Gnosis: The Payment Network Part 1

This two part series focuses on the Gnosis roadmap heading into 2024 and beyond. 

At ETHCC this year, Gnosis Co-Founder, Martin Koppelmann announced the launch of Gnosis Pay, the world’s first Decentralized Payment Network (DPN). Gnosis Pay’s first product is Gnosis Card: A self-custodial Visa debit card enabling you to spend your digital assets in the traditional economy using the Gnosis Pay network.

We’re excited to bring the advantages of open infrastructure to the daily process of payments by making them composable and, staying true to innovation in web3 - anyone can build on the Gnosis Pay SDK. Gnosis Pay is deployed on a custom-built L2 on Gnosis Chain to safeguard compliance and allows the network to scale sufficiently. Using Gnosis Pay, anyone can issue a card to their own users. By providing the tooling and APIs, Gnosis Pay serves third-party wallets allowing them to offer their users complete control of their digital assets all the way to the point of sale. Gnosis Cards are designed to be fully customizable. Users can integrate onchain assets, such as NFTs, for increased personalization.

Gnosis Pay’s integration into the traditional payment rails while preserving self-custody means that the product stays true to web3 values yet preserves the familiar UX of Visa cards. Principled, resilient technology for mass adoption. 

Our roadmap is focused on making Gnosis the best network for payments. By providing the best bridges to traditional payment schemes, the best liquidity for exchanging stablecoins and the best ecosystem to facilitate payments. 

Payments deliver on one of the earliest promises of blockchain technology. Bitcoin’s whitepaper titled, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," was about a decentralized, peer to peer, digital cash system. With Gnosis Pay the vision laid out by the Bitcoin whitepaper is today a reality. Secure, scalable with reduced transaction costs and settlement times on an unstoppable, always on network. The Gnosis Pay tech stack delivers a truly peer-to-peer payment scheme with the familiarity of Visa.

We are incredibly excited about the coming months and years. We have finally arrived at a point in time where the true value of web3, powerful tools that allow people to determine for themselves how they want to live their lives online, are advanced enough for mass adoption. We are deeply committed to delivering high quality products for everyday use cases that preserve the values of web3. 

Gnosis: The Payment Network Part 2

Since 2022, Gnosis has presented itself as 'The Community-Run Chain.' This tagline embodies our commitment to credible neutrality and resilience. As the community-run chain we've built a network of 170k+ validators—the second most decentralized network after Ethereum. We've also worked to maintain DAO governance as a foundation of our protocol evolution and development.

Now that we have a community-run chain, how can we shepherd this public goods platform into projects that bring the fruits of web3 to the widest audience of people?

With that in mind, we are renaming our tagline. In the spirit of open-source, composable tooling we made our tagline modular:

Open infrastructure for a decentralised internet

Open infrastructure for permissionless innovation

Open infrastructure powered by solo stakers

Open infrastructure for decentralised payments

Open infrastructure for a decentralized internet is the global tagline for Gnosis Chain. Open infrastructure for permissionless innovation is aimed at addressing developers and the last tagline is for our solo stakers, who secure Gnosis Chain by running nodes around the world. Open infrastructure for decentralised payments is directed towards Gnosis Pay and Gnosis as the best network for payments.

Let's work together to bring open and fair infrastructure to crypto natives and non technical users alike.

Open infrastructure for a decentralized internet

In a proof of stake system, a validator is a node responsible for storing data, processing transactions, and adding new blocks to the blockchain. The neutrality of a protocol is permanently undermined if external forces have a say in which transactions will be validated. For such a system to be credibly neutral, all content must be created and treated equally by validators. 

For Gnosis Chain, we are committed to credible neutrality at the level of core protocol development. Without privilege or prejudice and irrespective of the content, all transactions should be treated the same on Gnosis Chain. We believe that this is only possible if the network is secured by a geographically diverse community of validators around the world.

Gnosis Chain is secured by over 170k+ validators and thousands of solo stakers geographically dispersed around the world. By making it easy for solo stakers to validate on Gnosis Chain, Gnosis has attempted to level the playing field by making the hardware cheap and the requirement of 1 GNO low by design. 

This allows the network to remain credibly neutral. That means that all transactions should, in principle, be treated the same on Gnosis Chain. A geographically dispersed validator set ensures that the network is highly resilient and capable of censorship resistance.

The principle of “network neutrality,” first coined by Columbia University professor Tim Wu in 2003, holds that all internet packets shall be treated equally and consistently—irrespective of their content, source, or destination.1 Public infrastructure is credibly neutral, so long as one pays the nominal fee to use it. Roads, highways, bridges, water supply systems and internet infrastructure are all prime example and each provides vital support to the operation of society. Blockchain neutrality ensures that the web3 ecosystem, the new internet, remains a level playing field that’s open, permissionless and uncensored.

Yet, in regards to the internet, a vital piece of public infrastructure, significant influence is wielded by tech giants over the information flowing through their platforms. These platforms possess the capability to delete data on a whim, either with intentional motives that may be obscure or in response to factors such as copyright claims, geopolitical pressures, and external threats. They engage in the collection and monitoring of personal information, tailoring content based on individual details.2 An open infrastructure for a decentralized internet presents a starkly different view. On Gnosis Chain, anyone can develop an application without the threat of being de-platformed. As a network secured by validators all around the world, a single actor is prevented from censoring the flow of information. Gnosis Chain is open infrastructure that’s designed to be resilient, censorship resistant and accessible to everyone. 

Open infrastructure for permissionless innovation

Permissionless innovation is also at the heart of our values in the same way that user agency has figured into everything that we’ve built. Individuals and organizations should be free to experiment with and develop new technologies, products, and services without seeking prior approval or permission. We believe that anyone should have the ability to view, use, modify or benefit from what we build in web3.

Gnosis Chain is open infrastructure for permissionless innovation. An EVM compatible, community owned network that prioritizes credible neutrality and resiliency, Gnosis Chain has all the familiar developer tooling from Mainnet and low fees, making it possible to quickly iterate and spin up contracts with a few clicks. Gnosis Chain is core, open infrastructure built to accelerate and extend the Ethereum ecosystem. Developers are free to build and experiment, test in prod or go live on Gnosis Chain’s EVM compatible Layer 1 blockchain.

Open infrastructure for permissionless innovation is the driving force behind Gnosis Pay, the world's first Decentralized Payment Network (DPN). Stefan George, Gnosis co-founder and CTO of Gnosis Pay, echoed our commitment to the principle in a recent comment about Gnosis Pay, "Gnosis’ commitment to decentralization means that we want others to benefit from Gnosis Pay. We allow anyone who wants to integrate the Gnosis Pay technology to issue their own cards to their own users. Our mission is to contribute to the industry as a whole and drive innovation across the space, providing new ways to bridge the gap between fiat and crypto-based user experiences. By opening this tech to all who wish to use it, we are bringing real-world crypto utility to the mainstream."

Gnosis Chain is open infrastructure for permissionless innovation with all the familiar developer tooling from Mainnet and low fees, making it possible to quickly iterate and spin up contracts with a few clicks. 

Open infrastructure powered by solo stakers

An open, resilient and credibly neutral infrastructure is only possible if it’s powered by solo stakers around the world. A community-run, geographically distributed validator set ensures that the network doesn’t fall into the hands of small, powerful constituents with specific commercial or political intentions. Gnosis is persistently committed to building the open infrastructure for a decentralized internet because we believe that web3 applications require an unstoppable network, a level playing field that’s open to anyone. We believe that everyone should have access to the tools of web3 that empower users to take ownership of their data and digital assets.

To learn more about how to become a validator, head over to our docs. Join us in the Gnosis Chain Discord where we host weekly community events. See you onchain! 

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1. https://zine.zora.co/tornado-cash-primavera-de-filippi-morshed-mannan

2. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/10/internet-archive-decentralized-web-web3-brewster-kahle/671647/