Gnosis

Gnosis was founded in 2015, shortly after the launch of Ethereum mainnet, initially within the Consensys ecosystem, with the aim of building trustless, decentralized prediction markets in which users could collectively forecast outcomes such as elections, sporting events, scientific discoveries and market trends. During development, the team realized that scalable decentralized applications lacked underlying infrastructure such as custody and DAO coordination, and shifted its focus to infrastructure.⁠[1][1][1][2][1][2]

In April 2017, Gnosis held its first GNO token sale, raising $12.5 million: an allocation of 250,000 ETH sold out in 12 minutes, with Gnosis selling 5% of its tokens at $30 each, implying a market capitalization of $300 million; the sale was oversubscribed, Gnosis turned away $3 million in bids, and most investors came from outside the United States.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

The same year, Gnosis became independent of Consensys and set up Full Node in Berlin as its technical base. To custody the proceeds of the token sale, co-founder Stefan George wrote the Gnosis multi-signature wallet, the forerunner of Safe. Co-founder Martin Köppelmann said in 2018 that more than 50 people were working on the project and that it would not need to touch its reserve of about 200,000 ETH for the next five to seven years.⁠[1][4][4][1]

In 2018, Gnosis created the Conditional Tokens Framework, an open standard for tokenizing outcomes on which its own prediction market Omen and later PolymarketPolymarketPolymarket is a prediction market platform founded by Shayne Coplan in 2020, on which users buy and sell shares in the outcomes of political, sports, financial, cultural, and other events, with trading prices regarded as the market’s estimate of the probability that an event will occur. It rose to prominence during the 2024 US election, returned to the US market in 2025 by acquiring a licensed exchange and clearinghouse, and received a major investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, while facing gambling-regulation and insider-trading scrutiny in US states and several countries.Open the full entry were built; the same year it launched the smart contract wallet Gnosis SafeSafe GlobalSafe (formerly Gnosis Safe) is a smart contract account and multi-signature wallet protocol on Ethereum and compatible blockchains. It began as an internal project at Gnosis, was spun off in 2022, and is stewarded by the Safe Ecosystem Foundation, a non-profit based in Zug, Switzerland, with SAFE token holders participating in governance through SafeDAO; its official wallet interface is Safe{Wallet}. As of the end of June 2026, more than 63 million Safe accounts had been created, holding about $27.2 billion in assets.Open the full entry. Gnosis says its engineers were the first to bring the constant product formula on-chain in 2017 to price prediction markets, and that Uniswap and later decentralized finance protocols were built on it.⁠[5][1][1][5]

In April 2020, Gnosis launched Gnosis Protocol, a decentralized trading protocol two years in development that uses “ring trades” to share liquidity across all orders, with order settlement solutions submitted through open competition; its first application, Mesa, was maintained by the community organization dxDAO. In early 2022 the protocol was spun out into its own DAO and renamed CoW Protocol, with the governance token COW.⁠[6][6][6][6][1]

In September 2020, Jeff Dorman, chief investment officer of the GNO-holding hedge fund Arca, published a post criticizing Gnosis for taking “a 3+ year interest-free loan” from token holders without delivering the products in its fundraising white paper, for a balance sheet that had grown only because of rising ETH prices, and for launching products that created value only for equity holders rather than token holders; Arca called on Gnosis to tender for outstanding GNO at the book value of its balance sheet, which at the time would have been more than $74 per token.⁠[7][7][7][7]

Martin Köppelmann responded that Gnosis had already been working on a more appealing alternative path for GNO, involving a Gnosis DAO that would give GNO holders much more ownership, to be presented to the community soon; Arca welcomed this but asked Gnosis for a date and specific details.⁠[7][7][7]

In September 2020, Gnosis announced a partnership with the Ethereum sidechain xDai, investing partly in GNO in the xDai Ecosystem Fund to become a significant holder of its governance token STAKE, and deploying Gnosis Protocol, the Gnosis Safe multisig wallet and the Conditional Tokens Framework on xDai.⁠[8][8][8][8][8]

On November 23, 2020, Gnosis announced GnosisDAO, which uses prediction markets to guide governance decisions (futarchy) and which anyone can join through the forum; after initialization GnosisDAO was to have effective control over 150,000 ETH and 8 million GNO, with the GNO vesting over eight years. Gnosis Ltd later said that it divested 150,000 ETH, 8 million GNO and several third-party token positions into GnosisDAO when it was formed, and did not request funding from the DAO for years afterward.⁠[9][9][9][10][10]

In November 2021, Gnosis proposed merging xDai and the Gnosis Beacon Chain into Gnosis Chain, a plan accepted that December; around December 8, 2022, Gnosis Chain completed its “Merge,” moving from proof of authority with about 20 validators to open beacon chain proof of stake, with only 1 GNO required to run a validator.⁠[1][1][11][11][11][11]

In February 2022, the Safe team put forward GIP-29 on the Gnosis forum, proposing to spin Gnosis Safe off from Gnosis Ltd, form SafeDAO and issue SAFE; after the proposal passed, Safe became independent in July of that year. Under the SAFE allocation, the GnosisDAO treasury received 15% of total SAFE supply.⁠[12][12][13][14]

In March 2024, Gnosis set out its “Gnosis 3.0” strategy, shifting its focus from infrastructure to payments and financial applications, with in-house ventures including Gnosis Pay, which links crypto assets to traditional payment networks; Circles, a web-of-trust basic income project; the mobile wallet Gnosis Wallet; and the bridge security protocol Hashi. Gnosis Pay, launched in 2023, had processed €32 million in EU transactions by 2025, and in 2024 Gnosis also launched GnosisVC, a $40 million fund.⁠[15][15][1][1]

In January 2025, GnosisDAO approved GIP-116, proposed by karpatkey, burning 3.15 million GNO from the vesting contract and bringing total burns close to 4 million; this followed through on the commitment made about three years earlier in GIP-35 to reduce total GNO supply to 3 million, 70% below the original total.⁠[16][16][16][16]

In February 2025, Gnosis promoted Metri, a wallet built on Safe infrastructure that uses passkeys instead of seed phrases, through which users can connect a Gnosis Pay card to spend and take part in Circles.⁠[17][17][17]

After the Bybit attack in February 2025, Gnosis Ltd. signed a memorandum of understanding on March 3 with the Safe Ecosystem Foundation and Core Contributors GmbH on comprehensive collaboration to manage the aftermath of the attack; the Safe foundation also appointed Gnosis co-founder and CEO Martin Köppelmann as an adviser.⁠[18][18]

On July 12, 2025, co-founder Friederike Ernst put forward GIP-128, explaining that Gnosis Ltd had in early 2025 converted into a company limited by guarantee without share capital (a quasi-foundation), eliminating its dual equity-token structure, and, with its reserves running low, requesting $30 million a year in stablecoins from GnosisDAO, paid quarterly. The proposal also called for renaming Metri to Gnosis, bringing the wallet, business services, Gnosis Chain and Gnosis Pay under the Gnosis brand, and said there would be no further spin-offs.⁠[10][10][10][10][10][10][10]

The proposal passed in July 2025 and Gnosis subsequently unified its brand; by April 2026, GnosisDAO had disbursed $22.5 million to Gnosis Ltd under GIP-128. In 2025 Gnosis Pay launched in Brazil and passed $100 million in lifetime transaction volume, and the Gnosis App soft-launched to its waitlist in November.⁠[1][19][20][20][20]

In November 2025, the decentralized exchange Balancer was exploited for more than $116 million, including Balancer-managed contracts on Gnosis Chain; a majority of Gnosis validators first adopted a soft fork, and on December 22 Gnosis Chain operators executed a hard fork that recovered some of the funds, which Gnosis said were “out of the hacker’s control.” Gnosis head of infrastructure Philippe Schommers said that how people would claim back their funds and how contributors to the rescue might be recognized or compensated was still under community discussion.⁠[21][21][21][21][21]

On April 17, 2026, forum delegate Wismerhill questioned why the GNO net asset value dashboard had, without a vote or announcement, reclassified about 250,000 GNO held by Gnosis Ltd as circulating supply, lowering the calculated NAV per GNO by about 16.5%, and asked Gnosis Ltd to disclose whether the tokens had been committed to employees or used otherwise. Friederike Ernst replied that GnosisDAO and Gnosis Ltd are distinct entities, that GNO held by Gnosis Ltd is part of active supply, with a meaningful portion committed under milestone-based employee incentive plans, and that reclassifying it after the vesting period ended was a classification update, not a hidden transfer of value.⁠[22][22][22][22][22][22]

On April 21, Wismerhill put forward GIP-150, proposing a one-time option for GNO holders to redeem their pro-rata share of GnosisDAO treasury assets, with redeemed GNO burned, arguing that GNO’s discount to the treasury’s intrinsic value kept widening and had deepened despite DAO funding under GIP-128. Stefan George voted against, saying that value created in Gnosis Ltd would be destroyed, that most of Gnosis’s assets are strategic and that allowing redemption at any time could massively reduce Gnosis’s influence; he also said that projects failing to deliver a net return would have to be restructured. The final vote was about 27.9% in favor and 71.9% against, and the proposal failed; the proposer argued that the result was swung by the founders’ GNO, while supporters of the outcome said it was a normal token-weighted result.⁠[19][19][19][19][19][19][19][19][19][19][19]

On June 1, 2026, attackers exploited a signature-validation flaw in the Zodiac Delay and Roles modules used by Gnosis Pay card accounts to forge approvals and queue withdrawals from other users’ accounts, taking about $1.5 million and leaving about $300,000 inaccessible, across 5,281 wallets with balances of at least $1. Gnosis took card services offline and paused the bridge that day, restored service to 99% of users by June 6, and absorbed the losses, restoring users’ funds in full. The flaw had existed since Zodiac version 3.4.0, released on October 30, 2023.⁠[23][23][23][23][23][23][23]

As the attack unfolded, co-founder Martin Köppelmann first urged users on X to withdraw funds, then deleted the post and withdrew the advice, saying most users would not be able to withdraw, and pledged to make users whole. Former Near protocol core developer Vadim Zacodil criticized Gnosis Pay’s design for routing many Safe accounts through a shared “delay” layer that, if exploited, affects thousands of users at once, arguing that what protected users was Gnosis’s ability to pause infrastructure and commit treasury funds rather than the self-custodial accounts themselves. A Gnosis spokesperson said all affected users would be reimbursed in full; in its post-mortem Gnosis announced it was growing its security team, commissioning an independent holistic security assessment and widening its audit scope.⁠[24][24][24][24][24][23][23][23]

In October 2026, Safe investor Greenfield CapitalGreenfield CapitalGreenfield Capital (formerly Greenfield One) is a crypto investment firm headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, founded in 2018 by Sebastian Blum and Jascha Samadi; its early investments include Celo, NEAR and 1inch. It has invested in Safe since 2022, and in October 2026 it filed a supervisory complaint with the Swiss Federal Supervisory Authority for Foundations over the governance of the Safe Ecosystem Foundation.Open the full entry filed a complaint with the Swiss supervisory authority over the Safe foundation’s governance; claims in its open letter concerning Gnosis include that Gnosis developed and operated two wallets competing directly with Safe{Wallet}; that after the Bybit incident, Stefan George and Martin Köppelmann, threatening that Gnosis would sell its entire SAFE position of about 10% of supply and publicly distance itself, demanded that Safe’s other board members and co-founders give up a large amount of SAFE, and that they gave in; and that Gnosis exerted material influence over how the foundation handled the Bybit incident. Greenfield says these accounts come from several unnamed sources. As of October 14, 2026, no public response from Gnosis or the two co-founders had been seen.⁠[25][25][25][25][25]

As of October 2026, the projects listed on Gnosis’s website include Gnosis Pay, stablecoin card infrastructure for fintechs and wallets (with more than $180 million processed); the blockchain Gnosis Chain; the Ethereum Economic Zone, co-funded by the Ethereum Foundation and built with the Zisk team; and Circles, a community currency that anyone can issue at the same rate. Projects built inside Gnosis and spun off by GnosisDAO vote include Safe, CoW Protocol and Gnosis Guild, the creator of Zodiac.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5][5][5]

Gnosis: Official website: https://www.gnosis.io/ (opens in a new window).⁠[26]

X: Public account: https://x.com/gnosis_ (opens in a new window)⁠[27]

X: Public account: https://x.com/gnosischain (opens in a new window)⁠[28]