GIP-151: Should GnosisDAO offer a one-time pro-rata treasury redemption?

[StefanGeorge]

We have been working with @Wismerhill to find a fair exit path for GNO holders who do not believe in the ROI of the different investments made and products built within the Gnosis Ecosystem.

By redeeming their GNO, they lose any rights, utility, or functionality that those redeemed tokens have in relation to the Gnosis Ecosystem, the GnosisDAO, and associated legal entities. This also includes all investments made via Gnosis entities.

The three main initiatives and their economic opportunities developed by Gnosis are:

Gnosis Pay:

The Economic Case for Gnosis Pay

Gnosis Pay is a more conventional business than Gnosis Chain. This post sits alongside the Gnosis Chain and EEZ piece and makes the case for Pay on its own terms. It has a clearer path to sustainability, more predictable cash flow into the DAO, and a different shape of bet. The idea behind Gnosis Pay is straightforward: legacy payments infrastructure is complicated, fragmented, and gated. To offer a card product, you need relationships with a card network, a BIN sponsor, a payment processor, a …

Gnosis App:

The Economic Case for Gnosis App

Gnosis App is the hardest of the three business models and the one with the largest consumer upside. It is also the only one of the three where the product itself is the distribution. That product is Circles. It is worth being clear about why we are doing a consumer product at all. In the Gnosis Pay piece we said the unit economics of acquiring individual consumers in payments are brutal. That is true, and it is exactly why most crypto consumer apps fail. So the bet here is not that we are bett…

Gnosis Chain and the EEZ:

The Economic Case for Gnosis Chain

The economic case for Gnosis Chain today is weak. The chain collected around $105,000 in transaction fees over the past 12 months. Even if we raised fees to where we realistically could, we are looking at $1-2 million a year at most. Operating the chain costs the DAO $7-10 million a year, depending on whether or not you count staking rewards, which exclusively go to GNO holders for securing and validating the network. That covers client development, infrastructure provisioning (block explorers,…

In addition, GnosisVC has made several investments in Sorted, Monerium, Yodl, Bermuda, among many others, out of which some show strong growth and potential for a good ROI in the long run.

I am in favour of offering this exit path, but I will personally not participate in the redemption.