Gardens – Milestone-Based Retroactive Payment Proposal

🌿 Proposals
#1

Gardens – Milestone-Based Retroactive Payment Proposal

This proposal requests a milestone-based retroactive payment to cover the outstanding contributor debt for the Gardens team. By tying the disbursement of funds to specific performance metrics, 1hive can gain confidence that the Gardens platform is delivering measurable value and exposure for 1hive.

Gardens has been the only project in the past year consistently driving activity within the 1hive ecosystem—sustaining engagement, governance experimentation, and treasury activity. Without continued investment in Gardens, 1hive risks losing one of its most valuable mechanisms for decentralized governance and coordination. Many of the Gardens team members have been dedicated contributors to 1hive over the last years, ensuring continuity and progress in the community’s mission.

Proposal Rationale - Added Value to 1hive

Gardens plays a key role in expanding and improving decentralized governance within 1hive. Our vision is to make GardensV2 the most advanced and user-friendly implementation of Conviction Voting. While we are currently in a transition phase, our long-term goal is to fully integrate Conviction Voting with enhanced features that will make decision-making more efficient and scalable.

The modularity of Conviction Voting Pools has already demonstrated its effectiveness, as evidenced by the recent GNO decision and the ongoing signaling streaming proposals. Thanks to GardensV2, 1Hive has expanded its influence, forging connections with prominent communities like Blockscout and Breadchain.

To reinforce 1hive’s presence in Gardens and maximize its impact, we will:

  • Strengthen 1hive branding within the UI by incorporating the 1hive logo and a direct link to the (soon to be updated) 1hive website.
  • Improve documentation and onboarding , making it clear that Gardens is a core 1hive product.
  • Exposure: 1hive community will always be displayed on top of the others.
  • Expand adoption of Conviction Voting , demonstrating its unique benefits for DAOs and decentralized governance.

Millestone based on metrics will be leveraged to keep Gardens acountable on these goals.

Background

  • Outstanding Debt : The team has an accrued contributor debt of approximately $40,000 (with tracking stopped as of August 2024 from GoogleSheet).
  • Gardens’ Role in 1hive : Gardens has been the primary project keeping the 1hive ecosystem active and evolving.
  • Verification Dashboard : The primary data source for verifying metrics is the Gardens v2 Dashboard on Dune.

Used metrics

The following metrics demonstrate Gardens’ utility and adoption:

  1. Unique Members
    Reflects the number of individual participants, indicating growth and user engagement.

  2. Communities
    Shows how many organizations use or integrate Conviction Voting through Gardens in their processes.

  3. Total Transactions
    Measures overall activity and engagement across the platform.

  4. Total Value Locked (TVL)
    Reflects the total funds held within Gardens contracts, representing the scale of assets under management.

  5. Total distributed
    Represents the cumulative amount of funds historically dispatched through proposals on the Gardens platform. This metric captures the overall impact of Conviction Voting over the platform’s entire lifetime.

Team Information

This proposal will be used to cover 3 sprints payments (epoch 3,4,5) with the following contributors:
@paul @kamikazebr @Mati0x @LuchoSca @rperez89 @Kev @vermeer

Funding Information

Each milestone payment will be released upon meeting the corresponding metric targets https://dune.com/paul2/gardens-v2.

The treasury redemption method will be used to collect these funds.
When a millestone has been reached, a comment on this post will indicates the redemptions numbers for each millestones proposals.

Milestone 1 – $5,000

  • Unique Members: 600
  • Communities: 75
  • Total Transactions: 7k
  • Funding Pools Funds: $10k
  • Total Distributed: $3k

Milestone 2 – $5,000

  • Unique Members: 950
  • Communities: 115
  • Total Transactions: 13k
  • Funding Pools Funds: $18k
  • Total Distributed: $6k

Milestone 3 – $5,000

  • Unique Members: 1.3k
  • Communities: 160
  • Total Transactions: 19k
  • Funding Pools Funds: $26k
  • Total Distributed: $9k

Milestone 4 – $5,000

  • Unique Members: 1.8k
  • Communities: 200
  • Total Transactions: 24k
  • Funding Pools Funds: $34k
  • Total Distributed: $11k

Milestone 5 – $5,000

  • Unique Members: 2.2k
  • Communities: 240
  • Total Transactions: 28k
  • Funding Pools Funds: $40k
  • Total Distributed: $13k

Milestone 6 – $5,000

  • Unique Members: 2.7k
  • Communities: 290
  • Total Transactions: 32k
  • Funding Pools Funds: $46k
  • Total Distributed: $15k

Milestone 7 – $5,000

  • Unique Members: 3.1k
  • Communities: 330
  • Total Transactions: 36k
  • Funding Pools Funds: $52k
  • Total Distributed: $16.5k

Milestone 8 – $5,000

  • Unique Members: 3.5k
  • Communities: 375
  • Total Transactions: 40k
  • Funding Pools Funds: $60k
  • Total Distributed: $18k

Ethereum address where funds shall be transferred:
New Gardens Safe: 0x9a17De1f0caD0c592F656410997E4B685d339029

Future Vision & Sustainability

To ensure continued success beyond this funding request, Gardens will:

Execute on the roadmap to refine and expand Conviction Voting. Your connected workspace for wiki, docs & projects | Notion
Improve long-term funding sustainability for contributors.
Continue developing to achieve the milestones above.

2 Likes
#2

First of all, thank you for putting this together, it takes significant effort to put together a proposal, and asking for funding and the discussion that comes with it can end up being a draining excercise.

I’m not sure where I land on actually supporting this proposal or not, I probably wont add support for it personally. But I would like to find a way for 1Hive and the Gardens team to continue to work together in a positive and sustainable way.

I do want to share a few thoughts though…

  1. I’m not sure why the outstanding debt is relevant to this proposal, its a bit like getting an unexpected bill for a service that was performed but never requested. While I can understand that the situation is frustrating for those Gardens contributors, and I don’t really have the context to understand how that happened since I wasn’t involved, it seems like something that could be resolved within the team.
  2. It seems like this may set up the team for even more frustration in the future, given that there is an outstanding contributor debt of 40k, and this proposal is asking for 40k, but is tied to milestones that have yet to be hit and likely require more work to achieve. But again that seems like more of an internal discussion that should (or has already happened) that nots all that relevant here.
  3. Currently 1Hive’s treasury is about 420k, so an ask of 40k is nearly 10% of the current treasury, and is being used to cover ~3 sprints worth of development effort. I’m not sure how you guys are defining a sprint, but if its ~2 week sprint cycle then thats 6 weeks, and represents a burn rate of 26k per month or 312k per year. I’m not going to suggest that isn’t fair compensation for the work, but I will suggest that it is probably not be something 1Hive can afford if we want 1Hive to be sustainable long term.
2 Likes
#3

Thanks, @lkngtn. I think this is very constructive feedback. We basically already had a long-standing internal discussion about this topic, and this is pretty much the result of the whole team’s input. There were many arguments not listed here, but I can mention a couple if it helps you get a clearer picture:

  • The Gardens project is slowly losing its experienced dev force due to insufficient grant funding.
  • 1Hive has only had Gardens as an active project for a while—until now.
  • 1Hive holds a large treasury in favorable market conditions and could easily lose 10% tomorrow.
  • Gardens now has more credibility to support 1Hive’s visibility (as certain stats/criteria are tied to this aspect).

I can also try to address your questions that might not be directly related to the core arguments:

This debt is partially due to the scope being changed or extended too many times.
Gardens is still applying for several very promising grants, but those would be tied to future development. Clearing the old debt would help create a much better per-feature budget, directly aligned with the grants we’re applying for (e.g., supporting a new network, integrating with a protocol, etc.).

The 40k is probably around half of the actual debt, but we stopped tracking hours in August 2024 to focus on polishing a valuable product, aiming to build enough credibility to request further funding.

The question of completely erasing this debt was raised internally, but since that wasn’t the agreement from the start, it wouldn’t make sense to do that now.

To conclude, this proposal is more about asking 1Hive for one last major support effort to keep Gardens alive and healthy—so that it can later return the favor in a wealthier position. And we’re pretty much all aligned on this.

#4

ADDENDUM

Following the latest discussions on Discord voice and text channels, we have decided to split the milestones into eight smaller payments instead of four. The Milestones section in the original post has been updated accordingly. We have also increased the difficulty of the later milestones to spread the payments over a longer period, thereby reducing the immediate financial pressure on the treasury. As a result, the difference in thresholds between Milestone #1 and Milestone #8 is now a little over x5, reflecting the incremental progression in required performance.

How funds will be distributed

Gardens team recently held a meeting to finalize how these funds will be allocated. We plan to use up to 20% of the milestone-based funding for efforts to enhance 1hive’s visibility within the app and to support ongoing maintenance. The remaining funds will be used to chronologically pay recorded hours of Gardens team’s unpaid sprints, as detailed in this spreadsheet.

#5

First millestone

Gardens dune dashboard

Payment information

According to this 1hive dune dashboard and Treasury Safe:

  • Total supply of HNY: 66,913 HNY
  • Safe Treasury Value: $302K

→ Redempted HNY price: 302K/66,913 = $4.51
→ Request HNYs: 5k/4.51 = 1108 HNY