Gitcoin Grants Garden 🌱 GG23 Retrospective

Overview

The Gitcoin Grants Garden GG23 Community Round marked a significant milestone in our mission to advance public goods funding through innovative governance mechanisms. As the second iteration of our community round, we succeeded in fully transitioning from Quadratic Funding (QF) to Conviction Voting, leveraging the Gardens v2 platform to create a more sustainable and community-driven funding ecosystem.

With $30k in matching funds raised from Gitcoin, 1Hive, and Celo Public Goods, our round supported 21 communities across diverse sectors including Ethereum open source software, pop-up cities, node / chapter-based orgs, DeSci, IRL groups, climate initiatives, political activism, and beyond. The round demonstrated the power of modular conviction voting for creating continuous, high context, bottom-up governance and protecting against common forms of governance abuse.

Key Results

Financial Impact:

• $60,659 total funding raised:
  • $25,900 from eligible communities
  • $20,990 from Gitcoin
  • $10,744 from 1Hive
  • $3,000 from Celo Public Goods

Matching Funding Track:

• $18,000 matching funds distributed on $25,900 raised from communities, added to funding pools on Gardens.
  • 21 communities funded
  • $818 average matching amount
  • $2,497 highest matching amount
  • 104 unique participants
  • 1.7x average matching multiplier

Allo Builders Funding Track:

• $12,700 distributed to capital allocation builds
  • 17 funding proposals created
  • 6 projects funded
  • $2,117 average funding per project milestone
  • 27 governance participants
  • $1k in funds still to be allocated, and working on additional funding

See our Round Finance Spreadsheet and Dune Dashboard for the full data.

Round Mechanism & Innovation

Our round took advantage of the unique modular governance structure of Gardens, running several governance pools each with their own eligibility criteria, voters, voting weight systems, arbitration settings, and conviction parameters.

To participate in any of the pools, members joined the Gitcoin Grants Garden, signing the Community Covenant and staking 1 $GTC to join. Participants had the option to increase their GTC stake, giving them more governance weight in some pools.

Governance pools fell into 3 separate tracks of round coordination on public goods ecosystem growth:

1. Matching funding for communities

To be eligible for matching funds, projects created a community on Gardens (if they didn't have one already) and funded a funding pool targeted at a need within their community. The Council Safe approved funding pools after reviewing them for proper setup of the community and funding pool on Gardens, a clear benefit of conviction voting for the distribution of funds, and the use of a highly liquid token for funding.

Communities were eligible for bonus matching if their Gardens community was based on Celo network, and if they were classified as a pop-up city/village - sponsored by Celo Public Goods and 1Hive.