Next up, I want to bring on Philip to tell you about the future of Gnosis. Please give Philip a big round of applause. Hello. All right, I'm going to be talking about Gnosis, its chain and vision focused on payments and financial rails. So, I start with presenting Gnosis chain because I think many people still don't know about it.
And it's kind of the foundation of everything we work towards at this point. So, essentially it's quite identical to Ethereum at this point. So, we have a beacon chain and execution layer. We use the same clients. So, Nethermind, Aragon, Geth and Rest also are coming quite soon.
And then on the consensus side, we have Nimbus, Lodestar, Lighthouse and Teku. So, pretty much the same. A few are missing, but yeah. We go through the same hard forks and we focus on decentralization. So, we actually have almost 300,000 validators online or and active at this point.
Of course, there's also a few differences. So, we were a proof of authority network. We were never proof of work. It was based on Aura. We use xDAI, which is a stable coin based on DAI of course that is bridged to Gnosis chain as the native token and GNO that is an ERC-20 token as the staking token.
We have 5-second block times and 16-slot epochs, meaning that we get 2.44 times faster block times and 4.8 faster finality. The block count is basically the same. It's less, but as we have faster blocks, we get through the same throughput kind of.
and so we improve with a kind of plugin architecture, so we add new features on top with while remaining compatible with Ethereum because we really want to be able to go through all the hard forks in a quick fashion, so we kind of don't change the base layer too much. So, this is the hard fork timeline and history. So, we launched our beacon chain basically 1 year after Ethereum and then picked up the base quite rapidly for the merge, Chapella, and Stan Kuhn. And we actually went through Dencun 2 days before Ethereum, which I think is a good testament to our core dev team and its capability to stay in sync with Ethereum and maybe even be faster on some things. And then we launched the shutterized chain on in June, which is one of those plugins, but I'll come back to that a bit later.
And Spectra, of course, is as for Ethereum, it's scheduled for well, at least the first part because it was just splits into, but end of this year or start of the next one. So, one deliberate choice we make at Gnosis Chain is to say a layer one, whereas new chains tend to be layer twos or even some layer ones become layer twos, we want to stay a layer one chain, mostly because in our opinion layer twos are still fairly centralized. But I'm not going to go into too many details today because I actually have a talk or a debate specifically about this about whether Gnosis Chain should become a layer two with Vitalik, which is kind of an alpha, so I'm sharing this I think for the first time today in Bangkok at an event that is called Devcon 3 that we are organizing with Gnosis at Bangkok. So, for Devcon, of course, on November 9th and 10th. So, you can scan this QR code if you want to go to the the website or go to devcon3.
com. All right, so On shutterized chain, which I was alluding to before. Um so basically the idea is that we want a shielded mempool. Um basically to prevent MEV, so front running and sandwich attacks. And we want this to be decentralized, so unless unlike sorry flashbots or MEV blocker for example.
Um and it should be censorship resistant. Why do we want censorship resistance? Simply because currently on Ethereum like right now almost 95% of all blocks are built by two builders which are Titan builder and Beaver build. Um and that's actually worse than last year where I think 90% uh were built by only four builders, but that's also not great. And obviously it's way easier to um censor two builders than the 1 million plus validators that are currently active on Ethereum.
Uh one way to do this is to force them to be or those builders to be OFAC compliant which is already the case. So most blocks are OFAC compliant, so censoring in some capacity which is not good. Um centralized block builders are well they also have a huge competitive advantage because they have access to transactions others don't. Uh so they can extract extract a lot of value out of that. Um and sandwiching and front running still causes a lot of loss for users uh that don't know what slippage is for example or use dapps that are not perfectly configured in that sense.
Um and this is where Shutter comes in. So basically Shutter's mission uh is to shield protocols and their users from malicious users. They do this in two ways currently. Um one of them is to restore privacy to voting protocols like for example snapshots and the other one is this encrypting uh mempool which we at Gnosis are the first one to integrate and the only ones currently, but I'm sure it will come to other chains as well. Um and so the ideas of of it is basically that you can um well, encrypt a transaction before going on chain.
So, you sign a transaction, you encrypt it, and then you post it to your sequencer contract, and that sequencer contract actually defines uh the order in which those transactions will get added to a block. Um when a shutterized validator gets a proposal block, they get all those they take all those transactions in that order. Um and then they get the decryption keys from a decentralized set of uh keepers. Uh they dis- they decrypt all those transactions and then have to add them in the very at the very beginning of the next block uh in the order defined by the sequencer contract, so they cannot um add some arbitrary transactions in between, so they cannot do sandwiching, front running, or whatever else. Uh this effective effectively makes those transactions private and secure uh MEV-wise at least.
Uh you can actually use this already uh currently like right now on Gnosis Chain. There's three ways essentially to use it. Uh one, you can use one of those RPCs um uh shown here on the screen. Of course, this is suboptimal because you would still give your raw transactions, your signed transaction, but cleartext to those RPC providers, so you should really not use that, but deploy that service yourself. It is obviously open source uh like mostly everything we do at Gnosis.
Uh you can also use a wallet that supports shutter encryption natively, but none of these exist yet. Uh this is actually part of a bounty uh attack at the Nouns tomorrow. Or you can encrypt transactions like in the dapp locally. Um but sadly, no wallets well, there's one, but you cannot really sign a transaction without also broadcasting it, uh which then would defeat the whole purpose of Shutter. Uh except for Brave Wallet that allows you to do this, but yeah, so the UX-wise it's not great, and then if you can only use Brave, then uh people won't won't use it most likely.
All right, so moving on to Circles, which is a civil resistant decentralized trust protocol governed by social eccentric value. Okay, that's a bunch of complicated words. Let me explain how this works. So basically when you turn Circles um a private unique token, a CRC token, but that's unique to yourself is deployed and you actually get one CRC per hour, so 24 per day. Um as I said, CRC's are all different.
You cannot pay people with them because well, they don't actually have like a value or I might not value your CRC as much as mine, for example. And this is where trust connections come in. So basically I can decide and then of course incentivize to trust people I actually know and once well and actually trust in real life. And they can trust me back. And then you can do this with your whole like network or people you know, people you know to who exist.
And this creates a social graph. So basically trust connections yeah, a graph of trust connections. What this allows us to do is that basically imagine I want to pay someone here in the crowd that I don't know. Um they would not accept my CRC, right? Because they don't think it has a value.
But Circles can actually find a path between me and that person whereby um someone would someone else, for example, here in this audience would trust me. Someone someone would trust them and then the person I want to pay I trust that last person. Um and then basically what the way the payment works is my tokens get transferred to to that person that trusts me. Their tokens get transferred to the next one up until the last person that gets also tokens that they trust. So everyone ends up with tokens they trust um and considered to be worth as much as their own tokens.
So, this is how you can um well, basically interconnect people and do payments to basically just through trust. Um this of course encourages genuine connections. Uh so, you really should not trust anyone or some people you don't know or just any address. Um and this is where civil resistance actually comes in. So, if for example, you have a network of 10,000 bots or whatever uh that join circles, they would also all get one CRC per hour.
But, because no one else of the greater like genuine network trusts them, they would not be able to actually spend that CRC. Um yeah, and then there's a concept of groups that is well, a collective of people of course that share similar interests. Um and those groups can actually be defined by smart contracts. Uh and in that group uh basically all the CRC the CRC of of all members um can be used for that group. So, imagine uh ETHGlobal decided to create a Circles group for um this Pragma San Francisco.
They could define a smart contract that says, "Okay, you got like this wrist bands uh that is NFC enabled and has a smart wallet or whatever um and then you get access to that group." And you you would then be able to use your own CRC to buy merch for example um at ETHGlobal without necessarily having a trust connection between you and ETHGlobal. Uh because that group would implicitly trust you because you actually went to the event so we can prove that you exist and that you can be trusted. Uh so, basically Circles is fair money for all. Uh and it's about transforming monetary systems through the power of collective action.
This new type of uh money uh was actually deployed in its 2.0 version 2 days ago. And this was also coincidentally it's uh fourth birthday. So, Circus has existed for 4 years now. Um but the new version is now accessible and has way more new features than before.
All right, moving on to Nosis Pay um which is the future of banking and payments in our opinion. Um well, this was okay, my bad. So, the evolution of banking. Basically, we started with banking 1.0 um yeah, one which was traditional banks.
Uh they were brick-and-mortar. They had limited uh local distribution and technical capabilities. So, I mean, way back when you actually had to go physically to a bank. Um of course, they also got technically better, but then we moved on kind of to banking 2.0 which are neo banks.
Um so, that's when fintech started uh building on top of legacy infrastructure. So, think for example Revolut. And now we're uh proposing this new concept of banking 3.0 which is on-chain banks. Um and then here users regain control of their money and start banking without bankers and without borders.
So, there are a few uh technical challenges for TradFi and Web3, of course. So, for example, in TradFi you get kind of seamless UI. This was not really the case for uh this banking 1.0 but for um neo banks, it's actually the case. Most uh in most cases at least.
Uh you get perceived trust because those banks are generally like huge corporations that can be backed by governments for example. Uh and they get good customer support. Imagine you lose your card or you get it stolen or do like a wrong payment whatever, you can with a bit of chance get your money back or a your card or whatever. Uh but for that you get a slow banking system, and that is potentially costly, so you have to pay a monthly fee. Uh, for example, it's geographically restricted, of course.
So, for example, your bank uh here in the US will uh most likely not exist in Europe. And it's, of course, very centralized. In Web3, it's kind of the opposite, so you get poor UI, you have still have to know about uh wallets, gas, uh transactions, whatever. It's dangerous. Uh, so you don't have any customer support, of course.
If you lose your keys, you get them stolen, and you do a wrong transaction, you're kind of out of luck, let's say. You will never see those tokens again, and no one actually is able to even help you if they wanted to. Um and there is no real-world linkage, so if you want to spend your crypto, you basically do it on chain, or maybe you go through a centralized exchange, but then that's kind of a bridge between TradFi and Web3, let's say. Um but for this you get uh custody options, so you can decide to self-custody everything, to give to give your custody to a smart contract, to an entity, whatever you want. It's borderless, so it works exactly the same here as it does in Europe, or Asia, or anywhere else in the world.
Of course, there are some um laws that might prevent you from using it uh concrete uh specifically, but technologically speaking, it's exactly the same. And it's composable. I'll get back to that a bit later. So, the objective of Gnosis Pay is to merge those two worlds together, right? So, to make it easy, nice, uh everything you would expect from TradFi, but then also composable, decentralized, and um more, yeah, usable, composable, borderless, and available, all functioning 24/7.
Um about composability, I think that's actually very important and interesting. So, within months of Gnosis Pay being deployed, uh two wallets or dApps actually already integrate Gnosis Pay, which are Methery and Zeal. So, basically, those apps can decide how they integrate Gnosis Pay. So, they can be arbitrarily complex or easy. So, you can have, for example, Methery that is very straightforward, abstracts away everything crypto-related.
Or Zeal, that is a bit more complex, maybe, that has a wallet, shows more information, has more features. Uh but, this is completely defined by the dApp itself, right? So, they interact with smart contracts that are Web3. Um we don't really have to give permission to anyone to interact with those. You can also automate a lot of things if you want to.
So, it's kind of neo bank on the outside in your app and Web3 on the inside. And I think that's very interesting. So, anyone can actually do with this Gnosis Pay card or account what they want. Um so, a quick recap. And, of course, this card actually already exists.
So, I have one here. Um right here. It's just a normal Visa debit card. Um So, we integrate crypto with the real world using a Visa as a debit card. It's already available, I think, since February.
Um it's fully self-custodial. It's based on Safe, which is another Gnosis project. Actually, about the self-custodial part, I think that's very important and interesting because there are a lot of other cards, but they are generally custodial. So, you have to send your tokens to some entity. Um and they can technically, like, rug you.
They can prevent you from spending your tokens. They can maybe not give them back to you if they don't want to. Whereas, on Gnosis Pay, it's fully self-custodial. So, you never lose access to your tokens. Sure, Visa on Gnosis Pay could prevent you from paying with your card, but they They never get access to your tokens.
They can not take them for you from you. You can at any point just get them back. And then you can use them on chain or with any other provider if you want to. So, that's a very important point of Gnosis Pay. Uh we use tokens issued by Monerium for payments.
We have an IBAN integration. Okay, that's not really that interesting for the US markets, but uh in Europe it is. And coming soon uh we'll have also Apple Pay and Google wallets, more countries, USD settlements, uh and multi-currency cards. All right. So, uh if you want to learn more, here are a few interesting links.
So, gnosis.io. We are a DAO, so you can also go to the forum for proposals, posting proposals, reading, whatever you want. Some documentation. Of course, you can also find us on Telegram, Discord, and um Twitter, or whatever other network.
Uh yeah, and that's it for me. Thank you for listening.
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