GnosisDAO, the community behind the fully EVM-compatible layer 1, Gnosis Chain, has approved the proposal to finance a new $40M GnosisVC Ecosystem Venture Fund (“Fund”). Under this proposal, GnosisDAO will invest $20 million into the Fund, with the remaining $20 million being raised by external Limited Partners.
The GnosisVC fund will invest in early-stage projects aligned with Gnosis 3.0 – the Gnosis ecosystem’s latest roadmap introduced in March this year which aims to bridge the gap between blockchain technology and practical, high-quality applications for the masses.
Commenting on the passing of the proposal, Stefan George, Co-Founder of Gnosis said, “We have put a lot of thought into composing a team that combines expertise in investments, legal structuring, fund management, quantitative modeling at hedge funds as well as DeFi from both a technical and financial perspective. With the GnosisVC Ecosystem Fund, we are formalising a strategic venture to allow the GnosisDAO to have a more targeted investment strategy aligned with the Gnosis 3.0 thesis. Identifying and taking strategic stakes in relevant external companies and protocols will allow the DAO to integrate a cohesive stack for on-chain financial services, payments, and custody.”
Benjamin Senn, General Partner at GnosisVC added “Gnosis has a long track record of investments in decentralized applications and infrastructure. This broad coverage has given us a holistic overview of where there are still demands and gaps with respect to use case. With the new Gnosis 3.0 thesis, we are aiming to further fill in these gaps.”
To promote further ecosystem growth, investments made by the Fund will fill gaps between existing Gnosis ecosystem projects, with a focus on three primary verticals, collectively aimed at accelerating the development, adoption, and growth of DApps and fintech integrations:
- Real World Assets: The continued growth of self-custodial alternatives to existing CeFi interfaces presents the opportunity to funnel conventional financial players into the already existing DeFi stack.
- Decentralized Infrastructure: Projects can only be as decentralized as the infrastructure that supports them. From nodes, to AI, decentralized compute, and storage, this vertical focuses on those projects which minimize the dependency on central points of failure across the entire Web3 stack.
- Financial Payment Rails: Focusing on payments middleware around Gnosis Pay, the fund has considerable experience and informational advantages to build out an integrated stack from the point of sale onwards.
The Fund is one of the first ecosystem funds boasting an institutional-grade structure, with some of its key aspects governed by GNO token holders.
At launch, the Fund is already invested in projects across all three target verticals. These include Monerium, the issuer of EURE, the on-chain fiat infrastructure for Web3 builders, Naptha AI, the decentralized AI workflow orchestrator, and Schuman Financial, which will soon launch EURØP, a novel MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin designed to enable secure, regulated, on-chain transactions for euro holders.
GnosisVC signals a commitment to grow the Gnosis-accelerated ecosystem, adding to a past portfolio of over 60 investments Gnosis has made since 2019, including in Succinct Labs, Centrifuge, Risc0, Autonolas, and Kinetex.