In essence, the company is looking to bridge the gap between self-custodial crypto wallets and traditional payment methods such as Visa. The product launch comes in the context of high-profile bankruptcy filings from companies such as FTX, which not only brought to light the misappropriation of customer funds but also caused users to move their assets away from centralised exchanges and towards self-custodial wallets such as MetaMask and Ledger.
However, spending self-custodial assets in the real world remains a problem, one that Gnosis aims to solve with the launch of this Visa card. The card will be initially available in the UK and the EU, with plans to expand to Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, and Hong Kong in the future.
Gnosis is also working on a service named Gnosis Pay, which is a set of developer tools that allow crypto wallets to create a version of their Gnosis Card for users without having to build an entire online payments system. The Gnosis Pay service will launch in the US by the end of Q3 and will work with MakerDAO to offer its USD-denominated stablecoin Dai as an option for the credit card.
As for pricing, one Gnosis Card will cost EUR 30. The cost of producing and distributing the physical card is EUR 10, and the surplus will be directed towards the product’s engineering and compliance infrastructure. The plan is to generate revenue via transaction fees, and as the card gains more and more popularity, it would drive demand for Gnosis’s GMO token.
For its know-your-customer process, Gnosis Pay has tapped Fractal. Specifically, users can use Fractal to verify their identities with Gnosis as they set up a Monerium bank account and apply for a Gnosis Card.
The Gnosis Card is supported by Monerium, a company that offers the Euro-denominated EURe, which is the only stablecoin regulated in the European Union. Monerium allows users to connect their wallets to an International Bank Account Number or IBAN, and when users send money from a bank account to a wallet-linked IBAN, payments are minted as EURe stablecoins on blockchains such as Ethereum and Gnosis and show up in their wallets. On the other hand, whenever users sign off payments from their wallets, EURe stablecoins are burned and sent as euros to their bank accounts.
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