Dear Gnosis Community,
In this letter, we would like to share our experiences with Gnosis Builders (GB), the ecosystem team of Gnosis Chain (GC).
Please note, we had a limitation on the screenshots we can include in the forum so we will share the same story on our Twitter https://twitter.com/gnsdomains/status/1720826922064576952
We assume that most of you will already have a deep understanding of the Gnosis ecosystem, but want to introduce you to the builder’s side of GC so that we are all on the same page as this is important for the rest of our story.
In 2021 the former xDai Chain merged with the Gnosis team to create Gnosis Chain. Soon after the launch of Gnosis Chain the team went ahead and founded “Gnosis Builders” to support the growth of its ecosystem.
The Gnosis Builders team centers around Shawn O’Connor, Flora Sun, and Teck Chia. It is hard to find information about the team in the first place but we found that Teck and Flora have been working together at Binance Labs, with Teck heading the team before Binance became big. Next in line is Ken Li, who also worked at Binance Labs for a short period of his career. Ken seems to be spearheading a lot of the work at Gnosis Builders and there is a small team working underneath him consisting of Philipp Seifert, Ralph, and other members whose real identity we don’t know.
Their encapsulated way of working makes it difficult to gain a deeper insight and we encourage you to do your own research (1).
Now that you know Gnosis Builders, we can fast forward to May 25th, 2023 aka. the start of Gnosis Name Service.
May 25th was the day we approached Gnosis Builders and had a conversation with Philipp Seifert and later Ken Li to share our vision of Gnosis Name Service with them. Excited to build, we emphasized the need for Gnosis to have a native name service. Knowing that the support of the Chain will be important for a name service we asked for support from the GB team. We shared our design, vision, and proposed a joint venture in one of our conversations with Ken and Philipp. We felt their excitement was limited with Philipps’ argument being that one can already use ENS. At the time, Ken didn’t really seem to have any opinion. However, we knew that Gnosis Name Service had great potential - so we gave it our best. We decided to go ahead and build GNS without a joint venture keeping Gnosis Builders in the loop about our progress, after all, we were still assured marketing support.
June & July were used to focus on finalizing our idea, determining which direction we wanted to take, and building GNS. We also had some urgent matters outside of GNS which led to a short break of about two weeks. During this period we shared our design and progress since we still hoped to collaborate with Gnosis Builders down the line.
With assured marketing support and a desire to improve the user experience of interacting with Gnosis Chain, we continued to build. We put our heart and soul, our sweat and tears into the project, as well as months of continuous crunching. Gnosis Chain lacks some developer tools to this day (e.g. no thegraph on Chiado (their testnet), so we needed to switch to developing on mainnet!) but we didn’t let things like this slow us down. We attended the ETHMunich hackathon and after discussions with the team got Chainlink to support Gnosis Chain next on their CCIP product (which we planned to use for our cross-chain functionality). In other words, when there wasn’t a way, we made one. There was no such thing as impossible.
We did some last design changes and followed up with Gnosis Builders on our progress.
During that time GB reached out to us and it seemed everything was going our way. Rather than rushing out an early version of our product we focused on adding features and making sure using GNS would be a great experience
Following the introduction of Ralph and learning that he is working on “some identity ideas on GC” with Ken we set up a call with Philipp, Ralph, Faisal, and me. During the call, we updated them about our progress as suddenly they seemed very curious about GNS. We were surprised but happy to see their change of mind.
A few weeks later, on August 21st, we went live on Chiado and shared the news with them. We were already so far ahead that it made sense to start thinking about marketing. We were ready to launch very soon. We wanted to make due on Philipp’s promise to support us through endorsements from official channels and think about co-marketing and asked for a call with their Marketing Manager. During this time we also applied for a grant of 5000 - 10000 USD to cover our costs.
Suddenly, Philipp and Ralph wanted to join the marketing call. The call takes place and before we could discuss the marketing strategy we were told that Gnosis Builders is creating a joint venture with Space.id and thus marketing “is going to be hard”. For us, it felt like there is something that doesn’t add up here. If they were working together with Space.id before we pitched them the Idea, then why didn’t they tell us before we spent months of work and the little money we had? What’s worse, if they didn’t have the joint venture at the time why would they do a joint venture with Space.id after we pitched? And why did they wait to tell us until we were ready to launch? No matter how we try to frame it, it doesn’t make any sense at all. Instead of supporting founders in the space, GB seems to prefer paying close friends with company funds to drive out the actual builders on Gnosis Chain. Sadly, we are not the only ones as we heard that they are trying to create their own NFT exchange and Lending Platform. There are so many low-hanging fruits to improve the Gnosis Chain ecosystem but targeting the existing ecosystem is hurting everyone.
In September we approached Martin from Gnosis and were exploring what value we could bring to projects such as Circle. We received great initial feedback from Martin and Shorn. As they had DappCon coming up they were busy but the plan was to pick up our conversation afterwards and get an audit from Gnosis.
Knowing now that Gnosis Builders is trying to work against us we launched on the 14th of September (earlier than we wanted). Our launch was well received from projects with many having wanted a solution such as ours on Gnosis Chain. In the first two weeks, we had more conversations with projects than humanly possible (e.g. MetaMask, 1Inch, NiftyFair, and Agave to name a few). Founders were excited to integrate with us and we even had some projects approaching us.
The joy didn’t last long, however. While we were having a crazy amount of calls with projects each week, they soon all came back with the same reply: “Sorry, we have been told not to work with you” or “We heard that Gnosis Builders is launching their own name service and we want to wait and see”…
When building on Gnosis Chain we chose the Chain for a reason. We believed that Gnosis Chain was community-driven and decentralized. The perfect playground for builders. After learning about Space.id we tried to find a solution with Gnosis, but sadly people no longer were interested in hearing us out. Most of our messages just got ignored from here on out.
Despite all of this turmoil we still approached the situation cool-headed. We set up one last call with Gnosis Builders in hopes of finding a compromise. We offered the following: We wind down operations by announcing their Space.id collaboration and in return for the hard work we receive the grant we applied for at the beginning of the project to at least come out of this with no financial losses. That would’ve been objectively the best outcome for everybody but sadly this offer was declined in the same call due to the following reasons:
- The team GB is currently working with Space.id already received a significant grant so there isn’t space to also give one.
- They don’t even know the person who gives out the grants. (?)
- They didn’t give out grants for a long time.
- They don’t give out grants retrospectively.
If you think this sounds too surreal to be true, you are unfortunately mistaken. These contradictory statements were the serious answers from Philipp of Gnosis Builders to the situation we found ourselves in. We were looking for a solution that was best for everyone but in return got accused of blackmail (see my summary below).
The amount we applied for was 5k - 10k (to cover our costs) and it was never even discussed in this call. We were turned down right from the start.
Instead of finding a solution that helps the community and those that acquired a .gno/.owl domain on GNS, we heard from projects in the space how Ken, Philipp, and Ralph were laughing about us behind closed doors when mentioning GNS.
The continuous grind already left us exhausted but something you could recover from if we wouldn’t be occupied with playing needless strategic moves to battle against an enemy you cannot win against. The last call left us so frustrated that we simply don’t have the motivation to continue this emotional and financial torture. What is even more enraging is that in the end you and all of our supporters as well as the core community are the ones carrying the consequences of this crossfire between Ken’s and Philipp’s personal vendetta against GNS. This sadly leaves us in a position where we believe we can no longer operate in a way that would be satisfactory to our users and community. As such we heavy-heartedly decided to wind down our operations at GNS.
We are writing this open letter to bring transparency to what has happened which we feel we owe our community.
During the research for this article and for transparency we found some wallets that we think are associated with their operations and like already noted above, feel free to do some more research. We believe the wallets belong to Gnosis Builders and their associated Factor VC (Managed by the same people, aka Ken, Flora, Teck, …)
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(1) Doing our research we believe that these are wallets highly associated with either Gnosis Builder and or the Factor VC:
Gnosis Builder Wallets:
- 0xea71a14591551de45bf1ea103fae2f48b567ff46
- 0x570154C8C9F8Cb35dc454f1CdE33DC8Fe30ecd63
- 0x0034e8411d397c7377c06995565e61846d9af957
Factor (VC) Wallets:
- 0x1ee424a0f7a79ec4e8703c26029ed719873b0b60
- 0x1ca861c023b09efa4932d96f1b09de906ebbc4cd