Gnosis Pay cards are now being mailed out to European users who have signed up. We’ve covered Gnosis Pay in Reflecting on ETHCC and The Looming Opportunity with Decentralized Stablecoins. Gnosis Pay is primed to be the first crypto debit card that is truly viable. Gnosis Pay card is a self-custodied wallet that allows users to purchase goods with funds from their crypto wallet wherever Visa is accepted. Built on top of Gnosis Safe, Gnosis Pay will join on-chain protocols with traditional payment infrastructure. DeFi will finally be able to incorporate its composability into the payment process and demonstrate our superiority over legacy payment rails. I offered a glimpse of why I’m so excited about Gnosis Pay in The Personal Finance DeFi Stack, which could be anchored by Gnosis Pay.
GNO has performed well over the past few days, and could be an interesting play given its relative valuation to OP, ARB (~$700M vs $13B/$17B). Gnosis chain is considered a sister chain to Ethereum, and is highly decentralized compared to other EVM alternatives. On the other hand, the Gnosis ecosystem is saturated with tokens: GNO, XDAI, SAFE, COW; has never been able to spark a narrative, and doesn’t have any unit bias to draw retail. But its merit as a Ethereum sister chain combined with its emerging identity as a payments layer offers a potential path to Gnosis being included in the discussion with popular alt L1s/L2s.
I wonder if the lack of a foreign currency presence in crypto will be a headwind for Gnosis Pay’s success, or if this is a trivial issue to fix on the back end. The majority of DeFi is based in USDC, and the vast majority of Gnosis Pay initial users will be paying for goods in Euros or other currencies. Could Gnosis Pay be a catalyst for the de-dollarization of DeFi?