Gitcoin Grants Garden 🌱 GG23 Retrospective

🌱 Gitcoin Grants
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Gitcoin Grants Garden :seedling: 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.

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2. Allo.Capital Builder’s Fund

A Gardens funding pool built for milestone-based support for capital allocation / capital formation / decision mechanism builders. To be eligible, proposals listed deliverables and an expected timeline to complete, and requested the amount of money needed to execute. Proposals that requested more funding needed more conviction from voters to pass, algorithmically set by the Gardens platform.

The pool is still active and governed by Allo Patron NFT holders, and is being used to develop a cohesive and supportive builder community in the Allo.Capital ecosystem.

Builders showcased their projects and proposal in this Allo Builders show and tell: https://x.com/owocki/status/1923416344390951056

3. Signaling Pools

The final track in the round included several non-financial governance pools designed to promote Ethereum ecosystem alignment. These signaling pools included:

  • Pain Points of Ethereum - identifying issues holding back mass adoption of Ethereum
  • Regen Communities / Regen All Stars - identifying people and projects in the ecosystem strongly aligned with the regen ethos.
  • Council Safe Election - round admin were democratically elected through this governance pool.

When possible the round aimed to reduce complexity for participants as much as possible, but this proved to be our greatest challenge as an experimental round built on newer infrastructure on a relatively short timeline. To mitigate issues related to the complexity we set up robust support for participants, including:

  • Real-time Telegram support with dedicated topic channels
  • Educational workshops and onboarding sessions
  • Comprehensive documentation and video tutorials

These proved to be indispensible for many of the round’s participants, who noted process friction and UI/UX issues.

Lessons Learned

To review the impact of our round we used a combination of onchain data and surveys of round participants and Council Safe members. Here are the key learnings from our analysis:

Technical Challenges

  • Due to heavy traffic, the Gardens platform experienced subgraph latency with 1-5 minute delays in onchain actions showing in the UI, requiring attention from Gardens Core devs.
  • UI/UX friction, especially for users with no previous web3 experience.
  • Wallet connectivity and UX challenges, especially for MetaMask and WalletConnect users.

Process Challenges

  • Community onboarding required significant hand-holding for Gardens newcomers
  • Eligibility criteria for matching didn’t clarify which assets could be used as funding tokens in pools. Some projects registered funding pools with assets with very little liquidity, prompting the Council Safe to meet and reach consensus that only major tokens with high liquidity could matched. Some projects then needed to recreate their funding pools to be eligible.
  • Late registration pressure created support bandwidth constraints in final hours.

Highlights from Community Feedback

Data collected in our post-round survey:

  • Overall experience: 7.1/10 average satisfaction
  • Application process ease: 6.8/10 average rating
  • Gardens app interface: 6.3/10 average intuition score
  • Ecosystem growth achievement: 7.0/10 average rating

Top Feature Requests:

  • Improved proposal submission workflow
  • Mobile app optimization
  • Enhanced analytics dashboard
  • Integration with other DAO tools
  • Multilingual support

Next Steps for the Gitcoin Grants Garden

Building on the success of GG23, we’re committed to advancing public goods funding through several key initiatives:

Product Development

  • Incorporate UI/UX feedback into the Gardens Core product roadmap, prioritizing the biggest pain points and feature requests from users.
  • Target integrations that address community pain points outside the scope of Gardens roadmap, like governance token issuance, capital formation, and other novel capital allocation and decision sourcing mechanisms.
  • Improve analytics dashboards with real-time metrics and insights.

Performance-Based Matching

  • Set up tracking on project funding pool metrics in Karma GAP, identifying successful funding pool activity for future matching rounds.
  • Move beyond funding-only matching to include performance-based criteria by developing impact measurement frameworks that reflect effective use of the Gardens platform
  • Where onchain metrics fall short, help communities source qualitative feedback from members on the effectiveness of their programs and sustainable ways to raise more capital.

Ecosystem Partnerships

  • Source more partnerships with platforms and protocols, potentially through track-based matching rounds in GG24.
  • Increase available matching funds through a diversified partnership network.
  • Cross-pollinate learnings with other conviction voting experiments, decision mechanisms, and grants programs.

Continuous Governance

  • Engage Gitcoin Grants Gardens participants between rounds through off-season governance initiatives
  • Leverage conviction voting strengths for ongoing community coordination
  • Maintain active governance pools for ecosystem signaling and coordination

Tokenomics Innovation

Conclusion

The Gitcoin Grants Garden GG23 round successfully demonstrated that conviction voting can serve as a powerful alternative to traditional quadratic funding, enabling more sustainable and community-driven public goods allocation. By combining the strengths of Gardens v2 with the expertise of the Gitcoin community, we created a governance experiment that balanced innovation with practical funding needs.

As we prepare for the next iteration, we’re committed to incorporating feedback, expanding partnerships, and advancing the infrastructure needed to scale conviction voting as a core mechanism for public goods funding.
The round proved that Gardens grow things :seedling: - not just funding, but communities, governance innovations, and sustainable coordination mechanisms that can serve the broader Ethereum ecosystem for years to come.

For detailed metrics and ongoing updates, visit our Karma GAP community page.

Links

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Thank you @paul2 for your retrospective.
I really appreciate the overall documentation—especially the Notion page with round info and your financial transparency.
And congrats on being in the Top 3 of the Public Vote! I also noticed some checklist items hinting that you’re already preparing for GG24, which is great to see. I’d love it if you could share updates here from time to time—I’m particularly interested in how conviction voting could become a viable alternative to traditional QF.

I love the idea of engaging GGG participants between rounds through off-season governance initiatives. If you post updates on that in the coming weeks or months, I’d definitely be eager to read them and sure will help other communities too.

Could you also share your educational workshops, onboarding sessions, and tutorials?
I completely agree with your take on the importance of community onboarding as one of the process challenges—and I’d really appreciate it if you could open-source or share those (above) resources.

I want to say I truly value your honesty—it’s not easy, and the issues aren’t unique to GGG; I believe many community rounds face similar challenges. All of you experimenting with new (allocation) mechanisms are trying to fund grantees in a fairer, more thoughtful way, and that’s commendable.
But still, I find it striking how easy it is to apply to any Gitcoin Grants round: if I meet the eligibility criteria, I can apply in under 3 minutes—just copy-paste my grant in markdown, submit, and wait for a decision. I pray that for GG24 we will have the same experience with the new platform. Not much to read and understand. As a grantee I do not want to spend too much time trying to understand how to onboard myself I only want to spend time in my grant/project, marketing/donors (and getting funds). By contrast, when it comes to community rounds, I often find it unclear how to apply—I usually need to spend extra time digging into the specific workflows and documentation.

Thanks again for sharing your learnings, and please keep up the great work!

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Hey Ivan thanks for the thoughtful feedback!

Yes, definitely a top priority for us to simplify the onboarding process for GG24 and take out as much of the headache as possible. Appreciate you and the other communities taking the time to figure out how to get onboarded and funded.

I added some links to the demo videos and onboarding materials at the bottom of the “Links” section. Hope that helps!

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Thank you, @paul2 — all the new links are very informative and insightful :raised_hands:

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