Why Gnosis Pay is more than just a crypto card

Crypto payment cards have become a popular way for crypto holders to spend their hard-earned satoshis, allowing them to pay with crypto through widely accepted networks such as Visa and Mastercard. It will be.

Launched in 2023, the Gnosis Pay Visa debit card is unique among cryptocurrency payment cards. It is self-custodial, giving users full control over their crypto assets, and early users can pay fees-free directly from their blockchain address. As a Visa card, it can be used at over 80 million merchants worldwide.

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

“Gnosis Pay allows you to connect your self-custodial wallet to your credit card, allowing you to off-ramp your cryptocurrencies anywhere Visa is accepted,” Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst recently said. said in an interview. She added that “building bridges” between the old and new worlds is “the way we think adoption can happen.”

Building “Banking 3.0”

The Gnosis Pay card is the first step towards on-chain banking, or “Banking 3.0,” said Deep Shah, Gnosis Pay founding team and head of growth, in a recent talk at Token2049. “Imagine a bank where bankers are separated from banking operations and empowered to bank across borders and customers to keep their own funds,” he added.

“With Banking 3.0, the core banking infrastructure no longer resides on a 50-year-old legacy system; it is built on Web3,” he explained. Instead, Gnosis Pay cardholders store their cryptocurrencies themselves in the Gnosis Pay Safe. these smart contract The wallet already allows users to store over $70 billion in assets, giving users exclusive control over the ownership of their funds rather than a third party.

“This is the basis of the account,” Shah said, adding, “It has card functionality, so you can spend money like you would with a Visa card.” He said the safe also has an account function, has an IBAN number, and allows users to transfer fiat currency to and from the card using regular bank transfers.

To load a Gnosis Pay account, users can send EURe, a stablecoin authorized and regulated by the Icelandic FSA, to Gnosis Pay Safe or perform an instant SEPA transfer to Gnosis Pay IBAN. To ensure regulatory compliance, users must perform a Know Your Customer (KYC) check before ordering a card, and each transaction undergoes a Know Your Transaction (KYT) check on-chain.

After payment is made to the card issuer through a customized module on Safe, funds are transferred from the user's Safe and ultimately off-ramp for settlement with Visa and merchants. will be done.

Since Gnosis Pay Safe is on-chain, users can also interact with Web3 decentralized applications (dapps). This is a feature not found in centralized competitors, says Shah. decryption.

“Gnosis Pay accounts have the potential to combine the best of the Web2 and Web3 worlds to build propositions that users have never seen before,” he said. “Banking 3.0 is borderless, 24/7, allows users to store their funds as they wish, and enables permissionless innovation and configurability while maintaining the UX that users are accustomed to. '' he explained.

Gnosis’ “Banking 3.0” vision is to “bridge the gap between blockchain’s technological potential and the practical needs of everyday users, making decentralized financial tools accessible and usable to all.” It was born as part of a broader push to develop Gnosis 3.0.

Community and cashback

Gnosis Pay includes Discord and Twitterand focusing on Web3's philosophy of rewarding early adopters and community, the company operates a referral and cashback program that provides additional rewards for owners of OG NFT collections.

Users will receive 1% to 4% GNO cashback depending on the amount of GNO tokens they hold in Gnosis Pay Safe. Users with 0.1 to 1 GNO will receive 1% cashback, which increases to 2% for users with 1 to 10 GNO, 3% for users with 10 to 100 GNO, and 4% for users with 100 GNO and above. Gnosis OG NFT owners will also receive an additional 1% cashback (up to 5%).

Funding for the rewards program will be provided by GnosisDAO, with an initial pool of 10,000 GNOs allocated through on-chain proposals.

OG NFT supports Gnosis Pay and rewards early adopters who “stay true to our community's values,” Shah said decryption. NFT also promises to provide access to additional “new features, IRL experiences, and perks with partners” in the future.

Minting is currently closed, but non-OG NFT holders who refer new users will also have the opportunity to access OG NFTs if they refer three or more people to the Gnosis Pay Card by October 31st. You can.

New countries are also planned, including Brazil, Singapore, Thailand, and Argentina, as well as native integration with Apple Pay and Google Pay “soon.”

“This is what we call Banking 3.0,” Shah says. “A classic bank account with the power of Web3, or a cryptocurrency wallet with bank account functionality.”