What Is Gnosis? Inside the Ethereum Layer-2 Blockchain Infrastructure Developer

Gnosis is a decentralized platform built on Ethereum, primarily focused on prediction markets, decentralized finance, and secure digital asset management through its multi-signature wallet, Gnosis Safe.

Launched by Martin Köppelmann, Friederike Ernst, and Stefan George in 2015 as a prediction market platform on the Ethereum blockchain, Gnosis has since expanded into a broader blockchain infrastructure ecosystem.

Gnosis has become a major player in the blockchain industry, with 300,000+ validators, it is one of the largest projects to come out of the Ethereum network. The native token of the ecosystem, Gnosis GNO, peaked at $644 in November 2021. By April 2024, Gnosis surpassed 200 million transactions.

“Surpassing 200 million transactions underscores the growing adoption and practical application of Gnosis Chain, affirming our path towards realizing Gnosis 3.0 which aims to bridge the gap between blockchain technology and practical, everyday applications for the masses,” Gnosis co-founder Martin Koppelman said in a statement at the time.

The Gnosis ecosystem includes:

• ⛓️ Gnosis Chain – a sidechain used for verification.
• 🐄 Cow Swap – a decentralized exchange.
• 🤝 The Coincidence of Wants (CoWs) Protocol – which matches users whose trades on Cow Swap complement each other.
• 💳 Gnosis Pay – a crypto credit card.
• 🔐 Safe – a crypto wallet.

Gnosis was also among the first projects supported by the Ethereum-focused incubator ConsenSys (which incubated Decrypt prior to its spin off in 2022). This article examines Gnosis's development, core technologies, and role in the Ethereum ecosystem.

What is Gnosis?

Gnosis is a layer-2 solution for the Ethereum blockchain designed to address scalability challenges within the Ethereum ecosystem.

As an Ethereum sidechain, Gnosis was designed to offer faster and more affordable transactions. Additionally, Gnosis evolved to incorporate various features, including a prediction market and multi-signature wallets that require multiple private keys to authorize a transaction.

Prediction markets let users trade shares based on the outcome of future events, such as elections, sports results, or market trends. In blockchain versions of prediction markets, oracles help by pulling real-world data onto the blockchain, ensuring accurate results and resolving disputes.

Prediction markets are considered a major use case for blockchain, and as a pioneer, Gnosis faced stiff competition in the early days.

"At the time, prediction markets were a major topic in blockchain. Our main competitor, Augur, held the first ICO, raising about 5% of the Ether supply and becoming a key Ethereum application," Gnosis co-founder Stefan George told Decrypt. "We saw an opportunity to compete and build something better."

Gnosis’ flagship dapp, Gnosis Olympia, launched in December 2017 as a test version of Gnosis’s prediction market. It allowed users to explore decentralized betting without financial risk. Participants received free Olympia (OLY) tokens to place bets, and successful predictions earned Gnosis (GNO) tokens. While Olympia offered a fun way to experience prediction markets, Gnosis has since taken it offline.

Looking back, one of the biggest challenges Gnosis faced, George said, was timing.

"It was too early and prediction markets struggled with adoption, not just for Gnosis but also for Augur and others who attempted them back in the day,” he said. “Meanwhile, the infrastructure we built to support prediction markets, like exchanges and wallets, took off and became the main focus."

Over time, Gnosis evolved beyond prediction markets into a comprehensive decentralized ecosystem designed to facilitate secure, transparent, and efficient decentralized applications and essential financial infrastructure on Ethereum.

History of Gnosis

• 💻 January 2015: Gnosis is founded as a decentralized prediction market on Ethereum.
• 💰 April 2017: Gnosis raises $12.5 million in a 10-minute ICO.
• 🏛️ December 2017: Gnosis launches Olympia, a test version of its prediction market app.
• 🤖 April 2020: Gnosis Protocol launches, introducing a new decentralized exchange mechanism.
• ⛓️ November 2021: Gnosis Chain launches following the xDai and GnosisDAO merger.
• 🤝 April 2021: Gnosis Protocol v2 launches, introducing CoWSwap.
• 🚨 December 2021: Gnosis Beacon Chain launches as an Ethereum Virtual Machine protocol.
• 🏦 July 2022: Gnosis Safe rebrands to Safe following a community vote by the GnosisDAO.
• 🟡 September 2022: Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe) launches SafeDAO and the Safe Token.
• 💳 July 2023: Gnosis launches Gnosis Card, a self-custodial Visa Debit card.
• 💰 May 2024: Gnosis launches Metri, an on-chain self-custodial wallet.
• 😡 February 2025: A laptop belonging to a Safe developer is compromised, leading to the $1.4 billion hack of Dubai-based exchange Bybit.

The Gnosis ecosystem

Gnosis Chain

Gnosis Chain launched in 2021 as an Ethereum sidechain designed for decentralization, efficiency, and low-cost transactions. It operates as an Ethereum Virtual Machine execution-layer chain, secured by the Gnosis Beacon Chain consensus layer.

The Gnosis Beacon Chain uses a Proof-of-Stake mechanism, where validators stake GNO tokens to secure the network and earn rewards. Governed by GnosisDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, it prioritizes community-driven decision-making. The Gnosis Chain ecosystem includes projects like POAP, and Giveth.

“Gnosis Chain serves as a kind of substrate—a sister chain to Ethereum,” George explained. “It runs the same technology, consensus, and execution clients, and like Ethereum, it is very decentralized, with hundreds of thousands of validators.”

Coincidence of Wants Protocol

Launched by Gnosis in April 2021, the Coincidence of Wants (CoWs) protocol improved crypto trading by directly matching users, reducing costs, and preventing slippage and front-running. It used batch auctions and solvers to optimize execution and powered the CoW Swap DEX.

CoW Swap

CoW Swap is a decentralized exchange aggregator that finds the best trading prices by matching users directly through its Coincidences of Wants mechanism. This peer-to-peer matching reduces reliance on external liquidity, enhances price efficiency, and protects against Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) exploitation that seeks to profit from blockchain transaction manipulation.

The Gnosis Pay Card

​The Gnosis Pay Card is a Visa-enabled debit card that connects directly to a self-custodial crypto wallet. The Gnosis Card allows users to spend their cryptocurrency assets at any merchant that accepts Visa payments. Unlike traditional crypto cards that require preloading funds onto the card, the Gnosis Card enables payments to be made directly from the user's wallet at the time of the transaction.

GnosisDAO

GnosisDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that governs the Gnosis ecosystem. Launched in November 2020, it transitioned Gnosis from a traditional company to a community-driven governance model.

GnosisDAO operates under a futarchy governance system, where decisions are guided by prediction markets rather than direct voting. In this model, participants bet on the outcomes of different proposals, and the most promising ones—based on market consensus—are implemented.

George acknowledged the challenges of futarchy adoption, highlighting the complexities of using prediction markets for voting and efforts to make participation more accessible.

“The reality is that it has been difficult for people to make those bets—they don’t necessarily feel comfortable making predictions because it’s too complex,” he said. “Additionally, we haven’t had a great user experience for participation.”

Despite these challenges, George said Gnosis is working to resolve the issues with futarchy-based voting, and is supporting a new startup, futarchy.fi, which is “developing interfaces that should finally make it easier for people to participate.”

Safe

Safe, formerly Gnosis Safe, is an open-source, non-custodial smart contract wallet for managing digital assets on Ethereum and other EVM-compatible blockchains. It offers multi-signature security and smart accounts and supports Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Avalanche. 

The Bybit hack

In February 2025, Dubai-based exchange Bybit suffered a significant security breach, resulting in the theft of approximately $1.4 billion in Ethereum and related assets. The attack was attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group, which compromised the laptop of a Safe developer, enabling hackers to access Bybit’s Ethereum cold wallet.

While George emphasized that Safe is “completely separate from Gnosis,” he explained that “because of recent events, we decided to be closer to get through the crisis.”

Following the attack, George said Gnosis assumed the worst-case scenario and immediately took action to secure their systems and protect user data.

“Without knowing if the infrastructure was compromised, we took everything down, identified and isolated the issue, removed it, and improved monitoring,” he said. “We reset the infrastructure, strengthened internal and external threat monitoring, and restored networks so everyone could access their safes.”

To mitigate the chances of a repeat hack, George said future software designs will allow users to interact with their Safe wallets without relying on a service provider.

Gnosis 3.0 and beyond

As of 2025, Gnosis’ infrastructure powers over 200 projects, making it a key player in the blockchain industry—and one that is continuing to build tools to support the fast-changing blockchain space, George told Decrypt.

Gnosis Chain’s blockchain infrastructure is “highly decentralized, developer-friendly, and cheaper to use than Ethereum,” he said, calling it a “great home” on which to build applications.

Future plans include Gnosis 3.0, a “pivotal shift from infrastructure to application,” that will see Gnosis focus on consolidating a “collective of aligned projects” linked by its GNO token, emphasizing consumer-facing applications that address real-world use cases.