S4. - Ep. 11 Conviction Voting W/ Paul Glavin & Felipe Rocha

Transcript

welcome to the green pill. network podcast if you're just joining us we're building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to rank positive some digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and we publish a season of about 10 episodes every couple months this season is lean mean Capital allocation machines Capital allocation is the process of deciding how to spend or invest money in what ways can onchain Capital allocation change the way we make these decisions and distribute cap Capital better at scale more precisely at scale and without intermediaries at at scale how can we build cryptoeconomic systems that are better than the systems that existed in the old world what are

the coolest experiments these are the themes of green pill season 4 lean mean Capital allocation machines we have a capital allocation machine to show you on this screen pill episode this episode is all about conviction voting which is a powerful primitive for doing Capital allocation by staking your token ens on a cause that you have conviction on grows over time until you can finally release funds from a Dallas treasury so that is conviction voting my guests today to talk about conviction voting are Paul glaven and Felipe roacha of onehive onehive is a dow that funds public goods and they are working on a tool called Gardens which is basically gardens. fund which is a conviction voting public goods funding tool so Paul

is a dow contributor of public goods Maxi since 2019 founding team member and project manager at Gardens contributing Pastor present to onehive Honey swap panalo bread ID and gith he lives somewhere in between the aspirational theories brewed by PhD brainiacs and crypto and the trench warfare of those systems in practice Paul cares about Innovations in governance that can harness the wisdom of crowds and Innovations in money that can better measure and reward actual value fipe comes to us with more than 23 years of development experience he has been uh working with solidity and smart contract security he fell in love with governance when he studied and became a facilitator of sociocracy dragon dreaming and Theory youu Philippe has contributed to one

high for three years and has been actively leading the gardens developer team for six months okay so this episode is about gardens. fund which is a coordination tool for communities with shared treasuries to fund common goods part of the onehive ecosystem and I think that you're going to enjoy this episode about Capital allocation with Paul and Felipe so without further Ado let's get into it welcome gentlemen how you doing very good how are you doing pretty good thanks maybe we'll start off with some quick intros Paul uh you first then we'll go to fipe yeah um I'm Paul I'm a full-time Dow contributor I've been in the public goods funding space of crypto

for four years currently project manager at Gardens uh I've been with Gardens specifically for three years since we launched and have also contributed in other projects around onehive honey swap giveth right ID so I'm very much in the public goods experimentation sector of crypto thanks Felipe nice I'm Felipe um I have been developing and VAR Technologies since my 10 years old I think it's 23 24 years programming right now and I am the web trees space for the last three years and I start with the one half and contributing with the gardens last and

West and the others products I I got in love with the governance when I starting uh when I know Dragon dreaming sociocracy and social Tex and then I when I when I found Gardens I I I see the opportunity to to merge that social Tech with the real tech let's say to to provide uh way to decision making um yeah I think it's that thanks flupe well uh I want to dive in on conviction voting to start because that's the application that we're here to talk about tell us what is conviction voting and why is it so powerful yeah uh the short answer is that conviction voting

is is essentially just time weighted voting so when you support a proposal you stake your support and it grows over time the the longer answer is a lot more complex it's U very mathematical the the concept was developed originally by zarum at block science and it involves a whole host of mathematical Concepts that all kind of center around this idea that you can signal support in more rich and secure ways than a lot of the the consensus mechanisms that people are working with now and so there's the implementation of conviction voter that's most popular now was developed by from this block science concept by

Common stack and one Hive and the more intricate piece of it is that you you have this entirely onchain consensus mechanism where anyone can create a proposal when you create a proposal the more money that you ask for the more community support you need for that proposal to pass all these proposals are disputable when it gets disputed it goes to arbitration and you essentially have this entire ontain governance that allows people to Signal their support for proposals in in more efficient ways is probably the easiest way to think of it yeah so where I Place season four of green pill is all about Capital allocation mechanisms and where I place conviction voting in the suite of the

Ecology of capital allocation that we're building in this space is that it feels more Bottoms Up So anyone conviction vote tokens and uh it feels like it's a nice compliment to the multiun hundreds of hours of governance debates and processes that have to be done to remove tokens from treasuries now where you require the whole D's attention on something uh with conviction voting I can just take some of my tokens build conviction over time and like say I wanted to have a party at eth Denver and I need a slush fund to $400 uh that's not worth the whole D's attention I could use conviction voting to do it is that close at all yeah that's a that's useful way to think of about it and then also like time weight of your con ition growing is in in a lot of ways a

security measure that you you have governance systems that are a lot more continuous you don't have these binary moments of decision- making where you kind of demand the entire community's attention you have ongoing proposals people get to them in some ways when when they get to them and uh because your your support for proposal is not going to instantly uh kind of have all of the weight that it will eventually have you can kind of uh collectively make decisions that are continuous instead of in these discret binary super like administrative like there's a lot of overhead basically with those governance moments where you need the entire Community to pay attention to something and make a collective decision

together and so it that's like where a lot of the efficiency comes from seems really powerful I'd love to talk about this build that y'all are rolling out today so uh for the audience you can go to gardens. fund and play with conviction voting uh what did you all launch today why are you proud of it how does it innovate on existing conviction voting mechanisms and Felipe maybe I'll go to you for this one and the guidance the version two is different from the version one because the main difference is the capacity to have the conviction V multiple conviction vage um strategies for one community and and the V1 in the V1 version we have like one community and

it setups one conviction um parameter and then the community all need to agree on that parameter like like half uh Decay like how much time the proposal need to to pass something like that and minimum conviction necessary to to to pass and now in the V2 you can have one Community around one token and because uh because the you bu in on top of the Allah protocol we will be able to have multiple communities on top one token and then each Community can have multiple pools and each pool have the own CV parameter so we have

more more flexibility to to to get more opinions and and diversion of of ideas you know because conviction it's powerful to to allow you you have different ideas and when we get some conflicts we we do don't have the option to to say no you are incentivized to create a new idea a best idea to to meet your needs or integrate your needs inside the current proposal and now in the V2 you have that that that's uh a possibility with CV more you can also create a new community around the new token the same token for example 105 we have honey you can have multiple

communties around the same token in inside multiple pools with different strategies using CV quadratic and any others so I think that's the the summary for the the V2 thanks yeah Paul same question to you what do you want to say about gardens. fund which is what y'all are releasing today so to add some context Gardens was initially launched in 2021 like I don't know if you remember back then but we didn't have l2s we didn't even have side chains it was like a completely different space back then and the guys that built it really were pioneering a lot of stuff one hiive uh built an exchange a lending protocol they forked Aragon Court to build Celeste which is the arbitration protocol and they were literally

building this like from scratch which was an enormous challenge an enormous lift and like understandably we're still using a lot of these smart contracts and infrastructure and at this point they've aged a lot so a lot of what Gardens V2 is bringing is just like updated infrastructure we're rebuilding we're using Alo protocol which is in our opinion like the new current best novel funding mechanism framework and we're going to launch on much more networks we'll be on arbitrum optimism nois chain and polygon so like there's a lot of improvements that are just kind of overdue for us but then since we were rebuilding this we got to rethink a lot of what we don't think is working well about conviction voting and and we have

these improvements that we've made fipe covered a lot of them one extra one is that we have Point systems now so in V1 your number of tokens is your voting weight um but we're introducing Point systems uh there's four of them there's fixed where every Community member has the same voting weight there's capped where your tokens are your voting weight up to a a limit and then there's also quadratic where your voting weight is the square root of the tokens that you hold and since it's modular where you can have as many of these instances that you want you can create many different conviction voting instances all with custom Point systems and parameters and kind of dedicate them towards specific purposes it's really kind of cool to see

you all releasing this in updating it for an L2 world uh selfishly from someone who works at getcoin uh I'm really excited that you built it on top of Alo protocol thank you for speaking nicely uh about that I'm wondering you know if we take away all the technical details and just abstract it into how how does this help people the the median green pill audience member is probably a member of a couple dalls probably has some tokens in it um what should I use it for is is there like a good first conviction vote that you think people should be playing with at gardens. fund now that you all have released this either of you can take that so we at onehive have like our very specific

interest of how we want to use this we want to fund the ecosystem of onehive and the Honey token so we want to create a a a grants CV instance that will fund different ideas and different projects within the onehive ecosystem one of the the types of conviction voting instances you can create is is a simple signaling pool where there's no funding attached and you can just kind of collectively make a decision using conviction voting and one of the ways we want to use this is we want to hold continuous elections for our Council safe so the the multi- signature wallet that's managing a lot of what's happening in onehive we want to have an election where people can support they think is best

representative of the community and that's safe and have it automatically through zodiac update those signers and then we want to be able to Signal treasury uh portfolios one of the big issues that we have in one hiive is we have all these tokens in our Treasury and we want to uh manage this portfolio um but we're we're decentralized one hiive is truly like not a central entity and so we need to find safe and productive ways of of like deciding how we should allocate the different tokens in our portfolio one of the things I think is cool uh about onehive is that you're using your tools on one Hive themselves so there's kind of like a

loop there that creates a uh it's almost like a reverse Conway law like Conway law is this law that people build organizations build products that reflect their organization but since you're using your product to design your organization there's like an inverse conways law Loop there that could create some sort of weird fun upward spiral of the organization designs the product so the product designs the organization and and it sort of like spins upwards but yeah I think that's cool uh is it I think our listeners may actually not even be uh familiar with onehive so you want to int take this opportunity to introduce onehive and what your mission is and what you all are trying to accomplish Felipe you want to talk about when you first got to one what you liked about it and yeah yeah I can talk about I think I think I'm not the best person

to to explain the the vision one hiive but I think what what I got in love one Hive it's the the same concept that conviction vote has I think conviction voting Inspire one Hive to be the community as it's now it's the way where people it's willing to create every time I think we are in the environment where people incentivize you create a new strategy or solution for what kind of problem you have I remember when I I I get in I heard about the honey I get after I think when have has maybe three years old I think and was not the hype where one Hy had and the in the honey

token so the community was there and more solidified without a lot of DJs and people willing to creating solutions to solve in the web tree space and C is one of them and the division one hi it's experimenting I think the word for me one hi is experimenting we we love experimenting new stuff and to experiment we need test in ourselves right we need to experiment and test ourselves and then generate products for other people also solve your problem that we are solving for us yeah and kind of like any decentralized Community it kind of just reflects like what the interests of the specific

people who are working on it have U and when I first came into onehive that was public goods I I saw the the framework and I I wanted to know if we can use it to like build roads and and like have it be the its own self-running public goods funding mechanism there I think one Hive has its decentralization has has heard it at a lot of points in its history um and it's it has not been clear to people what the vision what the direction of the community is which has kind of led me to think of it um like less in terms of what it can be in the future and what it's done well at doing already which is basically to fund infrastructure web 3 infrastructure like one hiive

successfully incubated honey Swap and agave and Gardens and a lot of these communities that these were on XI chain which never really grew to become anything huge so that their their impact has been Limited in that realm and actually a funny interesting story is that when polygon first launched they approached honey Swap and and they wanted honey swap to launch on polygon but the onehive team at that point said no polygon's not going to go anywhere we're going to stick with XI and that's where the real growth is going to be so like within what became nosis chain one Hive is is basically an incubator of web3 infrastructure and I think probably the future that's most successful for

one hiive is where it's implementing that on other networks and taking what it's learning and doing better at that I find the the like I'm always looking for three threes between getcoin and other public goods Dows you were talking about the relationship between polygon and onehive um and I just want to take a moment to Spotlight the relationship between gitcoin and onehive here both Dows that have public goods in their ethos gitcoin been traditionally known for quadratic funding but is now moving to getcoin 2.0 and having many mechanisms one hiive really focused on conviction voting and one of the things I I'm really excited about is that y all built this on top of aloe protocol which basically you know is a capital allocation protocol um and and I think one of the cool

things is that getcoin can now offer conviction voting to its Partners the people that we already sell retroactive public goods funding and quadratic funding to and then yall get distribution for your conviction voting tool by partnering with with gitcoin so just wanted to highlight the three three there and just say uh I can't speak on behalf of getcoin because it's Dow now but I'm really excited that uh the getcoin and one hiive are working together and I'm excited for more people to play with conviction voting as a result of that partnership yeah yeah the um also excited about Al protocol and and like what what other uh funding mechanisms it's going to build and we want to implement those in in gardens V2 yeah yeah I I would say that like you

know our final destination in the fullness of time the way I articulate where Alo protocol could go is like we want to do for Capital allocation what open Zeppelin has done for erc20 tokens which is you have a a suite of well documented well audited contracts that you can just pull off the shelf and pull into your app so I'd be tickled pink If people could pull quadratic funding or retrop pgf or conviction voting out of aloe and build it into their apps so it's all about cross-pollinating uh different different Capital allocation mechanisms to to the world and um I want to live in a world where anyone can take the power of conviction voting and build it into their app anyone can take the power of Bitcoin grants and build it into their app so I think it's it's about empowering the builders to to

build on on this stuff so um yeah uh the these conviction voting contracts were built on the aloe and they're open source and uh they're available through the gardens. fund website is is that all right yeah for the for the audio listeners uh Paul was shaking his head yes yeah that's spot on cool well um if you guys are maximally successful in 10 years what do you think this looks like what is what does onehive look like what is the conviction voting ecosystem look like paint me a picture of of how this scales and and affects the world yeah Step One is web 3 open- Source software that's the the public good that's most ready to use what we're building um and so the near future is is really good

open source software that's really well funded with smart good hardworking people that are building and maintaining that software when we get that to work for web 3 open source software then it should very easily apply to web 2 open source software and I think that really the only Road Block for that is the uiux of web 3 as it currently is um but there's no reason that we shouldn't be able to to onboard web 2 onto this this infrastructure in 10 years within 10 years that's a a good timeline where we should also be applying this outside of the tech space and we should at least at that point be getting some traction with real world public goods Builders um and

and making something that's easy enough for any community of people to spin up a decentralized Gardens community and be able to fund whatever it is that they care about and and do a good job at it cool so I heard web web three open source and that'll have a bunch of secondary positive effects then web 2 open source and then and then the world from there sort of the order of operations be interesting to see in a future in which a local government or an NGO is running a conviction in funding round for their community that will be uh that'll be quite to sight a site to be seen yeah I mean it should be sooner than 10 years I think this is I think five years is realistic but yeah is is

is there anything that I didn't ask that you want to say maybe I'll go to Felipe first uh and then to you Paul Felipe is there anything I didn't ask that you want to say about this build or conviction voting or what you're up to at onehive no I don't think so what one I thing I I want to add it's uh about the vision at least I have it's the the conviction voting it's a tool that they going to promote the change of the mindset of I don't know the English word for that but we we are as a human don't have the tools before to to do decision making Collective right and we have our 51 uh majority and that's is too too

flawless and then what what I think are going to do happen it's CV getting more and more in in Minds people and going to change that behavior because it's more easy to to deal with uh with the creative process than than the the destructive process you know U so that that's something I I want to add I think the the CV it's just a tool that going to empower people to self-govern because I think that's the way we should evolve as human be more and more self-governed in in our lives particular life and also that going to impact our jobs our social environment

and Etc love that same question to you Paul is there anything I didn't ask that you want to say we covered a lot uh I think uh one final pitch for for public goods um I think that word kind of scares some people in crypto uh they associate it with like charity and things that aren't going to make them rich and I think that it's like could not be more opposite from the truth where like we have we have a an economic system that already really does a good job at handling private goods and in my view I don't really see anything about crypto that improves the organizational structure of a company that coordinates people to create revenue for a private good and create value for the world that

way there are some benefits to crypto access to like Securities Securities and equities where you you can give those financial instruments access to the benefits of the financial infrastructure of web 3 but I I don't see how companies are going to improve in any way in how they're run with crypto and the opposite is true for public goods where we it's very obvious to everyone that our governance systems and uh public goods funding mechanisms in the real world are not working and part of the problem s for that is that we've had an innovation cycle on governance that's defined by centuries and now all of a sudden we have crypto and that that Innovation

cycle has decreased to like months and and we have quadratic funding and conviction voting and all these systems that protopia as you call it that it's working towards is this system where we're harnessing the the wisdom of the crowds where you can have a collective group group of people that are making decisions that are actually better decisions than any of the individuals within that system could make on their own and then on top of that you can have this economic Innovation where you are actually making money itself work better by acting as a a unit of value and a store of value where uh money doesn't really work for public goods right now and we can we can allocate and and have

money represent value better um by by building some of these economic systems in a better way and and like there's there's no sealing to the benefit that we get when we're starting to like actually allocate money towards public goods in a way that represents the the value that it it really provides for the world so it's like unlimited upward potential yeah I love that and um I think I'll end on a very pragmatic note which is that for the listeners there's a launch today it's at gardens. fund you can check out the code that was released and play with conviction voting in your own Dow so definitely check that out and

then we also have links in the show notes to Paul's Twitter profile to Gardens Dow to onehive to all the things so uh while you're while you're uh closing down the podcast please check into the show notes and check out these various apps that have been built uh it's really quite cool to see Paul fipe thanks so much for coming on the green pill podcast thank you thanks for having us all right we just heard from Paul and fipe of one hes Gardens I'm excited about conviction voting and so I'm excited about onehive in gardens I think it's a really cool experiment in capital allocation thanks for listening to the green pill. network podcast again we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers who are using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the

world like Paul like Felipe like everyone who's doing conviction voting while you're here if you value our work please go to pods. media and find the episodes from this season in St Club colting them as nfts thanks again to JT nickel how. eth Simons sd. eth ZX Lucas skyou Shan W Bren MMA onchain and james. eth for collecting these episodes another thing you can do is go to green pill. Network where you can download the green pill book for free become a member of your local green pill. Network chapter or join the Discord while you're here might as well subscribe rate and review it really helps us build the regenerative crypto econ economic Movement by telling the algorithms how much love green pill all right thanks

for listening I will see you on the next one [Music]