Project Description

Gardens is an ecosystem-wide governance framework that pairs a programmable on-chain social contract—called the Covenant—with Conviction Voting, BlockScience’s continuous decision-making primitive first formalized in 2019. Together these two layers give any community a modular “governance stack”, while still remaining tailored to each ecosystem’s culture and constraints.

Why Conviction Voting matters

Conviction Voting turns every token holder’s spending power into an ongoing signal rather than a one-off ballot:

• Continuous preference revelation: Stakeholders stream voting power toward proposals over time; support accumulates (“conviction”) until a configurable threshold unlocks funding or enactment.
• Anti-capture dynamics: Because conviction builds gradually, short-term whales can’t muscle through decisions, and participants must remain committed to keep proposals alive. This property delivers Sybil resistance without sacrificing open participation.
• Capital-aware governance: Thresholds are proportional to the commons’ available funds, so the community never over-allocates its treasury. The result is an automatic budget guardrail that scales with growth.
• Emergent prioritization: Proposals that deliver broadly perceived value rise naturally, creating a living, token-curated roadmap—no rigid planning cycles required.

Which area of Ethereum mainnet does your project strengthen?

• [ ] Direct protocol improvements (consensus, execution, data availability, core networking)
• [ ] Critical shared infrastructure (e.g. client software, public testnets & tooling, peer-to-peer networking stacks, security & formal-verification frameworks, impact-certification & transparency protocols)
• [ ] Open dashboards, datasets, or studies, including analyses of roll-ups, bridges, MEV relays, or other external system, if the resulting insight strengthens Ethereum mainnet
• [ ] Protocol-level research and specification work advancing Ethereum's roadmap
• [ ] None of the above

I confirm that my project is not a:

• [x] Project whose primary contribution lies outside Ethereum’s protocol or its immediate roll-ups.

Technical Credibility

Provide at least one of the signals below (more is better, but a single solid item suffices)

• [x] A runnable proof-of-concept, prototype demo, or draft spec