The proposal being voted on Snapshot requires another Phase 1 or Phase 2 before moving to Snapshot anyways. Cause the entire terms have been changed. That’s why I called this a shitshow lol
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And despite all of those points it’s already on snapshot and looks like it will probably pass. So another years funding despite several failed attempts and poor product decisions.
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Hi!
First a small introduction:
For those who don’t know me yet, I’m the former dev lead of the circles protocol.
On the topic:
I just wanted to throw in an alternative I’m working on since a few weeks (that doesn’t cost you millions). Its still work in progress, but it progresses quickly.
Here’s the auto generated handbook of the current state: circles-ux-experimentation/docs/handbook/index.md at main · jaensen/circles-ux-experimentation · GitHub
I try to be very rigorous in the development and with testing (although I have to admit, its basically vibe coded). There are formal proofs in prolog for basically all features.
I’m open for feedback. Let me know what you think.
P.S.: I’ve heard from one person that they find this post “destructive” towards the original GIP. That’s not my intention and I want to point out that, what I’m building, its definitively a different thing. It’s just an open source wallet from a community member. I didn’t do user research, design, have no plans about marketing, no gnosis pay integration (also not planned - pure play Circles wallet) etc.. That’s all stuff the Gnosis Wallet team did before. Still, I wanted to point out that there’s another Circles native wallet in the making.
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Hey jaensen, glad to see you here.
As you might have seen in previous discussions, I’ve spent some time digging into the structural limits and alternative topologies for Circles, such as framing it through Hawala mechanics, using it for open-source distribution, and introducing AI Agents for network accountability of sorts.
I have a few fundamental questions regarding the broader architecture. Empirical research on basic UBI models (like the OpenResearch/OpenAI study) highlights that unconstrained, unaccountable issuance models face severe structural decay, a point I raised earlier, both here and in person.
Recently, my focus has been on stateless blockchain architectures using block-lattice structures. Given that UBI mechanisms struggle in atomized environments but hold up under localized, high-accountability networks, do you see a path where core elements of Circles are wrapped in strict accountability layers and an Actor System for cross-chain execution (e.g. Saga Intents)?
Sociologically, the group topology in Circles holds far more promise than individual issuance. If we frame it as a micro-credit or mutual-credit vehicle centered on group interaction frequency and quality, distribute individual tokens via merit-based ranking engines (like TinyMeritRank), and run mini-DAOs over self-hosted infrastructure with SIWE + OIDC mappings, the execution landscape changes entirely.
I’ve been looking for an opportunity to explore these dynamics through the lens of Quantum Social Science, applying formal mathematical models from quantum mechanics to sociological trust graphs.
Would love to hear your perspective on this direction, either here or in a dedicated thread, and open the floor to anyone else who has worked on Circles and wants to speak freely on the architecture. Thanks!
Yeah, I read some of your critique and proposals, and to some degree agree with many of your observations. However, I’m still very much in love with the original idea and mechanics of Circles.
My attempt at a Circles wallet picks up many old-ish ideas, that never were realized so far (e.g. suggesting people to get trusted by in order to get your circles “unstuck”, or showing a warning when you’re about to trust someone whose Circles you can’t spend). It doesn’t integrate the trust-score because honestly, I hate this kind of stuff. Instead I’ll try to surface enough information to the user, so that they can do an informed decision on who to trust..
I’ve never heard of “Quantum Social Science” before, so forgive me if I don’t have an opinion on it yet 
I will read trough your posts and suggest to keep the discussions about that in their respective channels.
First, I really appreciate the community engagement here and I support this proposal. While it is hard to define exactly what Gnosis is, to me it is a collective of builders who ship resilience infrastructure and apps that empower the individual. It has done so with Safe, CowSwap, Gnosis Chain and it continues to do so with a generation of infrastructure innovation and new products right now.
Building resilience infrastructure is neither popular nor short term lucrative - and that is why I was explicitly voting against the self-enrichment of certain traders who called themselves “investors” here. Gnosis committed to working on Circles while the rest of crypto largely gave in to low effort stable token plays that first and foremost expand the reach of US monetary policies and politics. This is not why I am in crypto and I am convinced it will not make the world a better place.
Building basically the only consumer app in crypto that is not just circulating around low effort yield and legacy (real world) assets is laudable and should be supported. And yes, there is valid criticism here on both Circles and Gnosis App and I most strongly support the call for turning Gnosis App FOSS from day 1. But I am sure that - just like the discussions above - these are fixable and an example of why DAO involvement is valuable.
I think people underappreciate healthy tenacity in a founder who is really the foremost driver of a project. Deep is here with all of you discussing, he is getting personally attacked, he is taking another haircut on the team building the product he wants to pursue and he answers everyone in this thread without flipping. I find that laudable and a founder quality that I appreciate but I also consider it a prerequisite for DAO operations that focus less on Gnosis Ltd as a singular actor and instead on agile products and services that are independently successful.
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Hey Sebastian. I get the feeling that this is the general perception on my expression of how it was to work with Deep. It is not an attack. It is just a mere expression of how I think of Deep as a former colleague of his. I have already mentioned this on Discord when it was called upon.
And his actions on the forum is self-evident of what I described in my original post. He is not listening, he just went ahead with a modified version of the proposal with no discussion whatsoever of whatever concerns have been raised here directly to Snapshot.
And yeah. I do not want to get into details about it much. But Deep was one of the reasons why I had to leave my job at Gnosis back then. The extra workload of helping them out during the inception phase of Gnosis Pay, despite not being part of our duties along with my other colleague, turned into a full on responsibility on us. To an extent that we were working 16 hours shifts to cover Gnosis Pay support in its early days, which eventually led to health problems for me and I had to leave. And Deep was one of the people who was responsible for this along with the other people who are not part of Gnosis LTD anymore.
And during that period, Deep was the main contact person between us and the early Gnosis Pay team. And despite me creating actionable items to solve main pain points that we have been encountering during support. None of those were solved under the previous Gnosis Pay leadership or when Deep was part of that team.
Also, sacrificing 6 people’s jobs for mere ambition of becoming an entrepreneur is not a haircut. It is another pure reflection of selfishness to go on with another year of paycheck secured. And he did not answer most of the main questions raised in this thread. Sorry not sorry for calling this out as bluntly as it gets.
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Many of the critiques in this thread are correct.
It reminds me a bit of this video:
Particular - the past years have clearly been confusing for user. And yes, I think this is to some extent inherent to Circles. Clearly - money - that is in reality millions of different currencies - is complex.
That being said: we still have two strong reasons to believe in it:
- many many smart people have looked into the Circles concept in depth and have liked it
- we also know that it is possible to “meme” Circles. The inital launch really went viral with >100k signups in days.
With those 2 strong reasons I think it is still too early to “give up” on Circles. (despite the last years of trying). (Side note: prediction markets are another field where we have given up probably a bit too early)
Now - concretely to Deep and this proposal. In the past a blocker has certainly been in addition to the complexities of Circles additional complexities of the leadership structure of Gnosis. I have always tried to connect various Gnosis ideas (Cowswap, Gnosis Pay, Safe, Circles) - which I can all give good theoratical reasons for but in practice they all introduce new complexeties.
Therefore I think the spinout is the right move. I have worked with Deep for many years now and know he has what it takes to be a successful founder. And I think 2 things can be mentioned here specifically: focus on the user perspective and “the grip” to continue even if not everything goes as planned initally.
It is now a much smaller bet and it will be just a couple of people but I think they should get the full autonomy to maximise there chances of sucess.
If in parallel efforts like @jaensen Circles wallet can speak to a different crowd - I certainly see this as very postive things. Ultimately for Circles to succeed there should be certainly more than one wallet.
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This is an interesting message because topic here is actually not primarily Circles, but Gnosis App. And yet again we are pulling Circles into another project, after Circles itself has still not demonstrated that it can be sustained. Yes, Circles is strategic pillar of Gnosis App, but App should also stand on its own. Otherwise every discussion about Gnosis App simply becomes another discussion about Circles.
So, on both arguments:
many many smart people have looked into the Circles concept in depth and have liked it
Who? Where are they in this discussion? ‘Many smart people like Circles’ is not really argument until these people actually show up and explain why. Especially here, where support for this proposal is what matters.
we also know that it is possible to ‘meme’ Circles. The initial launch really went viral with >100k signups in days.
The >100k signups in days is also not very strong evidence. The big question at the time was exactly how many of these people were airdrop farmers. I don’t see any serious analysis here showing that these signups represented genuine demand rather than incentive-driven activity.
This was one of the big lessons of airdrop campaigns around that period. So before using 100k signups as evidence that Circles can ‘meme’, we should first establish what these 100k people actually did afterwards. Otherwise we are taking a heavily questioned metric from that time and now using it as proof of the thesis. This is not very convincing.
So, Gnosis App, maybe. Circles being constantly pushed in as evidence for the App, no. I don’t think we should just let this narrative slide and grow into another project that just starts to be supposedly separate from Gnosis Ltd.
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Just dropping by to say hi, and yes I’m still following your adventures, it’s my little Monday tradition, seeing what bullshit you’re going to come up with to drain the DAO, but also because I was one of your first users and defenders of Metri.
You could have made Metri/Gnosis APP into a neobank, and that without too much work, because let’s not kid ourselves, the app is a disgrace especially considering what it cost the DAO.
If only you hadn’t gone all-in like brutes on your Berlin-socialist thing, and had confined Circles to some kind of loyalty/cash-back program. Especially since you could have, in a second phase, enabled payments directly with these points at local partners, which would have been a first step toward your dream (which you seem to have forgotten) of removing intermediaries.
Today the app is mostly used by bots farming a potential airdrop, you trapped two or three people with your unclear migration, but otherwise the app is dead.
Today you’re forced to do B2B because you failed.
Today you’ve become yet another intermediary, instead of removing them.
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Ah, thanks for sharing this smart idea. In fact it’s such a smart idea that only 368 other projects are trying to do exactly that (an Metri/Gnosis app is not even counted here)
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In EURO and with a sovereign control a minimum acceptable? No.
Sorry to hurt your ego, but you’re the worst disappointment I’ve had in Crypto. Between the theft of your users’ funds, the KPK scandal, the DCA fiasco, the chain fork under false flag, and now the golden parachute for an app that chatGPT could have made half-drunk…
Frankly, I almost feel sorry for you, it must not be easy to manage this ship…
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Having read through all the previous comments, I don’t think anyone is questioning his ability to persevere when his plans fail — rather, the plans themselves appear to be the problem. Users farming cashback in the Discord servers, the gamification of what really should be a serious financial product, swapping all of our CRC for “Gnosis CRC” with no warning. Shouldn’t the blame for these decisions lie with the Product Lead, and why is that same person now being rewarded for making these mistakes that have cost a lot of other people their jobs?
Instead, Deep is actually being rewarded with a new CEO position and even more funds to pay himself and two other people.
I have no idea how large the team was before phase one of this proposal, but if the team has recently been reduced to nine people, and then down to three following the comments here, then it’s obvious that a CEO should not be one of the last remaining roles.
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Hey all, just wanted to share a closing note after the conclusion of the vote.
A heartfelt thanks to all who supported the proposal/vote and believed in me, the team, the mission, and also to all those who gave constructive feedback that made the proposal stronger over time.
I understand not everyone here on the forum maybe convinced, but I hope over time the outcomes we bring turn you to the other side 
You’ll see me back here in three months with a proper update on the progress.
Now the real work begins - thank you all.
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For people who were sharing a similar opinion as me that Deep is not the person to run this new thing. I worked on a repo to unback your Circles.
It works on local as well.
And it is also deployed on Vercel if you don’t want to run.
If you do not want to be included among the numbers in the next report when Deep, ze highness shows up on the forum. You can unback your CRC by adding a new signer to your Gnosis App Safe.
while i feel no need to untangle the mess that this decision has been, i have to say that the gnosis app did play no role in the act of backing my circles, and that cuts both ways: neither will i unback out of spite, nor do i think that the claim that support for the idea of circles is somehow thanks to the app is honest or good governance.
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