Engagements of this nature should be strategically justified.
I completely agree with you on this central point and gladly take the opportunity to make the strategic alignment between Gnosis and HOPR clearer here.
From my perspective, it appears we are allocating 1.5 million to a product that is not necessary for our operations
Gnosis DAO is not primarily focussing on operations but on growth of the Gnosis ecosystem. I recommend this excellent blog and forum post by the Gnosis founders on that topic.
Despite HOPR’s long-term presence in the industry, the product has yet to demonstrate significant functionality.
That is not correct, you can try out RPCh.net - which relays Ethereum RPC calls via HOPR nodes - today. Please let me know if you run into any issues. Here are many examples of RPCh working well for people.
Upon reviewing LinkedIn, it’s evident that a majority of the team, including the primary founder and designer of the protocol, have departed from the company.
This is also incorrect. As is not atypical for startups and market cycles, HOPR has indeed downscaled and some people left, but I as primary founder as well as all senior developers are still on board (see GitHub links that I shared above). Apart from me there are currently 9 full time engineers developing HOPR, all of whom will be available to work on Gnosis VPN & HOPR should this proposal pass.
Binance was an initial financier of this venture. My concern lies with the possibility that Binance possesses a substantial quantity of HOPR tokens, which they may dispose of to avoid regulatory issues.
There are many holders of the HOPR token. All of them could sell, yes, that is a risk with any publicly traded token. We are happy to have received support from Binance (just as Nym did) but indeed we are looking forward to a tech world that is not just VC dominated but instead built on ecosystem collaboration and support. We have already begun this transition and want to pursue it going forward - hence leaning towards Gnosis chain as a self-proclaimed DAO chain.
Why not consider utilizing Privacy made simple - NymVPN 2?
Nym has decided to combine all solutions into one solution which is neither the approach of HOPR nor Gnosis. Nym is driving development of an L1 blockchain, a mixnet and a VPN product as one central player. The Gnosis ecosystem is made of independent projects (such as Gnosis Chain, Safe, CowSwap, Karpatkey, Gnosis Pay and many more) focused on discrete parts of the tech stack. That’s not Nym’s approach and that is fine but that is a major difference. Gnosis has not made a decision to move out of the EVM into the Cosmos world.
The founder has made references to RPCh. An examination of the relevant updates reveals code associated with this enhancement. In my view, 1.5 million is an excessive amount for such an update.
This proposal is not about RPCh but to generalize the initial work that we have and are still actively pursuing in the direction of RPCh for the much more general use case of VPNs. Yes, that work has already started but the completion of it is a very long process that is supported through the proposal that I posted here.