Gnosis App is the hardest of the three business models and the one with the largest consumer upside. It is also the only one of the three where the product itself is the distribution. That product is Circles.
It is worth being clear about why we are doing a consumer product at all. In the Gnosis Pay piece we said the unit economics of acquiring individual consumers in payments are brutal. That is true, and it is exactly why most crypto consumer apps fail. So the bet here is not that we are better at the same game. It is that we have a product no one else can build, and that product changes the game.
The thesis is simple: the world doesnât need another neobank, but there is a real and growing opportunity for something truly differentiated.
Trust in the financial and economic system is collapsing into active grievance at a global scale, and people increasingly believe the game is rigged and their children will be poorer. They want out. But they will not jump into raw crypto, which they distrust just as much. The winning product is therefore not a better bank and not pure crypto: it is an alternative money system with bank-grade credibility. That is what Gnosis App offers: anti-system in what it does, system-grade in how it feels.
Here are the readiness conditions:
Grievance is now the majority condition. ~61% of people across 28 markets hold a moderate-to-high âsense of grievanceâ built on agreement that âthe system favors the rich,â âthe rich are getting richer,â and âbusiness and government serve a select fewâ (Edelman 2025). 69% globally worry leaders deliberately mislead them, up 11 points since 2021 (Edelman). Distrust is broad-based: among high-grievance respondents, every institution scores below 50 (business 42, government 25, media 34).
People expect to be poorer and want the system changed. A Pew median of 57% across 36 countries expect children to be worse off than their parents, not better. In Germany that figure has climbed from 42% to 61% since 2019, and Western and Southern Europe sit above the global median. Edelman finds only 32 to 36% globally expect the next generation to be better off at all. And majorities in 33 of 36 nations want their economic system majorly changed or completely reformed (US 66%, Pew).
The grievance is factually grounded, which makes it durable. Billionaire wealth rose 16% in 2025 to a record $18.3 trillion, a $2.5 trillion single-year jump, roughly 3x the prior five-year pace (Oxfam). A 36-country median of 60% name the richâs political influence as the top cause of inequality, the single most-cited cause in 31 of 36 countries (Pew). And the divide is widening: the trust gap between high- and low-income people more than doubled from 6 points in 2012 to 15 in 2026, reaching 29 in the US. The fear of a permanent underclass is no longer a mood. It is measurable.
The technical premise of conventional money has changed too. Cryptography has removed the historical reasons money had to be issued by trusted intermediaries: trustless transfers no longer require a middleman, and issuance no longer requires a regulated entity. What used to be a technical constraint is now a design choice.
The credibility gap is closing at the same time. Mistrust of crypto is still high, but stablecoins and blockchain are reaching mainstream acceptance, and as the technology gets absorbed into the status quo, the gap we have to bridge shrinks. Wrapping the product in an IBAN and equipping it with a Visa card earns us the right to be considered.
Attitudes towards money are changing. This viral clip from Amy Poehler sums it up: âBoomers are all about money. Gen X is like, âis it all about moneyâ? Millennials are like, âwhere is the moneyâ? And Gen Z is like, âwhat is moneyâ?â
Gnosis App, with Circles at its core, is the answer.
Gnosis App is a different kind of money app, where money is created by people rather than banks, and value is structured to flow to those who create it. We affirm what people already suspect: that the fact that value flows most to the people who already have the most of it is just a design choice of the system and not an immutable law. And we give them an opportunity to fork it.
This is all made possible by Circles and how it enables a system of decentralised, personal currency. Each personal currency is minted continuously, at the same rate for everyone, so issuance is inclusive by construction rather than concentrated at the top. Currencies become spendable through trust: you trust people, payments route through the connections between you, and the result is a money system that is also a social graph. The graph brings native resistance to fake accounts, enables the emergence of community and group currencies, and provides issuance that resists concentration. What that translates to for a user is more control, more agency, and more freedom over their financial life, and an actual path to individual sovereign money. It is, in the most literal sense, what money should be.
To win a consumer market you either have to be prepared to bleed cash, or you have to find a genuine consumer opportunity. A me-too neobank forces the first path. The sovereignty narrative is the consumer opportunity: a real reason to adopt that incumbents structurally cannot copy, which is what makes the economics defensible rather than a CAC bonfire.
Circles is also the distribution mechanism. Referrals have driven real growth for European neobanks; with Circles the mechanism is structural: the trust graph is the product itself, so acquisition runs along social connections rather than paid channels alone. Communities add a second layer: people join because they care about a cause, and the community brings other members in. Retention is structural too: once your money and your trust graph live in the app, leaving means leaving your relationships behind, not just exporting a balance. That lock-in is something no card-and-IBAN neobank can replicate.
So the bet is not that consumer is easy. It is that Circles lowers customer acquisition cost and raises retention enough to make the hardest business model in fintech work.
And the sentiment is showing solid conversion signals. Our paid media has focused on message testing rather than at-scale acquisition (a monthly budget of âŹ2,500 across platforms), but the early signal is strong. In early April, CAC was âŹ31 for a signup and âŹ280 for a card activation. A recent creative reached âŹ4 for a signup and âŹ18 for a card activation. These are no guarantee of future performance, but the signal is hard to ignore, especially since every one of these was a carousel built for rapid message testing, not an optimised advertising creative. The differentiated narrative is not just defensible in theory. It is lowering CAC in practice.
We are imminently launching v2 of Gnosis App. In this iteration we have sharpened how our product delivers on the consumer promise, reduced friction, and increased gamification. Connections, economic contribution to the ecosystem, and personhood all build a userâs reputation, which determines how much of their minted Circles (CRC) is spendable in the shop and on the card as gCRC. They earn more of these gCRC when they add value to the network (e.g. spending on their card and inviting friends). When they mint and when they use the product, value is flowing to the creators of value. Communities sit alongside as a first-class organising layer.
When the app generates profit, that too flows back to the GnosisDAO (more in the economics section below).
Screens of the new home, reputation system, communities, profile, and CRC creation flow are below to show the look and feel. The app can also be tried at app.gnosis.io.
The fee switch is not yet turned on. When it is, the revenue lines are conventional:
- Cards and payments: the interchange, FX, and ATM withdrawal fees are collected by the licensed partner stack underlying Gnosis Pay. Gnosis App receives a share of those fees from the partners as a referral fee for the customers it brings onto the stack. The Pay piece covers the underlying take rate (0.9% to 1.5%).
- Money movement: a fixed, route- and asset-agnostic software infrastructure fee (0.3-0.5%) applied to user-initiated transactions prepared using the app interface.
- Stablecoin yield: a share of yield generated on stablecoin balances deployed through non-custodial yield protocols.
- Technical access to decentralised protocols: The app will allow users to seamlessly access a range of decentralised protocols and, in the case of GNO holders, to interact with on-chain staking contracts, with a technical service fee retained for providing the interface and connectivity to such protocols.
- EURe: a services fee paid by Monerium for driving adoption and liquidity, calculated as a percentage of the yield Monerium earns on the fiat reserves backing EURe.
- Circles: protocol fees automatically applied at gCRC minting that accrue to the GnosisDAO and are designed to sustain and develop the protocol.
Premium tiers and merchant- or community-funded offers will follow once the fee switch is on and the user base is larger. None of this is novel, and that is the point: the revenue model is boring and proven, while the growth model is the part that is new.
We should be honest about where we are. Gnosis App is early and loss-making. In the first week of June, weekly active users with high intent were 1,245, weekly active users opening the app were 4,631, and monthly active users in May were 9,636. Break-even sits at 800,000 to 1 million users.
The path to sustainability runs through the same place as the growth story: if Circles drives acquisition and retention the way we believe it does, the conventional revenue lines scale on top of a user base that costs far less to build than a competitorâs. If it does not, this is an expensive consumer app like any other. That is the bet, stated plainly.
How does this connect to GNO?
As Gnosis App scales, its economics feed back into GnosisDAO: revenue and fees are designed so they can be routed into DAO safes and deployed through treasury strategy, so a successful app becomes naturally a recurring value stream for the DAO rather than a siloed business line.
There is a second link that is specific to the app: Circles is native to Gnosis Chain, and a growing Circles user base is direct, sticky demand for Gnosis Chain blockspace. Gnosis App is an honest-to-god consumer product, which means TAM is huge by blockchain standards. A million users making two transactions a day would alone generate two million transactions per day on Gnosis Chain, around an order of magnitude more than current chain volume. If Circles drives the kind of growth we believe it can, the consumer product becomes one of the most scalable sources of the chain activity the first piece argued we need.
The three pillars reinforce each other. Gnosis App is the consumer surface that sits on top of the other two. It settles on Gnosis Chain, which through the EEZ becomes composable with Ethereum mainnet, so a user can refill a card cheaply onchain and route a larger transaction through Ethereum liquidity when it makes sense. It runs on the Gnosis Pay infrastructure stack at cost rather than rebuilding card issuance, processing, and compliance from scratch. Gnosis Pay is not subsidising Gnosis App. Chain at the bottom, Pay in the middle, App on top.
My TL;DR: Gnosis App is the hardest of the three business models and the one with the largest consumer upside. The difference between this and every other neobank is Circles, which turns distribution from a cost center into the product itself. The time is ripe for this kind of product. Circles is why people come. The neobank is how the business works.
Disclaimer: Gnosis App is a developer of blockchain infrastructure and software solutions. Any regulated services that users can interact with via Gnosis App are provided exclusively by licensed partners in their respective jurisdictions. Additionally, any interactions with decentralized software protocols via the Gnosis App constitute purely technical connections enabling users to access such protocols. Gnosis App acts solely as a non-custodial user interface providing technical access to these protocols and is not an issuer, broker, or regulated service provider in relation to them.
This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer or solicitation to buy, sell or trade crypto-assets / financial instruments or interact with any financial protocols.
This post contains forward-looking statements and financial modeling estimates that are inherently speculative and depend on external factors such as user adoption and partner execution. They do not guarantee future implementation and should not be relied upon as financial advice or assurances of future performance.
Furthermore, regulatory frameworks governing crypto-assets and decentralized finance are evolving and subject to change. Accordingly, the concepts and/or features described in this post may need to be modified, restricted, or disabled to ensure compliance with applicable laws and regulatory developments.
crc which need to be unfrozen to move. its much easier to understand