer just, you know, votes for one project, it still benefits the entire network. So we're kind of, like, you know, trying to grow the pie together, basically. And so that's that's kind of, like, where we're so we don't really necessarily I wouldn't say we have, like, a governance token. It's like a it's like a derivative almost of a governance token in some way, that that that it just has its own affordances compared to, like, like, other types of of governance tokens. And, yeah, definitely not trying to say that one is one is the best or or something like that, but it's something that we've been experimenting with. And so I love hearing, you know, these other types of experiments.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It's it's And need need also need to make sure I remember to say that we have a proposal up in the OneHive Gardens, instance for people to, vote on getting OneHive to bake some bread so that they can also, hold some bread in their own treasury and, yeah, build some some collaborations there. So if you're interested in One Hive, definitely check it out. Get yourself some honey, and I hope you'll vote for, the the proposal that I put up for for the for the organization to bake some bread. So that would be all on on Moses Jane, but I digress.
Well, yeah, this is kinda how we got in touch because, yeah, the so the this is working through our our v two garden. We have, this brand new treasury allocation system. It's totally experimental. This is the first iteration of it. We're not sure what winds up working and what doesn't work from it. But the way that it's structured right now is that there's two different treasury management pools. One of them is for, deciding the portfolio weights. So OneHive holds these tokens and what percentage of its portfolio should be held in each token. And so we're using a conviction voting pool where people can support or remove support, and, the the the treasury will be adjusted to reflect those, those new weights. So that's one pool. And then there's a second pool for, like, actions with the treasury, and that's things like adding tokens to the treasury, removing tokens from the treasury, or doing something with some of the tokens in the treasury that is it like staking it or, basically, something beyond just selling and buying the token to meet a a portfolio weight. So, yeah, that's the that's the pool that the bread proposal is in so that it's, like, the the proposal is, you know, use one half treasury to to bake bread. And, there's a threshold parameter where if it reaches that threshold, then the the safe will execute that action.
Right. Yeah. And I think it's I think that is an interesting, like, type of proposal where conviction voting, is really interesting, because I don't I don't I don't I'm I'm actually not, like, so aware of any other DAO that allows you to kind of influence what are the assets that they hold. So I thought that was really interesting as, like, one of the types of proposals that, that Gardens kind of, facilitates. So voting on, you know, what you want your DAO what assets you want your DAO to hold, and it does it in a way that's like I mean, I'm just like it it's like a aggregation of, you know, kind of input from from the community, which is really interesting. Are there any other kind of types of proposals that you have found as being, like, really, really good for conviction voting?
Yeah. I think the so the the assets themselves are managed in a safe. That safe has signers. That was immediately flagged as a centralization issue. And so one of the pools is an election, and so the the community can propose new signers to the safe or they can dispute or remove support from existing signers in the safe. And and that serves as a continuous election for who the signers on that safe are to kind of democratize ownership of the treasury assets within the community. But very broadly, the the like, that type of bottom up governance that, like, the people being able to make those types of decisions for the entire collective is the type of thing that you really need something secure like conviction voting to to even have be possible without the type of abuse that you can imagine if, like, Aave or Curve was managing their their treasury that way. And so, yeah, the the tie in element lets people see if someone's abusing it. There's, proposals are disputable. And so, if there is abuse, then anyone in the community can flag it, and it goes to arbitration. And so the the system is designed to enable that type of bottom up governance with the theory that you can have a stronger organization if if people from the bottom level actually have autonomy to to, do what what they believe the community should do and get the resources and people that they need to make it happen.
Mhmm. Yeah. Necess yeah. It's it's yeah. I think what I for me, I think if you're, like, also a a cybernetics nerd or, like, interested in the idea of cybernetics, I think you'll I think this is something that, at least for me, is really exciting. But, I'm curious is, like, for people maybe who are listening, like, do you have any advice or suggestions on how they should start their own garden? I know you mentioned the, the the covenant, which I think is a really neat idea because it's like I think this is it's like, you know, taking at you know, for what it is. You know? Like, that code is not law, that, like, you need to have some sort of qualitative understanding about what is the purpose of your organization, and we don't really have like, the technology is definitely not there if it can ever be there to, like, understand, like, these human nuances and, like, ideas of, like, purpose and desire at a collective level that people want. You can't really just implement that in, like, smart contract code on its own or very difficult. But what you can do, which I think is interesting, is have this document publicly available for people to to look at and be able to interpret and then use, you know, the smart contract code for governance to kind of facilitate the negotiation between the various parties in an organization rather than like, for me, I think it's interesting is not trying to, like, force feed everything into, like, a a smart contract, if that makes sense.
Yeah. Yeah. And a a couple of the tools that are good for the covenant specifically, Nathan Schneider has a a platform community info, and that's that's a template for, like, a zero to one community, basically. Like, you have a group of people and you're trying to do something together that walks you through the process of, like, okay. Why do you exist? What are your values? What are going to be your cultural norms? How are you gonna transition power if in in these situations? And just kind of, like, gives you a a, like, walk through step with, like, preexisting templates also to to kind of, like Nice. Give you that covenant in the end. And then because, yeah, that's, like, the hardest step zero of of, like, forming a digital community is agreeing on what you're gonna do and and let's just What is the point?
Yeah. Yeah. That's purpose.
There there's another one, community canvas. We so the we have Notion documents. The the main one is, like, how to grow using gardens, and that's kind of, like, slowly being populated with a lot of, like, the best practices for this. We're, like, just starting to put in some of the first experiments in, like, specific applications of conviction voting. So, like, this council safe election, the the safe election, that's something that, we'll we'll be reporting on on, like, what we're learning from that in that library. But, yeah, I can change this document.
Yeah. Sure. So would you like, what how would you kind of describe the steps to starting a garden, I guess? Step number one, have have a group of friends maybe that you want to do something with, have a purpose that's clear, you know, go through the process of creating a covenant, deploy that covenant covenant, I believe, on IPFS. Is that is that how you guys do it? And then begin deploying everything else?
Yeah. Yeah. And so the the create a community page is is, like, very simple. You have that covenant. You upload the text. You have your community name. And then, like, the only other decisions to make are what's your governance token? What are what's the token that people are going to stake to join the community? And how much do they need to stake to be a member? Are you going to take a fee? Who's the fee receiver, and and how much fee are you gonna take? And then and then the only other option is, does the, oh, the the council save? So so, yeah, how much how much are you gonna stake? Is there a fee? What's the fee receiver? And then the council safe is that's the moderator. It's the safe account that, is able to approve pools to be to become active, change the settings in eviction voting pools. The the the goal is for that to not be a money manager and and be able to, to to moderate the the money being managed in other mechanisms. I think we still have a long ways to go to to for, like, gardens to be a rich enough environment for that to be the case. But, the the council safe is, is has admin permissions in the community. And so the last option is whether or not they are able to kick people out of the community. So that's kind of, like, the one power that you can give the Council Safe is can they boot members. And, obviously, someone can come back and join from from another wallet, and or even or even the same wallet, because we realized that that you weren't gonna protect against that. So the way to protect against that is with a community fee. So your community fee service basically.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's that these are, like, these are these are, like, harder human problems that, like, that, you know, there isn't, like, a quick and easy technical solution to? And, you know, should there even be necessarily, like you know, you if if you want to be in a community, you have to act like a community. That means dealing with the types of issues that communities deal with, which, you know I mean, sometimes people get angry and they, you know, don't like the direction or whatever else, and that's something that you know, technology is never gonna fix that so much. Or is it gonna make it go completely go away? So
Right. Yeah. Yeah. And this the council safe is kind of a new element of centralization. That was something that, would not have flown in, in the original One Hive, but it's solving an issue of, in Gardens v one, you need to do governance to make administrative changes, like adjusting the parameters in the pool. And so that's, like, the most governance intensive types of decisions where you need x percent quorum and you need everyone to be paying attention and making a decision together. And, like, the efficiency of having a group that is responsible for, like, those types of administrative decisions is, like, was too beneficial. And so the protection against that is that we we we put that underneath a the the permissionless layer above it, which is the ecosystem, which if you don't like the way that your council safe is upholding the covenant, then you create a new community in the same ecosystem with the same governance token and and your own council safe. And if people like your community better, they'll remove their stake from that, that other community, and they'll they'll move to your community. So that's kind of the the the, like, easy forkability to to, like, keep that permissionless.
Right. Right. Right. Yeah. It makes sense. Yeah. I think, again, it's, like, not about making the technology that fix all the human problems, but instead, you know, creating the railings to which you are able to solve those problems yourselves as a community, you know, collectively.
Yeah. At the end of the day, it's the quality of the people that are gonna decide whether you have immunity or not.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. No. So I really appreciate the the type of work that you guys are doing and, like, the the things that you're building. It's definitely super exciting for me and definitely would love to have more people, have their eye on and to take part in and to, yeah, I mean, start building communities and start building some gardens. Maybe to finish it off, I mean, is there is there anything any last words you want to leave, or do you want to leave, or we can end it. You can have some leave some of your plugs where people can keep up with gardens and and you and your work.
Yeah. The follow us on Twitter. Dig into our notion docs, to to learn how you can create a community. The, the types of organizations that we're building for are web three communities, obviously, open source projects, real world communities. We're we're especially excited about pop up cities and intentional communities since those are really well structured with that ethos of decentralization and and community. And it and the goal that like, not just my goal, but I I think that we have a, like, a strong cohort in crypto that is kind of coalescing on this goal that what we really can do in crypto is make public goods much better funded and much better managed than they are today. And and, like, I think, Giveth describes it as as, like, we're replacing governments and nonprofits. And those are specifically the organizations that we are kinda depending on for all of the the stuff where the economy falls short, where our our private markets don't meet all of these things because there's not a good, profit model, basically, to create that value for people. And so we call all of these public goods, and that's that's, like, our our opportunity in this space. That's that's where the world is failing us and where we can step in and use these people and this technology to to make it significantly better.
Yeah. Sure. Definitely. I definitely agree with the vision of using crypto as the railings for for new institutions that will, and to show that we can you know, by, you know, working bottom up collectively, we can build things that are that answer to our community's needs, potentially even better than the current institutions that are, I mean, for the most part, in a lot of places, failing people. So totally agree on on on that vision. And, yeah, appreciate you coming on. And, yeah, looking forward to see what you guys are building in the gardens.
Nice. Yeah. Thanks for having me. This was fun.