Thank you @Nay for the proposal and @Wunderbernd for the comment.
First, I very much agree with @Wunderbernd is that the relevant metric is “free cashflow” or how I would call it: producing goods and services that provide so much value that users are willing to pay for it.
Now I do think that Gnosis has produced a bunch of those products:
- the chain itself
- Gnosis Pay
- EURe on Gnosis (https://uramp.gnosis.io/)
- Cowswap (on Gnosis)
- lending markets on Gnosis (where Gnosis has partially a stake in (Spark))
- …
So while we continue to do R&D and starting new ventures (e.g. GnosisVPN, AI agents, potentially some prediction markets plays again) I think it is now crucial to focus on (user) growth of the products mentioned above. The result should be much more users using our products and paying fees (or how you call it: “free cashflow”).
Now, for such a growth program we should spend money and it does make sense to use GNO here, as we want as many as possible of the users of Gnosis chain also be owner of the chain (aka GNO holder) as we generally believe in distributed ownership but also out of pure self-interest think a more decentralized chain can be more valuable. (credible neutral blockspace will be more valuable than centralized blockspace with some security guarentees (most L2s)).
So long story short - I think it is time to do a large user growth GNO incentive program. (it needs to designed in a way to actually attact real people and not just a “farming program” that gets “farmed” with capital and of course it should also not be Sybil attackable).
If we spend GNO for incentives we are essentially “selling GNO” to finance “growth expense”. Now this is the point where the GNO price matters - if we are selling GNO we don’t want to sell them below what they are worth.
So in summary - I am in favor of this proposal if it is connected to a growth program where the GNO aquired in the buy back are consequently used to attract more user. I had been working on such a program for a while and share more here is the forum soon but will also present those ideas at my “Circles 2.0 talk” at Dappcon next week. (spoiler: Circles can help addressing the challenges mentioned above) and can yet be another “product” that attracts users to Gnosis.