Decentralized Infrastructure Purpose-Built for the Ethereum (ETH) Ecosystem.

Gnosis (GNO) Fact Sheet

Gnosis is essentially a project that has the primary goal of providing a decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem of applications.
Gnosis has developed numerous products, all of which enable numerous functionalities found within the sphere of decentralized finance (DeFi).
GNO is the native utility as well as the governance token used across the ecosystem, where users can vote on governance proposals or, as a result of GNO locking, reduce their transaction costs, and it can even be used for liquidity mining.
The GnosisDAO is essentially a collective that utilizes Gnosis products to transparently guide decisions on the development, support, and even governance of the Gnosis ecosystem.
Gnosis as a project was originally created by Martin Köppelmann and Stefan George in 2015, during a point in time when they worked at ConsenSys, which is an Ethereum venture production studio.

GNO Historical Data Price Chart in the U.S. Dollars (USD)

Gnosis (GNO) Historical Data Price Chart in the U.S. Dollars (USD). Source: TradingView

What is Gnosis (GNO)?

Gnosis (GNO) is essentially a decentralized, open-source prediction market that was purpose-built on top of the Ethereum blockchain to enable any of its users’ access to the opportunity of creating markets where they can speculate on any event or any arbitrary outcome.

Through the utilization of the Ethereum blockchain, Gnosis can enable a secure as well as transparent ecosystem and provide efficient forecasting tools within the prediction market.

To truly understand how Gnosis (GNO) works, we will first need to go over what a prediction market is and how it forks. A prediction market is defined as a location where users can bet on future events. However, its utility goes far beyond the most common use cases.

In the whitepaper of Gnosis, the prediction market is described as crowdfunded wisdom, where they can gather information about expected outcomes or future events through a procedure where they provide a financial incentive through which data points can be updated accurately.

When we go over prediction markets as a whole, they essentially ask questions surrounding potential future outcomes. The total of an option's share is a reflection of the probability surrounding if it can occur or not.

If someone has a genuine belief that they have information about a specific outcome, they are motivated to buy shares that are a direct reflection of that opinion. The shares that win after the market's conclusion are redeemable with a value associated with them, while others become worthless.

Financial speculation, as a result of this, is one of the most efficient ways of gathering information that requires no central or biased coordinator that is a direct reflection of the people's true beliefs.

With that out of the way, we can now go over the true objective behind Gnosis. Gnosis aims to be a prediction market, which will allow any participant to bet on the results of different events.

They can participate in speculation surrounding a specific sports team and their odds of winning or losing a game or even for elections.

For example, a good use-case for GNosis would be to predict if the Bitcoin (BTC) market would continue to be in a bear market state throughout the following month, and this can include data such as what percentage is going to either increase or dip, what the price will be at the beginning or at the end of the month, and with this data, investors that aim to invest or trade the Bitcoin (BTC) cryptocurrency can project their growth or decrease as a means of adjusting their strategies.

How is Gnosis (GNO) Used?

To understand how Gnosis is used, we will first need to go over how it functions as a whole. The operations that relate to Gnosis are reliant on its architecture, and this architecture is unique and divided into up to three layers.

First, there's the Core Layer, and it is made up of all of the smart contracts that are responsible for controlling the events, tokens, as well as settlement and market mechanisms surrounding the Gnosis system.

The platform is made up of numerous smart contracts which were created through the usage of the Solidity programming language, and its access, as well as use, is free. Each of these contracts is also available to any developer to use as they see fit and import into other projects.

Within the core, the main contracts include the Event Contract and the Market Contracts, and they are utilized to handle the load surrounding the Core Layer due to the fact that they share the responsibility of handling the interactions between the off-chain world and the on-chain world through an oracle, where the interactions with the platforms are handled.

Second, there is the Service Layer. This is a layer that utilizes the Core Layer to create services, which utilize the capabilities of the base Gnosis Protocol, and the services can include numerous market mechanisms, payment processor integrations, DeFi integrations, decentralized applications (dApps) as well as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Third, there is the Application Layer which enables custom front-end applications built on top of the Service and Core layers.

What this means is that Gnosis has the ability to create specific applications. However, the majority of them will be created by third parties that can charge for the usage of their services.

With that in mind, the Gnosis Cryptocurrency, also known as GNO by its symbol, is an Ethereum-based token that was initially sold throughout the Gnosis ICO. The primary use-case surrounding GNO is for the generation of OWL tokens through staking. What this means is that users can essentially lock GNO for a predefined amount of time, which can span up to a year, after which they have received a reward. The amount of OWL that they receive gets calculated based on the length of time the cryptocurrencies were staked for.

On the network, users are incentivized to pay for the fees in the form of the OWL cryptocurrency as it is built on the platform and works alongside GNO.

OWL is an ERC-20-based cryptocurrency that can only be created by locking GNO.

Use-Cases of Gnosis (GNO)

A key use case surrounding Gnosis is the Gnosis Safe, which is a cryptocurrency wallet that has been designed for tokens built on top of the Ethereum Network. The main priority this wallet has is to essentially create a multi-signature environment, where the ownership of the wallet gets divided between the people the person chooses and the Gnosis Safe smart contracts, which can provide an enormous level of security when compared to other wallet types.

Then there's the Gnosis Governance procedure, where the GnosisDAO is the decentralized autonomous organization that enables its governance. As a means of participating in the GnosisDAO, each user will need to go to the form and begin the registration there. They can then present their proposals and participate in the debates that will take place within the forum.

Every proposal that is within the GNosisDAO begins within this form, where anyone can participate. However, there will come a point in time when the proposal can become accepted, and in this case, it will become seen as a GIP (Gnosis Improvements Proposals). At this point in time, all of the technical and coding parts of the improvement will be defined.

Then a survey on the GIP is carried out within the form, and the majority needs to be obtained before it enters the final stage, where only GNO token holders can decide whether or not they will accept the potential improvement.

This phase occurs on the platform Snapshot, which is the one that handles the final DAO.

There's also Apollo, which is a prediction market platform where users can create their own tokens that represent information, incentives, or even ideas.

Gnosis’s Prediction market is named Apollo Market, where it is possible to have a market for just about any kind of arbitrary event that can be speculated on.

Within this context, users are provided with the opportunity to buy as well as sell positions in arbitrary events. In almost every event, some outcomes will have a much higher chance of becoming true.

Here, a group’s estimation or prediction is more correct than an individual’s, as Gnosis utilizes the crowd-sourced wisdom model. Any event’s finalization has a token with it to trade it, and this value will depend on the changes in the event.

There’s also DutchX, which is a decentralized exchange where users can trade as well as auction off their tokens.

Usability & Primary Features of Gnosis (GNO)

It is clear by this point that Gnosis is a prediction market platform that has been built in the form of a decentralized application (dApp) on top of the Ethereum network and includes numerous apps associated with it.

Protocol

A prediction market takes advantage of user predictions as a means of aggregating information about future events. Users in the market can trade tokens which are a representation of the outcome of a specific event. Due to the fact that some outcomes are much more likely to occur than others, these will have different values associated with them within the open market.

As time ends up passing or related events end up unfolding, some token outcomes can become a lot more likely to occur and, as a direct result of this, increase their value. Once the event ends up happening, the tokens that represent the final outcome will receive their full value, while the others will be worth nothing.

Ledger

Gnosis is built on top of Ethereum (ETH) and is split across three main layers, including the Core Layer, Service Layer, and Application Layer.

Smart-Contract Support

The main smart contracts that are utilized for the Gnosis Protocol are the EpochTokenLocker and BatchExchange. This is due to the fact that trading happens in batches.

Tokenomics & Supply Distribution

When we go over the tokenomics as well as the supply distribution, Gnosis completed a token sale in 2017, where they sold 418,777 GNO.

The projected use of the sales proceeds was split as follows:

60% went to core development.
20% went to legal
15% went to operations.
5% went to marketing.

However, the initial supply was at 10,000,000 GNO tokens, and 95.8% went to the founders and the project, while 4.2% went to the investors.

Team & History

The Gnosis project originally began its development process in 2015 by Martin Köppelmann and Stefan George. This occurred at a point in time when Joe Lubin invited them to the company known as ConsenSys, where they would ultimately have the required resources to contribute towards the development of Gnosis.

Within ConsenSys, they would work on everything surrounding the project; however, in April of 2017, Gnosis also prepared an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) where it would raise funds and separate from ConsenSys. A total of 10 million GNO tokens would become available in the ICO, and it would raise $12.5 million to develop the idea.

Activities & Community

When we look at the overall community surrounding Gnosis, the Official GnosisDAO Twitter page has over 120,100 followers in total,

Furthermore, the Official GnosisDAO Discord page has over 12,000 members. Here we can see that the project has a strong as well as a healthy community surrounding it.

Development Activity and GitHub Repositories

When we go over the Official Gnosis GitHub page, there are 263 repositories associated with it.

Out of them, three are pinned in total, and these include:

On-Chain Activity

Gnosis (GNO) is built on top of the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain, according to data from Etherscan the maximum total supply of 10,000,000 GNO.

Activities and Partners

Gnosis Safe became live on Layer 2 - Polygon, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), and Arbitrum joined xDai as Gnosis Safe's Layer 2 offerings.
Metamask Institutional x Gnosis Safe - Metamask Institutional has integrated the GNosis Safe as a means of streamlining the operations for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), institutions, as well as crypto enterprises.

References & Reports

References

Market Research

TradingView
Etherscan