Gnosis Chain is an EVM compatible, community owned network that prioritises credible neutrality and resiliency, open to everyone without privilege or prejudice. Using the same execution layer and consensus layer clients as Ethereum, Gnosis Chain is compatible with all future EIPs.
Its diverse validator set up and the community governance ensure Gnosis Chain remains credibly neutral at a much lower price point than mainnet. Only 1 GNO is required to spin up a validator and the process is user-friendly.
Gnosis Chain uses a dual-token model. xDAI is a stable token used to pay for the execution of smart contracts and gas fees, and GNO is used for staking as the governance token for the GnosisDAO.
What is Gnosis?
The Gnosis mission has always been centered on experimentation and building decentralised infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem. When Gnosis was founded in 2015, it focused on building prediction markets to enable worldwide access to accurate information. While creating the prediction market platform, it became clear that Gnosis needed to build the infrastructure required to support it.
As a DAO, Gnosis uses the products that it creates to transparently guide decisions on the development, support, and governance of its ecosystem.
Gnosis Safe (multisig and programmable account), Cow Protocol (formerly CowSwap and Gnosis Protocol), Conditional Tokens (prediction markets), Gnosis Auction, and Zodiac (standard and tooling for composable DAOs) are all products incubated by Gnosis. By combining needs-driven development with deep technical expertise, Gnosis has built the decentralised infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem.
In November 2021, both the xDAI and GnosisDAO community voted to combine their vibrant ecosystems to create the Gnosis Chain: an EVM compatible, community owned network that prioritises credible neutrality and resiliency. It uses the xDaitoken and includes a wide-ranging group of projects and users. Secured by over 100k validators around the world, Gnosis Chain has all the tooling that you are used to and trustless bridges to mainnet soon. Using the same execution layer and consensus layer clients as Ethereum, Gnosis Chain is compatible with all future EIPs."
Who created Gnosis crypto?
Gnosis was founded by Martin Koeppelmann, Stefan George, and Friederike Ernst in 2015. Gnosis was one of the first projects backed by the Ethereum-focused incubator, ConsenSys, and has grown into a 60+ team with its main development hub based in Berlin.
The project successfully underwent an ICO (initial coin offering) in 2017, raising 250,000 ETH (around $12.5 million at the time). In just 15 minutes, the project sold 4% of its GNO supply.
A few months later, the Gnosis team launched Olympic, a test version of the prediction market platform. The next year, it launched Apollo, version 1.0 of Gnosis alongside DutchX, a decentralised exchange designed to trade and manage digital assets. Toward the end of 2018, the Gnosis ecosystem launched the Gnosis Safe, the platform's integrated wallet. In 2020, Gnosis became a DAO and in 2022 both Cow Protocol (DEX) and Safe (wallet) successfully spun out. To date, Gnosis Chain is one of the latest projects of GnosisDAO.
How does the Gnosis ecosystem work?
The Gnosis ecosystem has several components that help to improve the utility of Ethereum.
CoW Protocol
The CoW Protocol is a permissionless decentralised exchange (DEX) that allows users to swap any ERC-20 token – the fungible token standard developed by Ethereum – for another.
What makes the CoW Protocol unique is how it matches and settles trades on the platform.
Rather than using an automated market maker system where users provide liquidity for others to trade against, the CoW Protocol matches buyers and sellers using multi-token batch auctions and settles trades at the best available price.
Batch auctions work by grouping together buy and sell orders every five minutes. Other users can then compete to provide the best order settlement for the batch of trades. This is referred to as “solving” and anyone who does this on the protocol is dubbed a “solver.”
Solving protects traders against miner extractable value (MEV) — the maximum value a miner can receive as a result of producing a block over and above the usual block reward and gas fees.
Because each batch of orders will most likely contain a range of different tokens – such as DAI/USDC, LINK/WETH or GNO/USDT – a method called ring trading is used to settle them. This means that rather than clearing trades based on matching identical trading pairs, liquidity can be sourced from any order in the batch to complete the transactions.
Safe
Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe) is customisable multisignature wallet infrastructure suitable for companies and individuals. It is a smart contract wallet on Ethereum that requires a prespecified minimum number of approvals in order for the transaction to occur.
For instance, a business that has four main stakeholders can set up a wallet that requires a minimum of three stakeholders to approve a transaction before it is sent.
This gives users an increased level of security and means if one stakeholder’s private key to the wallet is lost or compromised, the funds are not at risk and can be retrieved by the remaining stakeholders.
Safe supports Ether (ETH), ERC-20 tokens and ERC-721 (NFTs) and it can interact with several DeFi platforms.
Gnosis Chain and Gnosis Beacon Chain
Gnosis Chain is the associated execution-layer Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chain and uses the xDAI stablecoin to facilitate transactions and pay for fees. The network itself is secured by the consensus layer, called the Gnosis Beacon Chain (GBC). The GBC uses a Proof-of-Stake system – similar to Cardano and Solana – whereby users lock up an amount of GNO to participate in the transaction validation process and thereby receive additional GNO tokens as a reward for helping to secure the network.
GnosisDAO
GnosisDAO is the collective steward of the Gnosis ecosystem, formed in late 2020. The GnosisDAO treasury has effective control of over 150K ETH and 3 million GNO tokens with 2.35 million GNO locked.
What are Gnosis digital assets?
GNO Token
Gnosis' native cryptocurrency is GNO, an Ethereum-based token that was sold during the Gnosis ICO. GNO tokens have a maximum supply of 3 million tokens. It’s used for staking on the Gnosis Beacon Chain and acts as the governance token for the GnosisDAO.
How can I buy Gnosis tokens?
For those looking to incorporate Gnosis into their crypto portfolios, you will need to do so through a cryptocurrency exchange. Ensure that you only engage with reputable and regulated platforms, and always do due diligence before moving forward. Consult a financial advisor should you need more information.
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