Thanks for the constructive questions @waldo.
an active user is anyone who takes at least one of these actions on the app:
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a Circles action - register, personal mint, trust, invite, profile update, or a relayed fee/module event
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a CoW swap tx (signed or filled)
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a marketplace buy
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any card transaction
Fair point that these carry different weight - a mint is a weak signal, a card transaction is not. That’s why the numbers the proposal leads with are the ones you can’t farm: card users, backers committing real capital.
These are 800 users of Gnosis App who actively used the card in the past week - not people who just associated a card with their profile. They’re comprised of users who signed up for the Gnosis Pay card via the app, as well as existing GP (Gnosis Pay) users that signed up elsewhere but have chosen the Gnosis App as their primary app.
All-time card payment volume through the Gnosis App is ~$15.5M, weekly volume end of Q2 was ~$310K.
On quests/streaks/badges: all fair concerns and I understand the parallels, but I’d draw the line differently. The farming problem comes from where the payout sits, not from gamification itself. Streaks and badges are engagement mechanics - they don’t mint any extractable value. What makes a system farmable is paying out for free actions, and that’s exactly what we avoid: CRC spendability is gated by reputation (built through vouching and economic contribution), card rewards require spending real money at merchants and the next iteration of cashback is planned to be funded from the fees we actually earn - so rewards scale with real usage, not treasury subsidy.
Opening the app and minting gets you CRC you can’t yet spend. There’s no $0.10 for showing up. (Also a small factual note: the badge system is live, nothing was quietly deleted.)
And to be direct on the direction: we don’t want to build an airdrop/token farming app. We’re going after the ideologically aligned crowd that wants to support the overall mission, communities and their identity.
Great question, there have been so many. In no particular order:
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Gnosis has historically been an open infrastructure company/ecosystem, not a traditional technology business - that’s its strength and its 10 year track record. Incubating a mainstream consumer app, or any business-driven 0 to 1 startup, requires a very different mentality, culture and set of operating values. I believed I could make the two could coexist under one roof when I took over the business unit last year. Turns out, structure/existing inertia beats intention. It’s telling that Gnosis Pay’s strongest early growth came in the period it operated most independently. This isn’t a criticism of anyone - it’s the case for the model this proposal implements: incubate inside, spin out to grow. Gnosis is great at being technically rigorous, and thus early and contrarian. In my view the way to convert that into value is incubating new ideas, finding capable people willing to make them their own, funding them with the right capital, and letting them run with full freedom.
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Going out to market as a pure-play neobank built on blockchain rails in Europe is a failing strategy in my view. Here are a few reasons why:
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Building a neobank on blockchain rails is technically trivial now, and has been for over a year -distribution is the hard part. Europe is one of the most mature fintech markets in the world, and users in most regions are generally happy with Revolut or similar local neobanks. Blockchain rails when used purely for savings yield & card payments (which is most crypto neobanks today) only give marginal user benefits, and that’s not enough for people to switch to a new neobank. Most crypto neobanks under-estimate how big switching costs are and how long building trust with mainstream users takes. I expect the large majority of them to fail on exactly this.
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Regulation is catching up, but is not there yet. Most mainstream users don’t know or want to take the burden of self-custody. Neobanks abstract it away through Privy or similar wallet infra tools, but ofcourse none of them (neobanks or wallet infra providers) can offer statutory protection (DGS/FSCS-style) in case of loss of funds.
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Similar case with yield/savings products: most neobanks today provide access to defi pools offering maybe a few bps over traditional yields, for an insane amount of extra risk the user takes without knowing, with on-chain insurance that doesn’t cover user mistakes. When you go mainstream, you can expect users to make mistakes. For an app that deals with people’s money, that’s a brand extinction event waiting to happen.
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Privacy is still largely unsolved or not mature enough yet (especially if you wanna build a neobank with cypherpunk values).
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The blockchain-based neobanks that have done well so far did it for mainly 2 reasons, neither of which is our path. Either they provided access to a better currency to an audience with a weak one - think Arq (prev Dolar app) - a regulatory arbitrage that’s closing down, where the time to make the most of it was probably two years back. Or they gamified incentives through tokens for mostly crypto-native audiences who love farming - think Tria or Kast. This is not a dunk on them by any means, they’re doing great - but I care more about building something that solves a real need and brings genuine impact.
These are the reasons we moved away from being a traditional neobank and went Circles-first, with the neobank under the hood (and not marketed like one). It’s important people don’t compare it to a neobank - it’s a completely different app, a new system that allows you to interact with money a different way, and support your favourite communities/causes.
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Where I have the most conviction for the future: communities. Communities can use the app to fundraise from their audience through fees and backing, which gives anyone with an audience a direct incentive to bring them onto the app - distribution the product pays for, not the marketing budget. And it fits our audience: people who don’t want a slightly better bank, but a different system where supporting what they care about is part of the product.
On the gnosis.io distribution advantage: both things are true - it was legitimacy and it was a channel. But honest accounting: that channel reaches crypto-native audiences, and after a year of being front and center it got us to ~800 weekly card users. Gnosis’ brand presence in the mainstream world isn’t very high- don’t get me wrong, a 10 year track record of building world-changing infrastructure is great, but it’s not a consumer growth engine. Having operational freedom outweighs the brand benefit that we’re currently receiving in my view.