Hey Martin, thanks for bringing up the discussion. It is indeed imperative that a “debit card” will need to implement simple incentive programs in order to be a viable alternative to the existing ones in the market to gain competitive advantage (main one being cashbacks). However, I’ll have to argue that it is a bit premature to initiate a token incentive program considering the current state of Pay due to a few reasons.
First: Pay is still a KYC-gated product for the residents of EEA+UK. Hence, such a program would only benefit users from a certain region of the world, which, we would probably all agree, already have better access to financial services. My argument against initiating such an incentive program while the card is still limited within this region would be, forgive me for being too straight, that it would feel to me as subsidizing European consumerism by holding GNO.
Second: Based on the publicly available Dune dashboards, it seems that Pay and other self-custodial debit card/current account alternatives have so far failed to achieve and establish a product-market-fit. In this regard, I believe Gnosis Pay team should provide better accountability to the DAO for the justification of support from GNO holders. It has been almost a year since the announcement of Gnosis Pay at EthCC in 2023, and even though Pay has exceeded the number of orders compared to the main competitor (Holyheld), I have a huge doubt that the number of users and the general volume generated through payments is justification for support.
Third: More like a question. Is Gnosis Pay ready to scale and sustain an exponential growth, which is expected through a subsidization? Just off the top of my head, friction of onboarding users to Gnosis Chain due to no direct on-ramps through CEX rails, KYC through Fractal, extremely strict/invasive AML checks, manual creation and shipment of cards are the main blockers for scaling which results in the requirement of extra human resources. This could easily be dealt with through aggressive recruitment. However, as we have seen it time and time again that startups following this approach during the early stages of exponential growth either file for bankruptcy or have to conduct huge layoffs when the growth reaches to a certain level. Would love to get the opinions of GP team on this.
Hence, I hope we can come to a point where we can seriously consider token incentives for Gnosis Pay. But for that to happen, we should first at least wait until Pay to expand into more regions so that more people can have a chance to benefit from the incentives. Second, we should receive better accountability from Gnosis Pay to the DAO itself so that all GNO holders can make a better informed decision for justifying a direct subsidy. These two primitives are integral to transparency within as well as impartiality of the DAO.