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Gnosis builds new market mechanisms for decentralized finance.
The Gnosis team has been a leading force in the blockchain industry since the beginning, and we’re here to stay. Seeing the immense potential of blockchain technology to transform social institutions, Gnosis was founded in 2015 by Martin Köppelmann and Stefan George as part of ConsenSys, the globally leading Ethereum venture production studio. In April 2017, Gnosis raised funds and spun out of ConsenSys to become an independent company. Now more than 60 employees, Gnosis is based in Gibraltar, with team members globally and a development hub in Berlin at the Full Node co-working space.
Gnosis was the first team to launch a live application on Ethereum in 2016, and four years later, we offer three leading product lines (prediction markets, DEXs, multisig platform) that allow you to securely create, trade, and hold digital assets. We build with the belief that open financial technology will lead not only to a more equitable economy but to fairer social institutions at large. Our core product, permissionless prediction markets hold the potential to surface accurate, fact-based information for a global audience. Now more than ever, global interconnection has proved that precisely such open access to information, resources, and financial infrastructure is key for global resilience.
Going above and beyond our core product, as an early builder Gnosis also develops integral infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem. Initially created as an internal tool, today the Gnosis Safe Multisig product is the most trusted platform to manage digital assets, holding more than USD 900 Million in ETH and ERC-20 tokens. The Gnosis Safe Multisig’s success underscores our approach: for blockchain technology to deliver on its promises, as builders we need to contribute to a flourishing product ecosystem for users.
Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.
These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property. This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middle man or counterparty risk [1].
Ethereum allows censorship resistant execution of smart contracts, which secures users as well as market makers on our platform and makes our software globally available.
A prediction market allows users to buy and trade binary positions on the outcome of any arbitrary event. “According to most experts ineconomics and finance, speculative markets are exemplary info institutions. That is, active speculative markets do very well at inducing people to acquire info, share it via trades, and collect that info into consensus prices that persuade wider audiences.” (Hanson 2013) As such, prediction markets provide an interesting, and potentially more accurate, oracle for the outcome of future events as well as for the reporting of the outcomes of past events.
Ultimately, Gnosis and Augur both approach developing decentralized prediction markets through delivering core infrastructure and tooling. While Augur focuses on designing an oracle and market resolution system, Gnosis technology is oracle agnostic. Instead, the conditional tokens framework developed by Gnosis prioritizes building a global liquidity pool for crypto assets generated by prediction markets by using an automated market maker as well as other unique design features.
No—a market creator can choose any token they like—as all Gnosis prediction market platforms are currency/token agnostic. It will always be possible for an end user to use a Gnosis-powered application without caring about Gnosis tokens.
However, our two token model (GNO and OWL) provides significant advantages to token holders on platforms built on the Gnosis conditional tokens framework. For example, Omen is a decentralization maximalist prediction market platform launched, maintained, and governed by the DXdao. The DXdao built Omen on the conditional tokens framework developed by Gnosis for prediction markets. On Omen, you can fund a prediction market using OWL, with one simple market creation transaction. Technically, this means you can fund the automated market maker Omen uses for market liquidity, and OWL will be the “collateral token” in which the prediction market is denominated.
Will Gnosis be available on other Blockchains other than Ethereum?
Our primary objective is to build a successful prediction market platform. Currently, Ethereum seems to be the best choice in blockchain to achieve this goal. That being said, we can also imagine a future in which platforms Gnosis builds can become blockchain agnostic and operate across multiple underlying blockchains.
The core use of GNO tokens is that they create fee credits which can be used to pay fees on Gnosis. Those credits are called OWL. You can find a detailed blog post about our tokens here.
What is the relationship between Gnosis and ConsenSys?
Gnosis is its own independent company, but we have a strong relationship with ConsenSys. This includes ConsenSys holding equity in the Gnosis entity and vice versa, Gnosis founders and early employees will hold equity in ConsenSys. Most importantly, Gnosis will utilize many ConsenSys services, projects, connections, and other benefits.
What will happen with the GNO tokens that have not been sold in the auction?
The GNO tokens that were not sold during our ICO will serve three main purposes including subsidizing applications built on Gnosis, long-term incentivization of Gnosis employees, and utilizing GNO for participation in GnosisDAO.
Previously there have been events where one could lock GNO to generate OWL. OWL is used in Gnosis Protocol to pay fees. Once enough fees are burned GNO holders will again be allowed to generate OWL. The goal is to longterm balance out fee-burn and generation of OWL to have a stable supply of OWL. The GnosisDAO has the power to decide when and how to do OWL minting.
Gnosis builds new market mechanisms for decentralized finance. Our three leading, interoperable product lines (prediction markets, DEXs, multisig platform) allow you to securely create, trade, and hold digital assets on Ethereum.
The road to futarchy has been long, but steady. An integral part of the futarchy hypothesis rests on prediction markets being permissionless—that is, open for anyone to participate. For this reason, we have spent the last three years working on the necessary technical building blocks to enable permissionless prediction markets. While we have seen the Ethereum ecosystem bloom, it has been clear that core components needed development.
To date, our core product suite has addressed the issues of prediction market conditionality, liquidity, and fund management:
Prediction markets component
Gnosis core product
Solution
Conditionality
Conditional tokens framework: The framework powering Omen and Polymarket prediction market platforms
Prediction markets require conditionality. The conditional tokens framework mints digital assets representing conditional event outcomes.
Liquidity
Gnosis Protocol: The top ten Ethereum DEX by volume powering Mesa
Prediction markets require liquidity. Gnosis Protocol enables ring trades to maximize liquidity for “long tail” tokens, such as prediction market conditional tokens.
Fund Management
Gnosis Safe: The platform storing more than ~$900 Million in digital assets
Prediction markets require tools for fund management. The Gnosis Safe is the most trusted platform to manage digital assets.
Now more than 60 employees, Gnosis is based in Gibraltar, with team members globally and a development hub in Berlin at the Full Node co-working space.