While I trying to follow discussion and sentiment in the form there are too many opinions to directly deal with all.
So I just copy my messages from a parallel Gnosis telegram group that tried to capture my views on the currently large topcis for Gnosis:
from a few days ago:
Martin Köppelmann, [23. Jul 2026 at 12:52:50]:
…1) EEZ
Gnosis Chain was born when gascosts on Etheruem where >$10 for simple tx. At the time we saw that while L2 claimed to be just more of Ethereum (as neutral and as secure) this claim was simply not true. So we saw an opportunity to truely try to create “more of Ethereum”. We “invested” heavily in decentralization and security. The result is an extremly reliable chain (basically one of the very few chains with no downtime since inception). The chain is certainly also not a “ghost chain”, but the truth is also: total usage of the chain is still to small to cover the costs of the chain. Not even looking at gas cost, even if we would assume all the apps on Gnosis would 100% be owned by Gnosis (which is not the case) the total fees would still just hardly cover its costs of a couple of $million.
While there is a small number of projects that came to Gnosis because of its focus on decentralization it simply is not a good sellingpoint at this time. The number of projects that value decentralization higher than distribution and already existing numbers of user is already small and of that small subset Ethereum itself is probably a good choice now as costs on Ethereum have gone down dramatically.
We do I believe EEZ is now the right step for Gnosis: we become the first chain that offers you both: 1) the advantages of an L2 (faster blocktimes, lower costs) AND 2) all the advantages of Ethereum (all the liquidity, tokens, integration). Whatever is available on Ethereum can be reached and interacted with from Gnosis. Access to tokens, liqudity, oracales, all the defi protcols, CEX intergarion and so on. The other direction is true as well. Deploying on Gnosis will mean: every user on Ethereum is your potential customer as they can interact with your procol directly from Ethereum but you also get the advantage of being on a chain where native users of it can still enjoy low gas costs and fast tx.
Our EEZ strategy assumes a rollout on Gnosis first. At the same time we know that our strength is rather tech than distribution. Therefore we know, that Gnosis chain, even with the strongest tech will not cover the full potential of a tech like EEZ. For that reason we are planing in parallel to offer it as a service to other L2 just like e.g. Arbitrum is offering their stack to Robinhood now (for some fees/ revshare).
- Gnosis Pay
While we did start it as a cosumer product it became early enough clear that we where not able to scale that. And I think it is pretty clear why: a card initself is not a selling point, at least not in Europe where we first had our licenzes. But also not in Brazil where we had the lizence next. It always required users to have another main trigger and the card is essentially a byproduct. To get started we manifactured this “main trigger” with the GNO cashback program. This was the necessary step to get the card from 0 to 1. However, it was not a model to scale to millions of users, simply because it was finacially unsustainable. Instead the approach was to offer Gnosis Pay as a backend (b2b) solution to wallets or other projects that can all have their own strategy of how to aquire users and Gnosis Pay being a serive provider to them. The most succesfull example of this is “miniPay”. Here the “reason” people get it is simply by being a Opera user already and the integration of “minipay” into the product people already have for a different reason.
- Gnosis App/ Circles
As said before, people don’t come for a card alone. The primary hook needs to be something else. Zeal e.g. tried it with a savings rate on €/$/pound. But that strategy is very hard. In the short period of “defi summer” with yields of e.g >10% it certainly would had been a selling point. Today yields are hardly higher. Why would you take on the risk of having your deposit not insured and additional very real smart contract risks for 3-4% when you can get from Chase e.g in Germany right not 4% on Euro (even if just as a temporary promotion).
Circles is a moonshot project but IT IS a true differentiator. It is a big promise about a better and fairer money (and of course it also has the element of just “free money”). We know a) from the Circles past (viral launch in 2020 with >100k signups in days) and b) from somewhat similar project (worldcoin or even scammy projects like minepi.com (number 47 and 55 on coinmarketcap, both with millions of user) that it is possible to use the mechanism of mining a new token to use that to get to a million of user distribution. That user distribution initself is valuable. Specifcally in a age of AI where code is cheap and distribution becomes everything. But however, with larger traction I also beleive that Circles itself has a real change to become something beyond a “marketing tool to achive distribution”. The core rules of Circles are clean and there is a chance that other will start to “make it their own” and use/build on it independtly. (like it actualy already happened for a while when in 2021 there was a chinse project building on Circles fully indepedent of us).
- Spin out vs stay in Gnosis
Over the years there have been lots of discussions about the spinouts. And I myself have gone back and forth about it. Obvisouly at the time we supported it. Years later there was the idea that Gnosis got too little from them. At that time we where symathatic to the idea “no more spinouts”. Now I would say, this was likely wishful thinking. Thinking, without the spinouts things would have gotten even bigger within Gnosis. We can not know, but in retroperspective I would say the spinouts where our most succesfull projects and I think it is quite likely that they became succesfull BECAUSE they spun out.
I think in summary:
a) Gnosis should focus on deliverything EEZ for the chain, using that to push the chain and at the same time offer EEZ as a framwork
b) Gnosis pay should do whatever their clients need (like recently deploying on Celo) to became a big player in the certainly coming connection between blockchain and fintech - the direction here is also either a spin-out or an acquisition
c) Circles (previously Gnosis app) should fully focus on the Circles story and give that a real shot as its own idependent project
More recent post:
I want to give more context on GIP 152 above.
We as in “Gnosis Ltd” have decided to no longer continue Gnosis app. The broad “ecosystem apprach” Gonsis used for many years had its rational in the earlier phase of crypto but now (and probably already since a while) focus is key. And we decided to put our main focus on the chain/EEZ while in parellel bringing Gnosis Pay into a spinout or aquisition position. For Gnosis app in theory other ways of continuation are possible (and we certainly would worst case feel responsible for an orderly winddown) but at this point this vote should be understood as: “continuation (as a spinout) vs shutdown” and not as “spin-out vs no spin-out”.