Why Gnosis Pay Isn’t Just Another Crypto Card

Crypto payment cards have become a popular way for cryptocurrency holders to spend their hard-earned satoshis, enabling them to pay with cryptocurrency through widely accepted networks like Visa and Mastercard.

Launched in 2023, the Gnosis Pay Visa debit card is unique among crypto payment card offerings—it’s self-custodial, affording users full control over their crypto funds, and enables early users to pay directly from their blockchain address with no fees. As a Visa card, it’s accepted worldwide by over 80 million merchants.

However, where crypto payment cards from the likes of Coinbase and Binance require the user to custody their crypto funds with a third party, Gnosis Pay is different.

“Gnosis Pay allows you to connect a self-custodial wallet to a credit card, allowing you to off-ramp your crypto anywhere that Visa is accepted,” said Gnosis Co-Founder Friederike Ernst in a recent interview. She added that “building those bridges” between the old world and the new is “how we think we can make adoption happen.”

Building ‘banking 3.0’

The Gnosis Pay card is a first step towards on-chain banking, or “banking 3.0,” said Deep Shah, Gnosis Pay Founding Team & Head of Growth in a recent talk at Token2049. “Imagine banks where the bankers are separated from banking, banking without borders, and empowering users to custody their own funds,” he added.

“On banking 3.0, the core banking infrastructure is no longer on those 50 year old traditional systems—it's built on Web3,” he explained. Instead, Gnosis Pay card holders store their crypto themselves, in a Gnosis Pay Safe. These smart contract wallets are already allowing users to custody over $70 billion in assets, giving them—and not a third party—sole control over the ownership of their funds.

“This is your base of the account,” Shah said, adding that it “has card capabilities, so you can spend your money like a Visa card.” It has account capabilities, too, he said, with an IBAN number attached to the Safe that lets users send fiat money to and from the card with regular bank transfers.

To load up their Gnosis Pay account, users can send EURe, a stablecoin authorized and regulated by the Icelandic FSA to their Gnosis Pay Safe or perform an SEPA instant transfer to their Gnosis Pay IBAN. To ensure compliance with regulations, users need to perform a know-your-customer (KYC) check before ordering a card, and each transaction undergoes a know-your-transaction (KYT) check on-chain.

Through customized modules on Safe, the funds are transferred from the user's Safe after a payment is made to the card issuer, and then eventually off-ramped for settlement with Visa and the merchant.

Because the Gnosis Pay Safe is on-chain, it also enables the user to interact with Web3 decentralized applications (dapps), a feature not seen with centralized competitiors, Shah told Decrypt.

“Gnosis Pay accounts have the potential to bring the best of the Web2 and Web3 worlds together, to build a proposition that users have never seen before.” he said. “Banking 3.0 is borderless, 24/7/365, empowers users to custody their funds if they want, enables permissionless innovation and composability while retaining the UX users are habituated to,” he explained.

Gnosis’ “banking 3.0” vision comes as part of its wider push to develop “Gnosis 3.0,” which aims to “bridge the gap between blockchain's technical potential and everyday users' practical needs, making decentralized financial tools accessible and usable for all.”

Community and cashback

Gnosis Pay has an active user base on platforms including Discord and Twitter, and in keeping with Web3’s philosophy of rewarding early adopters and its focus on community, the company is operating a referral and cashback program that offers extra rewards for holders of its OG NFT collection.

Depending on how much of the GNO token users hold in their Gnosis Pay Safe, they receive GNO cashback of between 1% and 4%. Users with 0.1-1 GNO receive 1% cashback, scaling to 2% for those with 1-10 GNO, 3% for those with 10-100 GNO, and 4% for those with over 100 GNO. Holders of the Gnosis OG NFT also receive an additional 1% cashback on top, to a maximum of 5%.

The funding for the rewards program comes from the GnosisDAO, with a pool of 10,000 GNO initially allocated through an on-chain proposal.

The OG NFT rewards early adopters for supporting Gnosis Pay, “staying true to its community values,” Shah told Decrypt. The NFT also promises to offer access to additional “new features, IRL experiences, and perks with our partners,” down the line.

Although minting is now closed, non-OG NFT holders who refer new users will also get the chance to gain access to an OG NFT if they refer three or more people to Gnosis Pay Card before October 31.

Also on the horizon are new countries including Brazil, Singapore, Thailand and Argentina, plus native integrations with Apple Pay and Google Pay coming “very soon.”

“This is what we call banking 3.0,” said Shah. “Your old bank account with the power of Web3—or your crypto wallet with bank account capabilities.”