GIP 152 - Should GnosisDAO spin out the Gnosis App into an independent company?

[deep45shah]

Hey, thanks for sharing your concerns @cynicalgnostic !

Important context to have here before I respond is that Gnosis Ltd is going to discontinue the app within its own annual budget, and are more open to doing spinouts now so each entity/team can remain more focused. Read this post from @mkoeppelmann here.

So this proposal should be read more as : Do we continue to keep Circles as a project alive in a new structure with a motivated founder as a seed stage bet, or do we shut it down.

Back to some of your Qs/concerns:

Regarding getting external funding to get a market price, I’m not against this at all but going full fundraising mode right now would very likely mean we stop all existing momentum, put product on a standstill and lose most of the team. Important to note here that we have a close to ~1000 backers on the product today (i.e $100,000 committed by users, almost like a non-refundable fee/‘revenue’ for the app). Many of these ~1000 have done this purely to support the product & it’s large vision — this is something quite valuable at this early stage in my opinion, and something to build on top of rather than forego it.

On the HQ comparison: I’d push back on the parallel. From what I understand, there, cash went out to pay external founders for their equity and the DAO took on ongoing payroll.
This is the opposite: no one is bought out or paid to exit, the $3M is akin to a seed stage funding to give the project a chance to succeed. The team’s equity vests over standard 4 year schedule. The incentives are aligned for both parties to bring long-term success. No one is trying to extract the DAO’s treasury.

[deep45shah]

@Pray.eth

I would prefer to see an updated strategy post from Gnosis Ltd instead of this ad hoc proposal without greater context.

Hopefully this post from @mkoeppelmann here should already give more context. I expect to see more info/insight in GIP 128’s renewal proposal!

[CriticalConsensus]

It would be a pity to just write this off entirely at this stage, I don’t know if the “no” sayers realize that that’s what they’re voting for. It’s the end. Yes, I understand the instinct that it can feel like ‘throwing good money after bad’, but in absolute terms this is not such massive commitment, especially if it is used to properly test whether there is something viable here or not, with reasonable burn rate.

At the same time, I really don’t understand one thing. @deep45shan, why not meet the market halfway on valuation? There have been multiple signals in this thread that this is the main blocker. If the goal of Phase 1 is to make this investable and actually get signal from DAO, then adjusting valuation seems like the most straightforward lever available.

Right now it feels like we are stuck in an avoidable deadlock. People are not rejecting the idea in principle, they are rejecting the terms. And Phase 1 is exactly where those terms should be adapted. So instead of letting this die with a ‘no’, why not iterate once more on that number before packing up and going home?

[cynicalgnostic]

This response does not address the core concern. It repackages a weak deal as an emotional “save Circles or kill it” decision.

First, 1,000 backers and $100,000 committed is not meaningful market validation in this context. Martin Köppelmann and the wider Gnosis network can mobilize 1,000 friendly supporters for almost anything. By your own admission, many contributed primarily to support the vision, not because the product solved a problem they were willing to pay for repeatedly.

That is patronage, not product-market fit. Calling it “almost revenue” is absurd.

Show us active usage, retention, repeat payments, and demand outside the existing Gnosis social graph. Until then, this is an average contribution of roughly $100 from a highly sympathetic audience. It does not justify a $15 million valuation.

The claim that external fundraising would stop momentum is also backwards. Fundraising is how you discover whether independent investors believe the company is worth anything close to the proposed price. Saying price discovery would be inconvenient is not a justification for asking the DAO to accept an insider-negotiated valuation.

And let’s stop pretending the only options are “give us $3 million” or “shut it down.” The DAO could provide a smaller bridge round, milestone-based tranches, a lower valuation, or funding conditional on external participation. The binary is manufactured urgency.

More importantly, let’s be honest about the incentive structure.

Gnosis Ltd has already decided it no longer wants to fund the product internally. The team is now asking the DAO for enough money to cover roughly a year of operations, without external validation, meaningful traction, or hard milestones.

From the outside, that looks less like a seed investment and more like twelve months of guaranteed payroll for a team working on a project that may already be on its way out.

The DAO takes the risk. The team gets a year of salary security. If the spinout fails, the employees have had ample time to look for their next jobs. The DAO is then left holding equity in a dead company after effectively funding the project twice: first inside Gnosis Ltd, and again through the spinout.

Nobody needs to be acting maliciously for this to be a terrible deal. The problem is that failure is comfortable for the team and extremely expensive for the DAO.

The HQ comparison does not depend on whether founders are literally being bought out. The relevant similarity is that the DAO provides the capital, absorbs nearly all the downside, and insiders retain the upside, all without genuine external price discovery.

Calling the incentives “aligned” does not make them aligned.

The team gets payroll.

The DAO gets the risk.

Let’s call it what it is: a publicly funded runway extension dressed up as a seed-stage investment.

[srv]

Thanks @deep45shah for putting this together and for engaging so actively in the thread, that’s appreciated.

That said, I’m much aligned with @CriticalConsensus and @cynicalgnostic , I don’t support the GIP as currently structured, mainly on company valuation and risk allocation grounds.

The $15M post-money cap looks inflated for what’s on the table. There’s no revenue run-rate, no profit, and no cash flow to anchor that number and several people in this thread have already flagged the point.

The risk allocation is lopsided. GnosisDAO is putting up 100% of the risk capital ($3M cash) plus contributing IP it already owns ($1M), while the founding team takes on no personal financial risk. The team gets salaries funded by the DAO’s investment, plus a 10-15% ESOP and founder shares that vest regardless of whether the company actually hits meaningful milestones, the vesting schedule is time-based, not performance-based. If this doesn’t work out, the team has been paid throughout; the DAO absorbs the loss.

PMF isn’t demonstrated yet. The proposal itself concedes “we haven’t found PMF.” That’s an honest and fair thing to say, but it also means we’d be setting a $15M valuation on a product still searching for its core loop, not one that has found it.

Suggested alternative:

tranche the investment. Rather than committing the full $3M upfront, structure this as a staged investment tied to pre-agreed milestones (e.g., mobile launch + retention benchmarks, a defined WAU/revenue threshold, fee-switch revenue actually materializing).

Each tranche could be released only once the prior milestone is met, ideally with valuation/cap terms re-assessed or at least reviewed at each stage rather than locked in from day one. This caps the DAO’s downside far more tightly than a single $3M SAFE, still gives the team room to execute, and ties the DAO’s continued exposure to demonstrated progress rather than to projections.

Happy to be convinced otherwise, but as it stands, the terms ask the DAO to underwrite all the risk while the valuation and reward structure are already fixed as if PMF were established. I’d rather see the risk and the reward capital move together, in steps.

[ernst]

@cynicalgnostic

It repackages a weak deal as an emotional “save Circles or kill it” decision.

Hey – very quick aside, also for the entire discussion.

We will retain a small team on Circles within Gnosis Ltd, subject to continue DAO funding. They will provide services for the base protocol: API end point and a pathfinder, as well as a Circles explorer. In addition to the Gnosis App, which still needs these services, there is a small number of third party projects currently building on Circles. In addition, we will have 1.5 additional people focussed on rolling out Circles locally as a community currency.

Gnosis App decided to go more into a worldcoin like direction. This is a valid direction and informed the gamified user experience it now offers. The other direction would have been to go community first. In terms of app experience, they aren’t compatible, despite the fact that both are supported by the same base protocol and protocol mechanics.

Circles is a project very close to my heart, so my judgement may be colored here: We as crypto people all know why fiat isn’t necessarily the best or only route, but Circles as a community currency immediately resontaes with a large proportion of non-crypto people. I love how Circles actually creates a framework that allows for different community currencies not only to co-exist but to interact with one another and yield a potentially global system. It’s this space that we started exploring very locally in Kreuzberg. We started recruiting merchants into a scheme where they can give discounts for circles at specific times of their choosing. This allows them to fill their dead hours, and it allows us to give value to Circles without us having to pay for this (like we did with cashback or the existing marketplace offers). It’s super early, but with AI assistance even a small team can do a lot. We’ll give a demo and talk about inital results soon :-).

So: Circles is not on the chopping block with this proposal. Whether Gnosis App is discontinued or not, I will include a small ticket for Circles in the main Gnosis Ltd funding GIP.

[waldo]

I’ve loved the execution of the Circles team on their mini game initiative. IMO it gets much closer to the decentralized moneyness / issuance of Circles than the current Gnosis App cashback initiative.

Why not allocate $3m to subsidize vibe coded Circles minigames?

Or, why not invest into Zeal? Seems like they have more proven market traction and a surer path to PMF once the next cycle comes around.

[deep45shah]

Super happy to see the community so engaged and willing to support the overall rationale/idea of spinning out, even if there’s some pushback on the terms.

Will try to share my thinking on some of the questions around valuation, terms, etc. below.

So here’s the rationale:

Why $3M: it’s what I believe it takes, in a worst case, to (1) validate and iterate to a hair-on-fire use-case and find PMF, (2) scale that one use-case to real traction, and (3) reach the next external round. Ofc the goal is to do this as fast as possible, hopefully well inside a 18-24 month timeline.

On the ownership % : A usual seed round would dilute roughly 15-20% of the company. In this case, however, I think it’s fair for the DAO to own more than that since it is contributing the product/IP/existing momentum. And thus it gets a minimum of 26.7% that can go much higher depending on the next priced round.

It is the one ownership structure that gives DAO more than usual ownership as it deserves but also keeps the company investable for future investors (by not owning too much of it) + leaves enough for the founder & team in the future rounds to be motivated to bring it to success. All three have to hold for this to work.

On the $15M: to be clear, this is the valuation cap, not the valuation - the maximum price at which the DAO’s investment converts to equity at the first market-priced round. If I’ve priced it too high and the next round comes in below $15M, the DAO doesn’t overpay; it converts at that lower price and ends up owning more. The risk of an over-optimistic valuation sits with the team, not the DAO - the opposite of the DAO being a price-insensitive buyer. On top of that, the DAO gets a 20% discount for taking early risk. Example: if the external round is at $10M, the discount applies (10 × 0.8 = $8M, below the cap), so the DAO converts at $8M - roughly a 50% stake, before the new round’s own dilution.

This is exactly why I proposed a SAFE: it’s essentially a convertible instrument ahead of the actual market priced round, and the global standard that protects both founder and investor.

On this being a ‘comfortable’ option, it isn’t. I’m the one who proposed spinning out rather than continuing it within Gnosis Ltd’s mandate initially, run it as a focused bet, and the decision to not continue it inside Gnosis Ltd came out of that, not the other way around. This wasn’t a lifeboat handed to me off a sinking project; it’s a path I chose, and I’m taking a substantial pay cut and leaving a stable & a high paying job at Gnosis for the ownership, risk and uncertainty of a startup. That’s the harder path, not the safer one. I care about the mission, and if I saw any other easier path to fulfilling it - i would have taken it.

On milestone-based funding: I understand the instinct, but I’m not the biggest fan of this model. You can’t hire, retain, or hold a team together under the threat of being defunded at a checkpoint, and that operational freedom is the whole reason for spinning out. The deeper issue is that pre-PMF, preset milestones make you optimize for the metric instead of the truth. The entire job at this stage is to keep following the need wherever it leads, and that often means changing direction, so numbers you locked in months earlier can quietly stop being the right ones to chase. You end up hitting the target and missing the point. I’d rather stay honest about finding something people actually need than manage to a dashboard that looked right at the start.

I hope sharing this rationale helps. Happy to ofcourse consider alternatives if the community still feels the deal should be changed.

[deep45shah]

@ernst

Gnosis App decided to go more into a worldcoin like direction. This is a valid direction and informed the gamified user experience it now offers.

Just a small note/clarification here for avoidance of doubt: Gnosis App was indeed going in a Worldcoin like direction, however, the spun out ‘Circles’ app with a much leaner budget, the goal would be to purely focus on finding the hair-on-fire use-case for Circles in regions (incl outside Europe) where people need financial resilience & sovereignty the most.

[deep45shah]

@deep45shah

I hope sharing this rationale helps. Happy to ofcourse consider alternatives if the community still feels the deal should be changed.

cc @Pray.eth @cynicalgnostic @waldo @srv @CriticalConsensus

[cynicalgnostic]

Thanks for the explanation, but this still avoids the central objections.

“$3 million is what I believe it takes” is not a justification for transferring the full amount upfront. It is simply the budget the proposed company would prefer to have.

You describe $3 million as the “worst-case” amount needed to find product-market fit, scale it and reach another round. That is not the worst case. The worst case is that the company spends the entire $3 million, fails to find product-market fit and never raises another round.

That possibility is barely acknowledged, even though the DAO would absorb it.

The argument about personal risk is also unconvincing. Taking a pay cut in exchange for founder equity, operational control and substantial upside is a normal entrepreneurial trade. It does not make the founder the primary risk-taker when the DAO is providing the cash, the product, the IP and the runway.

Regardless of how the internal decision was sequenced, the practical result is the same: a project that will no longer be funded through Gnosis Ltd is asking the DAO to replace that funding with up to two years of runway.

Securing $3 million, founder equity and operational control is not the same as bravely leaping into the unknown.

If the company succeeds, the founder and team receive substantial upside. If it fails, the team has received salaries throughout the experiment and can move on. The DAO loses the money and the assets it contributed.

That is asymmetric risk.

The rejection of milestone-based funding makes the proposal worse. The argument appears to be that the company cannot operate properly while facing the possibility of being defunded.

But that is not an unreasonable threat. It is accountability.

The DAO treasury is not there to let someone play entrepreneur with $3 million of community money, secure two years of payroll upfront, reject meaningful checkpoints and call the arrangement personal risk.

The argument that milestones could encourage the team to optimize for inflated or misleading numbers is also not a serious reason to eliminate them. Any metric can be gamed. The same numbers can be inflated or selectively presented in the promised quarterly reports after the full amount has already been transferred.

If those reports cannot be trusted enough to determine whether another tranche should be released, why should they be trusted as the DAO’s only form of accountability once all $3 million is gone?

The answer is to design better checkpoints. They can combine genuine usage, retention, spending discipline, external validation and a broader assessment of whether the project is actually progressing. They can also be revised when the strategy changes.

The purpose is not to force the team to blindly chase a frozen dashboard. It is to prevent the entire amount from being handed over before the company has demonstrated that it deserves the next tranche.

The same problem runs through the rest of the rationale.

External fundraising is said to threaten the project’s momentum. But what momentum?

The proposal itself says the company still needs to discover a “hair-on-fire” use case, find product-market fit and then generate real traction. That is an admission that the existing work has not yet produced a validated business.

You cannot claim that there is so much momentum that fundraising would endanger it while simultaneously asking for $3 million to discover whether there is a compelling use case at all.

Then staged funding is rejected because it could make hiring and retention harder. Checkpoints are rejected because they might constrain experimentation. Greater DAO ownership is limited because it might complicate future fundraising.

All of those concerns may make sense from the company’s perspective. But every trade-off is being resolved in favour of giving the company more capital, more freedom and less accountability.

Then the response ends by saying you are “happy to consider alternatives.”

But you are not really discussing alternatives. Smaller initial funding, staged capital, external co-investment and clear stop conditions have all been raised. The response simply explains why the original arrangement is more convenient for the team.

That is not consultation. It is defending the original deal while maintaining the appearance of openness.

The question is not whether the spinout deserves a chance.

The question is why the DAO must provide the full $3 million upfront, carry nearly all the financial downside and surrender its leverage before product-market fit has been demonstrated.

This response does not answer that.

It explains why two years of unconditional runway would be useful to the company. Everyone already understands that.

What remains unexplained is why the DAO should pay for someone to play entrepreneur under conditions designed to protect the entrepreneur from the ordinary risks of entrepreneurship.

[deep45shah]

@cynicalgnostic - I hear some of your concerns, and also the wider community’s concerns from the past 2 weeks.

I’m considering alternatives as we speak. Will get back soon!

[LOLiPOP]

@deep45shah

The goal is to get to 100,000 weekly active users solving a clear use-case within the next 12 months.

Here is a suggestion on how to acquire active users. At the beginning, these will definitely be FREE users who join just to gather UBI. I understand that creators, co-founders, and developers can sometimes be disconnected from ground-level users, so let me explain the idea more clearly.

Some time ago, “Hamster Kombat” (or similar clicker games) went viral. It was simple: tap the screen, get coins, and hope to swap/withdraw them. Millions of users joined with the hope of tapping their way to some cash. Even if many of these projects felt like a scam, one thing is clear: mobile users love tapping on a screen (low-effort activity) to get rewards in return.

Circles offers UBI, right? Why not add some gamification “magic”? Let users tap the screen (e.g., hitting a hamster or mining resources) as much as they want. However, when it’s time to “claim,” introduce a “Big Boss” fight or a “Let’s Smelt” button. The catch? All those millions of tapped coins melt down to exactly earned CRC ammount. (Reality check: magic doesn’t exist, but hey—your CRC is minted!).

Eventually, every player will want to test the withdraw function. This is the perfect moment to prompt them to create a full account, complete KYC, etc. (Bitcoin satoshi faucets do something similar, though their games are often more annoying).

Shall be added higher withdrawal fees, or offer the ability to spend it directly with lower fees using a Gnosis Pay card.

Granted, the tapping game might get annoying quickly since UBI is limited (e.g., 24 CRC per day). But here is the second piece of “magic” for the players: instead of standard cashback, offer a “UBI Boost”. Users could get a “baseball bat” (to hit the hamster boss harder) or a better mining / smelting tool. In short, all cashback is converted into a higher UBI rate for the following week. “the more you spend the more you beat/mining on next week.

How to drive these users even deeper into the Gnosis Chain ecosystem can be figured out by the smarter technical minds on the team, but this gives us the perfect funnel.

[deep45shah]

Important Update:

It’s important to me that the community feels genuinely aligned behind this proposal and the mission - this process isn’t just a box to tick for me. So despite the Phase 2 vote ending in favour of the original proposal, I felt it was right to step back and rethink it in light of the critical feedback from all of you, and I’ve spent the last few days reflecting on and acting on it. The points around the high valuation, the upfront risk, team size and more were all really valuable signals.

So I’m proposing to change the terms - reducing both the funding amount and the valuation by a significant margin.

Updated terms below:

Term	Detail
Instrument	SAFE
GnosisDAO cash investment	$1.5 M
Product & IP contribution / incubation equity	$1M
Total DAO SAFE position	$2.5 M
Valuation cap	$10M post-money
Discount on future priced round	None
Resulting DAO ownership	Minimum of 25%

Tl:dr

• The funding amount, and with it the DAO’s financial risk is reduced to half, i.e $1.5M.

• The valuation cap is reduced by a third to $10M.

• The team has been restructured from 9 people to 3 over the last couple of days. Feedback from @lefterisjp here was spot on. It’s the right size for the stage we’re in - nimble, fast, low burn, and able to aggressively iterate to hunt PMF.

• The DAO gets a minimum of 25% for a $1.5M cheque - above a normal seed investor’s typical 15-20%, reflecting & honouring its incubation of the product.

• The DAO’s IP value remains the same.

• The SAFE gives the DAO preferred shares at the time of conversion during the next priced round.

• The mission, to empower people failed by existing systems and institutions with more sovereignty, hasn’t changed one bit.

I believe these terms are a lot more aligned for both parties than the original ones — they reflect the reality of where we are much better, they’re fairer, and I think they set us up for success in the right way. They meaningfully reduce the DAO’s risk, still give it real upside, preferred protection, honour its incubation work, and leave enough room for future investors and the team to stay motivated to make this succeed.

Will be moving it to a Phase 3 vote on Snapshot now. Will post the link in a separate comment.

P.S. It has been genuinely great to see so many constructive comments that made this proposal stronger, raising money in public from a DAO has this uncanny way of bringing you closer to the truth as you move through the process. I believe this capital, if the proposal passes, is meant to lay the foundations of a mission driven company that truly empowers people who need sovereignty the most, at scale, and my gut says there’s a reason the first cheque comes from a DAO and not a VC. This mission keeps the team up at night, and I’ll make sure we do everything in our power to bring it to life.

Thanks all for contributing, and I hope you’ll vote on Snapshot

[deep45shah]

@deep45shah

Will be moving it to a Phase 3 vote on Snapshot now. Will post the link in a separate comment.

The vote on Snapshot is now live here.

[cynicalgnostic]

Reducing the amount and valuation is welcome, but none of the substantive criticisms have actually been answered.

The proposal still provides the entire cash amount upfront.

There is still no staged funding, no meaningful stop condition, no external validation, and no explanation of what accountability the DAO retains after the money is transferred.

The product still has not found product-market fit. The claimed “momentum” is still unsupported. Cutting the team and lowering the burn does not resolve either of those issues.

The sudden reduction from nine people to three also creates an entirely new set of questions. What work has been removed? Which roles remain? What is the new budget? How long does $1.5 million fund this team? What happens to the existing product and its users? If three people are now the correct structure, why was the DAO originally being asked to fund nine?

Those questions need answers before a vote, not after the money has been approved.

More importantly, this is not the proposal that passed Phase 2.

Phase 2 considered a $3 million investment, a $15 million cap, a nine-person team and a different economic structure. The community’s approval of that proposal cannot simply be carried over to a materially rewritten deal.

A lower ask does not make proper review unnecessary.

This revised proposal should return to discussion with a complete new budget, team structure, runway calculation, responsibilities, reporting framework and funding protections. The community should be given time to examine and challenge those terms before any binding Snapshot vote.

Moving directly to Phase 3 immediately after rewriting the central terms would turn governance into a formality: gather criticism, change the proposal privately, and rush the new version to a vote before the consequences of those changes can be scrutinized.

The criticism did not amount to “the number is too high.” It concerned the absence of PMF, the lack of external validation, the asymmetry of risk, the rejection of staged funding and the lack of meaningful accountability.

Halving the cheque reduces the potential loss.

It does not answer those concerns.

Do not rush a fundamentally different proposal to Snapshot. Put the revised deal through an actual discussion first.

[mrtdlgc]

Deep, take it personal if you want. I don’t care at this point. You have no idea what you are doing. And apparently, because of your enthusiasm, 6 people lost their jobs. You cannot just negotiate something with insiders and rush a proposal to a DAO. You don’t even know how crypto works. You don’t even listen to anyone. You are not the person the DAO should give $1.5 milly to waste.
Good luck in your life. But first, learn how decentralized decision making works.
And if anyone from Gnosis LTD has given the green light for this shitshow, you guys are not serious either.

[CryptosNF]

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.

[Pray.eth]

@CryptosNF

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.

Great post. I agree completely.

I, too, have tried to make Circles work. I, too, tried to introduce it to my own small community. In theory, it seemed perfect to me. I want a crypto native currency. Minting my own community token sounded intriguing. I support all of the abstract values @ernst writes so eloquently about when promoting Circles. I’m pro Gnosis.

But the reality is that while Circles may sound amazing in theory, it does not work in practice. The world is not filled with PhDs and rocket scientists.

Virality requires memeability. Memeability abhors complexity.

Circles is way too confusing to appeal to anyone outside an incredibly small niche of people (most of whom are paid, directly or indirectly, by Gnosis). No amount of gameability or improved UI changes that. We are asking for the impossible.

This is a classic case of The Emperor Has No Clothes. But nobody who apparently matters wants to tell Gnosis leadership. Or maybe they do finally realize it, and this GIP is their bone to the team. “If the DAO will finance it, ok, whatever…”

In the immortal words of Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby):

It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And then one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

[gnaut]

I just want to confirm what CryptosNF and Pray.eth posted before.

Feels pretty much the same for me from a user perspective.

I love the circels idea, i love what its trying to build in theory.

But pracitcal i have a hard time to use it myself or explain to my “normie” friends i try to onboard.