Why Gnosis Pay is not just a cryptocurrency card

Cryptocurrency payment cards have become a popular way for cryptocurrency holders to spend their hard-earned Satoshi, allowing them to pay with cryptocurrencies through popular networks such as Visa and Mastercard.

Launched in 2023, the Gnosis Pay Visa debit card is unique among cryptocurrency payment cards. It’s self-managed, so users have full control over their cryptocurrency funds, and early users can make payments directly from blockchain addresses with no fees. Visa cards are accepted at more than 80 million merchants worldwide.

However, where cryptocurrency payment cards like Coinbase and Binance require users to store their cryptocurrency funds with a third party, Gnosis Pay is different.

“Gnosis Pay allows you to connect your self-managed wallet to your credit card, allowing you to spend your cryptocurrency anywhere Visa is accepted,” Friederike Ernst, co-founder of Gnosis, said in a recent interview. “There is,” he said. She added that “building bridges” between the old and new worlds is “how we think we can make adoption happen.”

Building ‘Banking 3.0’

The Gnosis Pay card is the first step toward on-chain banking, or “Banking 3.0,” said Gnosis Pay founding team and head of growth Deep Shah in a recent talk at Token2049. He added: “Imagine a bank where bankers are separate from banks, banking without borders and giving users the power to manage their own money.”

“In Banking 3.0, the core banking infrastructure is no longer built on 50-year-old legacy systems, but on Web3,” he explained. Instead, Gnosis Pay cardholders store their cryptocurrency directly in a Gnosis Pay Safe. these smart contract The wallet already allows users to manage over $70 billion in assets, giving sole control over ownership of funds to users rather than third parties.

“This is your account based. It has card features so you can spend money like a Visa card,” Shah added. He said the vault also has an account feature with an IBAN number attached, allowing users to send cards and fiat currency through regular bank transfers.

To load a Gnosis Pay account, users can send EURe, a stablecoin approved and regulated by the Icelandic FSA, to Gnosis Pay Safe or perform a SEPA instant transfer to Gnosis Pay IBAN. To ensure compliance, users are required to perform know-your-customer (KYC) checks before ordering cards, and each transaction undergoes a know-your-transaction (KYT) check on-chain.

After payment is made to the card issuer through Safe’s custom module, funds are transferred from the user’s Safe and ultimately for settlement with Visa and merchants.

Because Gnosis Pay Safe is on-chain, it also allows users to interact with Web3 decentralized applications (dapps), a feature not found in centralized competitors, Shah said. decryption.

“The Gnosis Pay account has the potential to combine the best of the Web2 and Web3 worlds to build an offer our users have never seen before.” he said “Banking 3.0 is borderless, 24/7, allows users to manage their funds when they want, and enables permissionless innovation and composability while maintaining the UX that users habitually use,” he explained. .

Gnosis’ “Banking 3.0” vision aims to “bridge the gap between the technological potential of blockchain and the real needs of everyday users, making decentralized financial tools accessible and usable for everyone.” It is provided as part of a broader effort to develop 3.0″.

Community and Cashback

Gnosis Pay has an active user base on platforms including Discord. twitterAnd in keeping with Web3’s early adopter rewards philosophy and community focus, the company is running a referral and cashback program that provides additional rewards to OG NFT collection holders.

Users receive between 1% and 4% GNO cashback depending on the amount of GNO tokens they hold in Gnosis Pay Safe. Users holding 0.1-1 GNO will receive 1% cashback, which extends to 2% for 1-10 GNO, 3% for 10-100 GNO, and 4% for over 100 GNO. Gnosis OG NFT holders can receive an additional 1% cashback up to 5%.

Funding for the rewards program will come from GnosisDAO, with a pool of 10,000 GNO initially allocated through an on-chain offering.

OG NFTs reward early adopters who support Gnosis Pay while remaining “true to our community values,” Shah said. decryption. NFTs also promise to provide access to additional “new features, IRL experiences, and perks with partners.”

Mining has now ended, but non-OG NFT holders who refer new users will also get a chance to access OG NFTs if they refer the Gnosis Pay card to three or more people before October 31st.

Additionally, new countries including Brazil, Singapore, Thailand, and Argentina, as well as native integration with Apple Pay and Google Pay, are coming “soon.”

“This is what we call Banking 3.0,” Shah said. “A traditional bank account with Web3 functionality or a cryptocurrency wallet with bank account functionality.”