I’d like to share my perspective.
This is probably going to be a long post, so I apologize in advance. Also, this isn’t mainly about whether I agree or disagree with this proposal.
Right now, I’m trying to build a community that could eventually become a DAO around Circles/Gnosis App.
I’ve been involved in the Gnosis ecosystem since 2021, so I know it quite well.
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time reading and learning about both Circles and Gnosis.
I genuinely love the idea behind Circles. I was already around during V1, and I see so many positive aspects to it. More importantly, as a content creator and influencer, I see it as a way to engage my community—and even reach a much broader audience—to create products and services, beyond the philosophical and economic principles of the Circles system that I appreciate so much.
So this project really matters to me.
At the moment, my Circles Telegram group has 79 members, all gathered to help grow this project.
I’ve explained how to mint, how the system works, and everything people need to know.
The result? Only seven people have minted their CRC over the last five days.
Of course, there are many possible explanations for such low participation. Maybe I wasn’t convincing enough. Maybe I didn’t promote the group often enough to attract more members. Maybe I should have reminded everyone every day to mint their CRC.
But there are also much more obvious reasons.
The transition from Metri to Gnosis App disrupted a lot of things. Many existing users were lost because they never completed the migration. Then the new system itself confused a large part of my community.
People kept asking:
“My personal CRC are now worthless, and I’m not minting GCRC anymore. What’s going on?”
Or:
“My reputation dropped, and I don’t even know why. Now I’m no longer eligible for GCRC, so what’s the point anymore?”
Circles is already an extremely complex system. If you keep introducing major changes on top of that, it becomes a serious obstacle to real adoption—which is already very limited.
After all these changes, and with so much uncertainty around the future of Gnosis App and Circles, how can anyone feel motivated or confident enough to keep building something that could disappear overnight, or suddenly see its funding cut by 50%?
Because of that uncertainty, I’ve paused development of my own project for now.
There was also the Garage Hackathon. I submitted my own project proposal and ended up winning first place during one of the hackathon weeks. I thought it was very well organized.
More importantly, it proved something.
There are talented people who genuinely want to build useful and innovative things for Circles.
But here’s the current reality.
As a regular user, outside of claiming your CRC and waiting to earn enough GCRC to buy discounted GNO in the marketplace—or perhaps another product that happens to be available—there’s simply nothing else to do.
Does an application where there’s nothing to do make people want to stay? Of course not.
We could have had integrated mini-games, financial products, services, incentives that encourage participation, a real marketplace, a commercial ecosystem, stronger social interactions.
The reality is that it’s been over a year, and we still have none of that.
Instead, everything has been built, changed, rebuilt, and torn down.
And Gnosis DAO has been paying for all of it.
So yes, I understand the people in the comments who don’t want to fund this proposal, who are saying no, and who intend to vote against it.
It will probably also kill my own project idea, my ambitions, and what I hoped Circles could become.
But at some point, maybe we need to face reality instead of remaining disconnected from it.
I understand the idea of separating the project from Gnosis. That may very well be the right direction.
However, everything that has happened since the Metri/Gnosis App era has been poorly managed, poorly communicated, and poorly executed from the user’s perspective.
If this funding is simply going to produce more of the same, then I don’t see the point.
And I also agree with others who have pointed out that even a $10 million valuation is far too high.
Honestly, it feels like you don’t really know where you’re going or what the long-term vision is.
Asking people to fund a “maybe”—hoping that one day it might become this or that—is a very difficult sell.
Especially after everything that happened with Gnosis HQ.
A lot of people already don’t believe Circles can succeed. If your actions continue reinforcing that belief, you’re only making things worse.
You want to build an ambitious community currency with local roots—a project that I would genuinely love to support and help succeed.
But after more than a year, it feels like we’re looking at an almost empty shell that keeps getting rebuilt without ever truly evolving.
That’s the mix of thoughts going through my mind when I read this proposal.