GIP-128 progress report Q3 2025

[ernst]

GIP-128 Update Q3

Gnosis Ltd — Q3 2025 Report

Overview

This quarter marked a decisive shift in how Gnosis presents itself. We are consolidating our product suite and narrative under a single, consumer-facing brand that reflects both our heritage and our next chapter. The new brand strategy positions Gnosis as a values-driven alternative to mainstream finance — purpose-built for a generation seeking agency in a system they no longer trust. For Gnosis Ltd, this means aligning the development of Gnosis Personal, Gnosis Business, and our platform offerings — Gnosis Chain, Gnosis Pay, and Circles — around one shared goal: empowering every human with greater financial agency and access, and creating an open, collectively owned financial system that benefits everyone.

The brand design work is ongoing and not yet ready to be shared publicly; we will present it once the final direction is in place.

We share updates for various workstreams below. Financials will follow, we haven’t yet closed out Q3, but are well below budget.

Gnosis Personal

Overall Strategy & Direction

We’re in the midst of an exciting pivot — evolving from a Circles-focused wallet into a full-fledged Money App / Neobank, seamlessly integrating Circles as an in-app and rewards currency. Our new proposition:

A single, more rewarding app for all your money — designed for everyday people. Effortless and intuitive, yet uncompromising in its mission to empower every human, subtly but surely.

We’ve defined a clear roadmap and milestones across engineering, marketing, and operations to deliver V1 of the rebranded Gnosis App, due for a soft launch at the end of the year.

We’re currently conducting ongoing user research to validate and iterate on our product strategy and positioning.

People

• New member in a leadership role (Deep Shah who was previously part of the core team at Gnosis Pay & Circles, now joins the team to drive product growth, strategy & business)
• Initiated hiring for our first two Operations roles.
• Continued expanding our engineering team to accelerate development.

These foundations across product, people, and process will enable us to scale more effectively in the quarters ahead.

Product Development

• Gnosis Pay Integration is now live

  • View and manage transactions
  • Access and control card settings & details
  • Support for multiple cards
  • Card top-ups and withdrawals now available
  • KYC & IBAN onboarding directly within the app — nearing completion

• Circles Marketplace launched

  • “Top Up Card” offer now live
  • “Buy GNO at a bonus rate” now live

• User Experience & UI

  • Multiple UX polish updates to simplify flows and reduce friction
  • Dark Mode V1 shipped
  • Notifications V1 launched — users now receive alerts for:
    • Card & wallet transactions
    • Circles invitations & reminders

• Circles Invitation & Trust System

  • Introduced a new invitation escrow system to improve the experience
  • Added ability to cancel invites
  • Improving the experience to find invites for new users

• Transaction Guard

  • Collaborating with the AI team to reduce malicious transactions. To be shipped in coming quarter.

• Performance

  • Ongoing improvements for stability & speed

What’s Next

• Full in-app onboarding: KYC, card, and IBAN setup within Gnosis App
• Complete rebrand rollout: new visual identity and onboarding flow
• Email-based recovery system — making self-custody more approachable for mainstream users
• New cashback program tailored for Gnosis App x Circles integration

In summary:
It’s a period of deep groundwork and meaningful transition — setting up the product, people, and strategy foundations that will start to bear fruit in the coming quarters.

Gnosis Business

Overall Strategy & Direction

Gnosis Business serves as the financial operating system for businesses with onchain treasuries. Think Safe Wallet, for businesses. With Gnosis Business, teams now have a simple interface to manage all their treasury, payments, and accounting. Simply connect their wallets, and start operating their business at laser speed.

Crypto native at heart, fellow founders in spirit. We’re building an integrated FinOps stack that connects stablecoins and fiat seamlessly through the wider Gnosis ecosystem:

• Safe accounts for self-custodial treasuries
• Gnosis Ramp for fiat on/off ramps
• Gnosis Pay Corporate Card to spend with over 130 million merchants
• Integrated crypto-accounting, compatible with Xero and Quickbooks

Gnosis Business is available across all relevant networks. However, the best experience will be on Gnosis Chain, where liquidity for local stablecoins is deepest and transaction costs are lowest.

People

We’re thrilled to welcome Heng Hong Lee as Head of Engineering, Payments. Formerly at StraitsX, Facebook, and Apple, Heng Hong combines 15 years of technical experience with 6 years in payments to lead the next phase of Gnosis Business’ engineering growth.

Product Development:

• Gnosis Ramps: Unified API for FX, combining both on/off-ramps, stablecoin issuers and cross-bridge defi liquidity.

• Launched MVP, a cohesive AppStore like experience to access various
  on/off-ramps. This replaces bespoke integration with each on/off-ramp provider. Goal of Gnosis Ramps is to provide quick market launch, while maintaining a direct and transparent relationship between the merchants/partners and payment gateways.

• All provider integrations are built as modular, isolated packages with clearly
  defined capabilities. Each integration securely manages its own credentials and follows standardized compliance and payment hooks, ensuring consistent, auditable money-movement flows across partners.

• Gnosis HQ Invoices [Launching this Oct]

  • Ability to send your vendors an invoice link where they can easily and securely request for payments.
  • Pay/Issue invoices that works directly with your safe wallets

• Upgraded data pipeline [Launching this Nov]:

  • Faster transaction history processing that is orders of magnitude faster
  • Added ability to provide CEX transfers and balances
  • Added ability to provide DeFi transactions and balances

• Building Gnosis HQ’s Mobile App V1 [Launching mid-Nov]

  • Ability to view and update transaction history while on the go
  • It’ll eventually support making transfers via mobile as well

• Legal & Compliance Migration [Completed]

  • As part of the post-acquisition integration of HQ.xyz, completed the migration of Gnosis Business to be operated from a Singapore to Cayman entity, including tasks to remain compliant with both jurisdictions.

• Quality of life fixes [Completed]

  • Improved navigation and UX
  • Created a Payouts-only mode so users can use HQ for free if they are only making payments via HQ and not doing bookkeeping/accounting
  • Smaller updates to the current data pipeline that made our processing speed 2-5x faster and swapped providers to ones that provided better reliability

Financials & Revenue

• Total payment volume: $13.12M YTD across all rails.
• Transaction Volume:
  • Stablecoin-to-fiat: $4.02M (Q1: $1.34M; Q2: $1.39M; Q3: $1.29M)
    -Crypto-to-crypto: $8.83M (Q1: $5.83M; Q2: $1.03M; Q3: $1.97M)
    -Cards: $0.27M processed since beta launch in March 2025
• User activity: 1,982 total sign-ups and 2,067 organisations created.
• New sign-ups: 106 in Q1, 229 in Q2, 90 in Q3.
• Active Business Plans: 57 in Q1, 51 in Q2, 28 in Q3. Active users include Mantle, Stargate, Ocean Protocol, BeamDAO, NewCampus, and many more.

Q2 involved heavy post-acquisition integration between HQ.xyz and the wider family of Gnosis. This included migrating GnosisHQ.com to be operated from the former Singapore entity to a Gnosis-owned entity. A thorough migration process of clients, involving an opt-up approach was undertaken. I.e. Merchants had to actively opt-in for the migration, to continue being serviced.

Q3 centred on infrastructure groundwork, completing the migration to the Cayman entity, upgrading the data pipeline for up to 5x faster processing, and improving system reliability. Transaction volumes remained stable across payout and reporting modules, with early traction from card usage and continued engagement from multi-chain treasury teams.

In Q4, the focus turned to delivering new product surfaces: HQ Mobile App, HQ Invoices, and Gnosis Ramps (f.k.a. Uramp), a unified FX and liquidity layer connecting on/off-ramps, stablecoin issuers, and DeFi bridges through a modular API. These updates deepen Gnosis Business’ position as the financial operating system for onchain organisations, linking Safe accounts, Ramps, Cards, and accounting into a cohesive FinOps stack.

Gnosis Chain

Overall Strategy/Direction/People

• Reinforcing Gnosis Chain as the open, credibly neutral platform powering the broader Gnosis ecosystem — from consumer products (Gnosis Personal) to business tools (Gnosis Business) and payments infrastructure (Gnosis Pay).

• Strategic focus on chain reliability, client diversity, and stablecoin liquidity as foundations for mainstream financial use cases.

• Continued investment in core engineering, cross-chain connectivity, and regional stablecoin integrations to make Gnosis the best settlement layer for real-world money flows.

• Strengthened collaboration between core engineering, DevRel, and BD teams to streamline upgrades, improve testing infrastructure, and expand partner integrations.

• Consolidating messaging and positioning: Gnosis Chain as the chain for payments and stablecoins, anchoring Gnosis’ “Money Infrastructure” narrative.

Technical Updates:

• Fusaka Devnets successfully launched with full client diversity:

  • CL: Lighthouse, Teku, Nimbus, Lodestar
  • EL: Nethermind, Erigon, Reth, Geth

• Fusaka hardfork (Chiado) scheduled for October 21; mainnet upgrade to follow in line with Ethereum’s timeline.

• Bridge migration from sDAI → sUSDS planned for October 28.

• Universal Deposits (EDU → Gnosis) deployed (experimental release).

• Reth_Gnosis upgraded to support full chain data, enabling RPC providers to use it for the first time.

• Ongoing collaboration with Nethermind to improve indexing performance and optimize node efficiency.

Business Development & Ecosystem:

• CEX Listings:

  • Whitebit integration for GNO and USDC.e on Gnosis Chain signed; rollout in progress.
  • Ripio (leading exchange in LATAM) and Lemon (leading exchange in
    Argentina) listed GNO and xDAI, expanding access across Latin America. Lemon is listed here for completeness sake, credit for this integration goes to KPK.

• Stablecoins:

  • GHO (Aave) live on Gnosis Chain, expanding access to decentralized
    stablecoin liquidity (listed for completeness, credit goes to KPK).
  • ZCHF (Swiss franc stablecoin) live with 3% on-chain yield, and already
    integrated into Zeal, driving early user adoption.
  • ZARP (South African rand) and BRX (Brazilian real) launched,
    strengthening Gnosis Chain’s position as a hub for regional, non-USD
    stablecoins.
  • IDRX (Indonesian rupiah), AUSD (Agora USD), ARST (Argentine Peso),
    and gEURO (Euro-based Liquity fork) are rolling out in the next few
    weeks/months.
  • These integrations expand real-world utility for payments and settlement in local markets.

• Bridges:

  • Lucid bridge live for large-scale USDC transfers; liquidity seeded by KPK, scaling liquidity tbd.
  • NEAR Intents integrating EURe, enabling users to move funds seamlessly from any chain into EURe on Gnosis Chain, further strengthening cross-chain liquidity and access.

• DeFi Ecosystem:

  • Morpho has been deployed on Gnosis Chain, aiming to provide more yield opportunities through longer tail assets. Soon a curator will be chosen for the platform.
  • Pareto Credit, a permissioned credit line yield product, will be onboarded onto Gnosis Chain once the legal DD passes, which can provide relatively high and sustainable yield on EURe (estimated ~10% APY).
  • Defx, a perp DEX L1, has had a handshake agreement with Gnosis Chain, and we are now in the stage of finalizing the proposal. Once finalized, Gnosis Chain intends to have Defx as the gateway of FX trading for Gnosis Chain aligned assets, especially stablecoins.

Gnosis Pay

Overall Strategy/ Direction/ People

• Building the payment infrastructure that connects traditional finance and Web3 — enabling on-chain assets in self-custody to be used for everyday spending.

• Transitioning from a B2C MVP to a B2B2C platform via the new Partner API, powering card and payment functionality for apps like Gnosis, Zeal, and Picnic.

• Strengthening the Visa partnership and compliance stack to support scale across Europe and Latin America.

• Defining the foundation for a global payments network built on Gnosis Chain, where every transaction reinforces on-chain liquidity and stablecoin adoption.

• Growing the team across engineering, operations, and compliance, with a focus on partner onboarding, API reliability, and revenue optimization.

Product & Platform Updates:

• Partner API v1 launched, including KYC and card order endpoints.
• Apple Pay and Google Pay integrations completed.
• Brazil rollout finalized; 33 countries now live (EEA, UK, Switzerland, Brazil).
• PISMO processor integration delivered, enabling multi-currency accounts (€ | $ | £).
• Introduced real-time reversals, virtual cards, on-chain actions API, smart wallet compatibility, and Gnosis ID integration.
• B2B Partner Pipeline:
  • Over 100+ partners in the funnel; 10 integrations in active development.
  • Focused expansion into LATAM and Europe with regionally tailored regulatory and compliance frameworks.

Support Model Transition:

• Migrated from direct B2C support to partner-led L1 model, allowing the
  Gnosis Pay team to focus on L2 issues (payments infrastructure).
• Q3 metrics:
  • 1,677 tickets processed; 40 h average response; 81 % satisfaction rate.
  • Automation, localization, and SLA improvements planned for Q1 2026.

Financials & Performance:

• Transaction volume: $33 M in Q3 (+33 % QoQ; +488 % YoY).
• Transactions processed: 582,759; 106,391 total sign-ups, 41,121 cards
  activated, 12,526 active users.
• Gross revenue: +62 % QoQ; revenue per active client: +18 %.
• Revenue below projections due to high share of EU domestic transactions (capped take rates), no FX fees in Q3, and smaller average transaction sizes in Brazil.
• Total revenue for Q3 119,865 USD (actual) vs 206,849 (projected).
• Costs below budget owing to lean headcount and disciplined expense management.
• Future monetization levers: FX fees, swaps, yield on deposits, ATM fees, and subscriptions.

Gnosis Pay is evolving from a consumer pilot into the core payments engine for the Gnosis ecosystem and its partners. The shift to a B2B2C model, combined with expanding card and stablecoin functionality, establishes the groundwork for scalable, borderless payments. With BRL support, partner activations, and revenue optimization in focus for Q4, Gnosis Pay is positioned to become the trusted bridge between blockchain assets and real-world commerce.

Circles

Overall Strategy

The Circles team has used the learnings from the Metri launch and the extensive feedback we received from users and partners to update its strategy, being fully focussed on establishing a valuable and urgent problem that lots of people experience and that Circles solves better than the existing alternatives. Our contributions to the consolidated Gnosis strategy is expressed in our newly formulated mission and vision statements:

Our vision is to empower a multipolar world built on an open monetary system that serves people and communities everywhere. Our mission is to give economic agency to people and communities by letting them create their own currencies.

We formulated the following objectives for the next 6 months to inform our roadmap:

• Gnosis Personal users actively earn and spend their CRC.
• Circles is a powerful driver of growth of Gnosis Personal.
• We have systematically iterated on use cases for Circles beyond Gnosis Personal.
• We build up technical authority and credibility for the Circles protocol through strategic content marketing.
• Circles infra and dev-tooling “just works” and is reliable.
• We have evaluated a number of strategically relevant advanced functionalities with respect to their technical feasibility and strategic relevance.

People

• Paul Boes, who was formerly a researcher in the team and co-authored the whitepaper, has been appointed team lead.
• The team has grown to 10 core members, through a mix of hiring and welcoming existing Gnosis folks from other teams. In particular, we welcome Ann, Armagan, Sandipan and Zeng to the team.

Product & Platform Highlights

• Supported the rollout of the first Metri marketplace offers.
• White-glove support for the Open Internet Club as a lighthouse community.
• Simplifying the Circles-SDK.
• Enabled standalone mini-apps to be built and used with Circles via Metri.

Next Up

• Launching a Circles Marketplace and adding physical goods offers into Metri.
• Simpler invitations and community onboarding.
• Launching a user-facing trust score.
• Various technical and UX improvements.
• Participation at ETHGlobal Buenos Aires and EdgeCity Patagonia.
• CRC cashback for Gnosis Personal.

Marketing

Marketing

• Adrienne Youngman joined as the new head of marketing.
• Unified brand strategy defined for Gnosis.
• Brand relaunch and visual identity developed.
• New events strategy defined:
  • BD centric event executed at Token 2049.
  • BD event and targeted sponsorship secured in addition to main sponsorship at DevConnect, plus strong speaker exposure.
• Research kicked off ahead of consumer product launch (online and offline) to inform product and GTM.
• Continued presence on social media, via speaker opportunities, and in podcasts and
  interviews.

Next up:

• Brand Relaunch

  • Execute a relaunch campaign across channels (social, website, events).
  • Deploy a unified website with click-rate-optimisation (CRO) integrated.

• DevConnect

  • Support the Gnosis Pay Latam launch at the booth, on social, via PR, and targeted sponsorships.
  • Sponsor WalletCon to support top-of-mind awareness of Chain among stablecoin and payments projects and of Pay among wallets.
  • Host a conversion-centered event focused on our B2B / B2D products: Chain, Pay, and Business.
  • Guerrilla marketing campaign in development.

• Consumer Brand launch - soft launch to onboard evangels while growing the waitlist.

  • Grass roots events and community-building for deep authentic connection.
  • Cross channel narrative campaign - incl TikTok, Insta, and YT - to communicate our core message with reach and build awareness.
  • Conversion campaigns likely to include website and SEO.

• General Marketing Improvements

  • Customer acquisition funnels for Pay and Chain, rolling out to Business.
  • SEO and GEO content acceleration - (carefully) leveraging AI.
  • Stronger content on social media including significant ramp up of multi-media.
  • Personal brand-building on LinkedIn for multiple team members to support BD and our employer brand.
  • Upgrade the community experience with greater transparency and clear contribution tracks.

HR

Headcount

We were 129 people on July 1 and 135 on Sep 30.

Team reorg/ AI Team: The AI team has been repurposed from agentic prediction market research to deliver AI-related features for the product teams. So far, they worked on a transaction guard for Gnosis Personal, next they will work on AI assisted customer support for Gnosis Pay.

Please feel free to follow up with questions regarding products and strategy (and whatever else you have!) – the corresponding team leads or I will get back to you. I will add details on burn as soon as the numbers are finalized.

Also: This is V1 of this report. Please be liberal with feedback regarding what works/ what doesn’t work/ what should be in here and isn’t. Will take this onboard for Q4.

As always: Onwards and upwards!
F

Edit: Numbers for Q3 [Nov 3, 2025 FE]

Q3 Budget vs Spend

Category	Budgeted ($)	Spent ($)
Product Development	3,875,000	2,958,389
Core and Infrastructure	900,000	968,733
BD & DevRel	962,500	334,086
Marketing and Design	508,750	320,100
Legal	406,250	274,792
Finance	147,500	136,890
Personnel Overheads	373,000	141,135
Other Personnel*	341,875	360,964
Total	7,516,875	5,495,089

Detailed breakdown is here.

Please note that the total budget was for 12 months and we do still expect costs to increase over the coming quarters with a slightly growing team and products that require marketing pushes. We also budgeted conservatively, hence the 25% underspend.

[staworth]

This is great to see - thank you @ernst and everyone else involved in pulling this together!

We’d like to take this opportunity with the first report to realign on expectations for quarterly reporting going forwards… At the beginning of any reporting process, there’s often a tension between our ideals and expectations on the one hand, and what’s pragmatically possible on the other. We wanted to draw out a couple of items from the GIP-128 discussion, just to get an update on feasibility.

@ernst

Gnosis Ltd will publish quarterly reports detailing spend and progress across all budget categories.

We’re very pleased to see this report delivered within 3 months of the GIP-128 being approved, and within 14 days of the end of calendar Q3. We’re generally satisfied with the level of progress updates (though would love to see even more detail coming out from community questions on specific areas). However, we note that there is no specific financial details of either spend or budget.

1. Is it realistic to provide accurate and fully-accounted details of spend and budget in each quarter? Or is this likely to be a significant uplift and cause of delay?

2. If not realistic, would it be possible to give a rough estimate of aggregate spend against the $30 million in GIP-128?

3. If neither are possible for this or any quarter, will similar figures be released at any stage (e.g. year-end report)?

@ernst

I understand your concern about the lack of transparency regarding product profitability. I will make sure we capture this well in the quarterly reports.

We’re really glad to see this report includes financials and revenues in some categories. The Gnosis Business and Gnosis Pay figures are enlightening, particularly for two categories that lack the same visibility as purely public infrastructure like Gnosis Chain.

As with costs there also isn’t any indication on profitability here. We expect this may flow from the lack of cost data, and understand that reaching complete, fully-accounted figures may be quite an uplift in time and effort. However, in the same vein as for costs:

4. Should we expect that profitability will not form part of the reports going forwards?

For what it’s worth, we feel that the profitability of Gnosis Ltd is not a very high priority item. In a world where value accrues to GnosisDAO rather than Ltd, and the DAO then continues to fund Ltd, we would expect consistent and likely significant losses from Ltd for the foreseeable future. Though individual areas like Pay and Business may be more likely to make a profit relative to their own costs, we think that even there, the goal should be growth rather than profitability over the coming years.

@ernst

We will give quarterly updates, and would also be happy to do update calls with significant GNO holders/ representatives!

Finally, we’re grateful that this is being opened up promptly for questions and feedback.

5. Would an update call also be on the table for those wishing to discuss questions and feedback live?

Perhaps, given the very recent AMA, this may not be the best use of resources right now. However, we do feel that forum posts can be a limiting form factor for some, and additional channels of feedback may improve the overall quality of feedback and speed of iteration. We’d personally be keen to join and actively participate in helping perfect these reports.

Thank you again.

[lighthousegov.eth]

Thank you for the transparency.

It’s great for the broader community to be updated with the macro intentions as it helps us also plan our own efforts.

Look forward to seeing what develops and will be glad to help/put forward our ideas as best we can!

[ernst]

Thank you for your detailed review.

First and foremost: Yes, I expect to be able to deliver financials in two or three weeks’ time for the quarter. They will not be down to the last wei, but will give a good indication of what was spent for each workstream and for the infrastructure Gnosis Ltd pays for.

We are also happy to regularly do AMAs – ideally, next time we would time it better so that the AMA comes after the report. Our community lead @john_szczepaniak will gauge interest and schedule another one in Q4., maybe when I’ve added the financials here.

[dave]

Thank you for the detailed update, the progress across the payments products and integrations looks great. I’m looking forward to seeing the financials and attending the AMA.

I had a few questions regarding Circles. It’s a long-standing project within the Gnosis ecosystem (~7 years?), but so far hasn’t achieved significant user adoption. What will be different this time? Who are the target users, and what specific problem does Circles aim to solve at scale?

Related to this, could you clarify the rationale for building the new wallet around Circles? Is this primarily to give Circles renewed utility, or would it be possible, to build a wallet that stands on its own without that dependency? I believe Gnosis is extremely well positioned to build a Neobank product. My only concern is that Circles might be somewhat “forced” into the experience.

With a dedicated team of ten people now working on Circles, do we have a rough estimate of the total R&D investment to date on Circles, and how it is expected to eventually generate tangible value for the DAO and GNO holders?

[ernst]

So financials first:

Pre 2023, Circles was not part of Gnosis, and development was mainly supported by Martin and me personally alongside a number of smaller contributors. Large parts of the early app were actually developed by volunteers. Circles development was integrated into Gnosis at the start of 2023. Since then, we spent on it:

• 2023 €323,435
• 2024 €353,054
• 2025 H1 €180,019
• 2025.Q3 $54,886 - [note the currency switch, was done for having a singular reporting currency for GIP128 reporting]

So all in all less than 1m EUR so far.

Secondly, wallet strategy: Gnosis Personal is an onchain neobank. To me, this is a no-brainer. We already have the full stack to make it happen. We’re integrating Circles as an in-app rewards currency and building from there. The Circles team is also driving initiatives for external builders to develop on top of Circles.

Circles will be a first-class citizen in this app, but if we can’t gain traction, we’ll move on. Our time horizon is 12 months. Gnosis Personal isn’t “a Circles wallet”; it’s an onchain neobank that doesn’t just put a polished frontend on legacy systems. It lets users become owners of the rails.

So why keep pushing Circles, even though it’s likely to be an uphill battle? Because we’re not here to simply port off-chain systems onchain. The way money works today isn’t the way it ought to work. Is this a David vs. Goliath fight? Absolutely. Do I think our odds of success are greater than zero? Also absolutely.

We’re not putting all our eggs in the Circles basket, but I’d rather fight and fail outright than take the coward’s way out.

This is the tl;dr. @paulb and @deep45shah, please add your thoughts for Circles and Gnosis Personal respectively!

[deep45shah]

Adding to what @ernst said — from a Gnosis Personal perspective:

@dave , I understand how Circles can feel somewhat “forced” into the product given its complexity. But we see it as a strong opportunity to differentiate.

Launching a neobank today is far easier than it used to be — with infrastructure maturing across card issuing (Rain / Gnosis Pay), on–off ramps (Bridge, BVNK, BlindPay), and wallets (Privy) and friendlier regulation- you can launch a product in weeks, not years. This means competition will be intense, and teams with the best distribution and GTM chops will survive and win.

With Circles, we can not only differentiate at the GTM level but also at the product level, which I think is very valuable. Most neobanks will offer traditional, points-based rewards programs, while Circles lets us offer something that looks similar on the surface but is, in fact, a rethinking of money itself. It can start as a rewards program but evolve into a discovery journey — social (through trusting), gamified, and retention-driven (through the hourly creation).

We also expect Circles’ independent growth to feed back into Gnosis Personal, creating a new user acquisition channel.

I understand that all this is easy to say in theory, I want to state that I don’t underestimate the challenge of abstracting away this complexity. Building a successful consumer product is hard. Building a blockchain-based one is harder. Building a Circles-based blockchain product is wayy harder…

But at Gnosis, we’ve never shied away from hard challenges. It’s in our DNA to build products that we think should exist — empowering and meaningful even if they might be technically complex. Safe, CowSwap, Gnosis Pay are proof of that. Gnosis Personal will be the next — our first real attempt at building an everyday consumer product. We’ve always been ‘Built Different’, and this time we’re going to embrace and leverage this as a strength and point of differentiation in our marketing campaigns too. (Keep an eye out )

[dave]

Thanks @deep45shah and @ernst for the thorough reply and transparency. Looking forward to trying out Gnosis Personal once it launches.

AFAIK, Circles isn’t designed to directly generate revenue or direct returns for the DAO or GNO holders - it’s more of a common good. Would it be fair to say the main ROI would be indirect, by driving user onboarding and engagement across the broader Gnosis ecosystem?

In that context, the spend to date seems relatively modest within the bigger picture.

[ernst]

I just added spend numbers to the report!

[ernst]

Yes. So there are two rationales here,

1. It’s my core belief that porting existing monetary infrastructure onchain is not the be all and end all of crypto. We wanted to democratize money issuance, and currently we’re mostly building shinier rails for the banks. I posted this to twitter a while back:
   

   
   
   Circles is how we think money should and could work, and we have a moral obligation to try to make it happen. If it doesn’t that’s that, and we will cut our losses, but I want us to give our best shot.

2. Circles is an incredibly sticky protocol if it gains traction, effectively it creates a (reliable, but truly decentralized!!) DID layer with a social graph as a side product. This layer will be invaluable because so far all attempts to create something akin have not figured the incentive layer to actually curate the network and keep it honest.

[staworth]

Thank you @ernst! Great to see this prudence in budgeting, spend records and ultimately coming in under budget.

One question for the Gnosis Pay team: how should we understand the $126,000 of “income” recorded under Gnosis Pay product development (page 1a)? Is it broadly comparable to (or even the same as) the total revenue figure given in the original forum report? Or is this entirely separate?

@ernst

Total revenue for Q3 119,865 USD (actual) vs 206,849 (projected).

[paulb]

Hey @dave , super late to the party but also wanted to comment from the Circles team’s perspective.

First of all, thanks for bringing this up, as it’s an elephant in the room for many.

Beyond what @ernst and @deep45shah have said already (and to all of which I fully agree), some additional points.

The 12 month time horizon that Friederike mentions is fully aligned with the team, we’re not thinking of ourselves as living in a safe haven of Gnosis’ patronage.

In light of the evidence that the “better money” narrative by itself doesn’t attract users at scale (or that at least we haven’t been able to figure out how to do so), we’re actually changing gears and are actively looking for beachhead use cases to conquer, with a high willingness of modifying the user facing “product”. This does not mean we let go of the original vision of Circles, just our strategy for how we get there.

You ask “Who are the target users, and what specific problem does Circles aim to solve at scale?”. We’re currently in the process of systematically evaluating and validating a number of use cases that we’re particularly bullish on and see some pull for: These are

Soft Sybil Resistance
Problem: Providers of scarce on-chain resources and services find it hard to keep sybils out without deterring potential users with paywalls or overkill KYC requirements.
Solution: A Circles-based trust score keeps most of the sybils out while being easy for people to crack. Requiring additional payment in trustworthy CRC additionally allows rate limiting access to the service

One mvp example for this is a simple Sepolia ETH faucet that we just published.

Trust-based low-interest microcredits
Problem: Many people find it hard to get access to credit at reasonable conditions but also awkward to ask their friends for money and coordinate the “terms” of a small loan.
Solution: Using Circles, users can borrow $$ from users that trust them. Interest is paid in CRC. Loan information is scrambled/mixed for users that pay back in time, removing the awkwardness

Communit-based loyalty program
Problem: Vendors struggle to reach their most loyal customer base. Communities struggle to create stickiness. Users are rich in interests but short on cash and everything always gets more expensive. Services like Groupon feel soulless and outdated.
Solution: By offering specific communities discounts/exclusive offers/accept partial payment in CRC, vendors can attract customers that are highly interest-aligned and loyal, communities can make membership more attractive and users can buy more of the things they care about.

These are the top 3 rated from over 30 use cases that we collected, we’re conducting user research, seeking pilots with community partners. I expect that by our Q1’26 report we’ll be able to report traction with at least one of them. If you have any ideas, leads, comments on these cases or would like to learn more about the other ones, please feel free to ask, either here or by DM.

Lastly, you make a point about Circles not being designed for directly generating revenue. Yes and no. It’s true that in evaluating use cases, we prioritize traction and growth over unit economics and business model. It’s also true that currently our main value proposition for other Gnosis products is to provide them with a steady stream of highly values-aligned users and to help them, e.g. Gnosis Personal, distinguish themselves from their competitors. But it’s also true that CRC have a market price and that in case we hit PMF, the DAO could experience a significant revenue stream in CRC, from fees, LPing, etc.