Gnosis (GNO): Gnosis Chain, the Gnosis Pay card and the DAO treasury, and what makes it risky

Gnosis Pay, the crypto debit card built by the Gnosis team, said on 6 November 2026 that an intruder had reached the legacy system behind its consumer cards three days earlier and taken “certain customer information”. It was the second security incident at the card in five months, after a smart-contract bug let attackers move about $1.5 million out of user accounts on 1 June. Both happened while the rest of Gnosis was being rebuilt: Gnosis Chain, the network the card runs on, is preparing to stop being an independent layer 1 and become a rollup that settles on Ethereum, and GNO holders voted in June to let themselves cash out part of the DAO treasury.

Gnosis is an old name in Ethereum. Its teams wrote the multisig wallet now called Safe, the trading protocol now called CoW Protocol and the xDai chain that became Gnosis Chain. In 2026 the project is a set of pieces with different owners and different risks: a chain with about $86 million of value locked, a card business turning into a white-label supplier, a treasury that has been shrinking by vote, and a governance token decided on by a few dozen wallets.

What is Gnosis? From prediction markets to Ethereum infrastructure

Gnosis began in 2015 inside ConsenSys as a project for prediction markets on Ethereum, and became independent in 2017, according to the timeline the company published for its tenth anniversary in August 2025. That page names three co-founders: Martin Köppelmann, Friederike Ernst and Stefan George.

The token came first. On 24 April 2017 Gnosis sold GNO in a descending-price auction, in which the price fell with every block until buyers took the offer. Cointelegraph reported the next day that the sale raised almost $12 million in about ten minutes. Only 5% of the tokens were sold; the developers kept the other 95%, and Cointelegraph’s headline put the value created on paper at about $300 million. That 95% would shape every later debate about who owns Gnosis.

The products that made the name came out of the team, and most of them have since left. Safe began as Gnosis Safe, multisig contracts the team wrote to manage the assets raised in its 2017 token sale, according to The Block. GNO holders approved spinning it out of Gnosis Ltd in April 2022, and on 12 July 2022 it dropped the Gnosis name and announced a $100 million token sale led by 1kx, as The Block and CoinDesk reported. Gnosis Protocol, launched in April 2020, was renamed CoW Protocol in early 2022. The Gnosis docs now list Safe, CoW Protocol, the asset manager kpk (formerly karpatkey) and the Gnosis App as independent spin-outs, and Gnosis Pay, Circles, Gnosis Chain and Gnosis VPN as the active parts.

Before it took the Gnosis name, the chain was xDai, a sidechain live since 2018 and run under proof of authority. A merger of xDai with the Gnosis Beacon Chain was proposed in November 2021 and accepted in December 2021; the chain switched to proof of stake with GNO as the staking token at its own Merge on 8 December 2022, replacing the Aura proof-of-authority consensus. GNO itself is still an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, carried to Gnosis Chain through the Omnibridge.

Who runs Gnosis: Gnosis Ltd, GnosisDAO and a few dozen voters

Two bodies matter. Gnosis Ltd is the company that ran the 2017 sale and, in its own funding requests, the main builder of Gnosis infrastructure and products. GnosisDAO is the on-chain governance layer: GNO holders vote on Gnosis Improvement Proposals (GIPs) on Snapshot, with a quorum of 75,000 GNO, and those votes govern the treasury. The docs say the DAO does not run the day-to-day work of the products.

Money flows from the DAO to the company. Under GIP-128, which closed on 28 July 2025 with 76,800 GNO for and 10 against, the DAO agreed to pay Gnosis Ltd $30 million a year in stablecoins. The same text describes the company as having become, in early 2025, a company limited by guarantee without share capital, a structure close to a foundation. It does not say in which country, and we could not confirm the jurisdiction. In August 2026 GIP-154 cut the budget to $15 million for the 12 months from 1 September 2026 and added a $2 million repayable loan for Gnosis Pay; it passed with 104,172 GNO for and 1 against.

Those big numbers come from small crowds. GIP-154 had 44 voters, GIP-153 on the chain’s future had 54 and the redemption vote GIP-151 had 49, according to Snapshot. The failed GIP-150 drew 95 voters. A governance token gives power in proportion to tokens held, not people, as our guide to governance tokens explains, and at Gnosis that means a handful of large holders and the Gnosis entities set the direction. The DAO treasury is held across 22 Safes plus one Gnosis Ltd address, per the docs, and has been managed since February 2026 by Noca (Noctua), chosen under GIP-148 after the DAO ended karpatkey’s mandate with GIP-143. Noca’s budget is capped at $1.5 million a year.

How Gnosis Chain works: xDai fees, GNO stake and 5-second blocks

Under the hood it is an EVM chain with chain ID 100, according to the Gnosis Chain docs, a block about every 5 seconds and two tokens with separate jobs. Every transaction pays its fee in xDai, a token pegged to the dollar and bridged from Ethereum, so a user’s cost does not move with the price of a volatile coin. The fee goes to the validator who sealed the block. GNO is the consensus token that validators stake. The chain copies Ethereum’s beacon-chain design: deposits used to be counted in mGNO, a unit set at 32 mGNO per GNO to mirror Ethereum’s 32 ETH. The docs now say mGNO is deprecated and no longer serves any purpose.

Use is modest. The DAO’s monthly governance summaries count about 10.8 million transactions on the chain in August 2026 and about 10.2 million in September, with fees of about 7,800 xDai and 7,400 xDai. Gnosis says the chain peaked at more than 5 million transactions a day in 2023. The block explorer GnosisScan was replaced by Blockscout on 11 August 2026.

Validator counts that do not agree

How many validators secure Gnosis Chain depends on who you ask. The chain’s docs say “over 200,000 validators”. A Gnosis forum post of 5 November 2025 on the Balancer exploit spoke of about 340,000. The DAO’s own monthly summaries put active validators at about 76,000 in June 2026 and about 33,400 at the end of September 2026, with about 299,000 GNO staked. GIP-153 gives a fourth figure, about 350,000 GNO staked, or roughly 27% of circulating supply. None of these sources explains its definition (registered keys, active keys, or keys that voted), and we could not check them against a beacon-chain explorer, so we report each with its source.

Bridges signed by a 4-of-7 set

Money reaches Gnosis Chain through bridges run by Gnosis. The xDai bridge takes USDS (formerly DAI) on Ethereum and mints xDai; the Omnibridge carries ERC-20 tokens such as GNO, WETH and WBTC; the Omnibridge is built on the Arbitrary Message Bridge (AMB), which carries data and contract calls. The docs say transfers on these native bridges are signed by a set of bridge validators, and a Gnosis Bridges team notice of 21 August 2025 describes that model as a 4-of-7 multisig. A transfer from Ethereum takes about 30 minutes because the bridge waits for Ethereum finality, the docs say; the bridges roadmap, updated on 29 October 2026, lists work on a Fast Confirmation Rule to cut that to seconds. For how this kind of bridge differs from messaging and intent systems, see our guide to cross-chain bridges.

Gnosis tried to reduce that trust. Hashi, an oracle aggregator that makes more than one bridge confirm a message, was integrated into the canonical bridges, and Least Authority audited Hashi and that integration in a report dated 18 July 2024. A year later it was switched off: the same August 2025 notice said GnosisDAO had allocated no further funding, that maintenance would stop by 22 August 2025 and that the Hashi validator would leave the bridge interface by 29 August. Hashi’s contracts remain deployed but are not required to execute messages, so the bridges went back to the 4-of-7 model. One forum critic of GIP-153 argued that Gnosis lost credible neutrality through its multisig-controlled bridge and deposit contract; that is his view, but the facts it rests on are in the docs.

Bridges have hurt the chain before, through design rather than theft. On 15 March 2022 attackers used tokens bridged with the Omnibridge, which follow the ERC-677 standard and call the recipient back on every transfer, to run reentrancy attacks against Agave and Hundred Finance, two lending protocols forked from code that did not expect callbacks. A community post-mortem said 517 tokens had been bridged before the callback was restricted and, not being upgradable, could not be changed. It placed the flaw in lending forks that did not guard against callbacks, not in the bridge contracts.

The Balancer hard fork: when Gnosis Chain rewrote balances

The episode that most defines Gnosis Chain’s security came at the end of 2025. On 3 November 2025 an exploit of Balancer V2 hit several chains, and about $9.4 million of the stolen assets sat on Gnosis Chain, according to a forum update by Friederike Ernst two days later. Monerium froze the compromised EURe balances and StakeWise looked at a similar freeze for osGNO; together, the post said, more than €3 million was protected, out of about $128 million drained across chains by the post’s count. Validators also ran a voluntary soft fork: a client that refuses to attest to blocks moving the attacker’s balances. More than half of validators adopted it, per the post.

Then the chain went further. On 12 December 2025 a Gnosis contributor posting as filoozom announced a hard fork set for 16:11:40 UTC on 22 December, giving node operators ten days to upgrade their clients. Its purpose was to move the frozen funds to a rescue address so they could later be returned; once they sat in a DAO-controlled wallet, he wrote, everything else would be worked out. A forum reply identified the rescue address as a Safe that, at the time, appeared to have a single signer, which filoozom said would be swapped out. Unchained reported that the fork activated at 11:11 ET (16:11 UTC) on 22 December and recovered around $9.4 million of frozen funds, the same amount the Gnosis forum had counted on the chain in November.

No DAO vote came first. filoozom wrote that validators “are entitled to run any software they see fit” and are not forced to follow the DAO, adding that this was his personal view, not Gnosis Ltd’s. Several forum members objected: some to the ten-day notice, others to the precedent of rewriting state on a chain sold as neutral, and one to the unequal treatment of the earlier GIP-127 case, in which nothing was frozen. For a user the lesson is double. Victims of the Balancer exploit on Gnosis had a path to recovery that most chains would not offer, and every user now knows that a coordinated validator set can, and did, move balances on this chain.

Gnosis Chain becomes a rollup: what GIP-153 changes

On 22 July 2026 Friederike Ernst, with Philippe Schommers and Ben Carvill, put forward GIP-153, asking whether Gnosis Chain should move into the “Ethereum Economic Zone” (EEZ). Their case was blunt: “Gnosis Chain has failed to deliver on its original value proposition”, which they describe as credible neutrality, a decentralised, low-cost chain run by many independent validators. Fee income, they wrote, covers only a small share of security costs, so the treasury pays, and the staking rewards dilute non-stakers by about 2.3% a year, while Ethereum issues less than 1% a year before its fee burn. The Snapshot vote closed on 19 August 2026 with 123,158 GNO for, 115 against and 151 abstaining.

The plan turns Gnosis Chain into a rollup that settles to Ethereum. The EEZ framework is run by a separate Swiss non-profit, co-led by Gnosis and the proving team ZisK and co-funded by the Ethereum Foundation, and has no token of its own, according to the Gnosis docs. For users, addresses, balances and contract state carry over without redeployment, and xDai stays the fee token. For the chain’s security model almost everything changes:

• At launch Gnosis Ltd runs a central sequencer (the GIP calls it a composer) that orders transactions and builds blocks every 2 seconds, and that can delay or hold suspect transactions to stop obvious hacks.
• The Gnosis Chain validator set is wound down, bridge validators are repurposed to run provers, and the treasury-funded staking subsidy ends, which frees the roughly 350,000 GNO now staked.
• The first version relies on interim proving, likely based on trusted execution environments, with real-time zero-knowledge proving and the full specification expected over 2027.
• Genesis is targeted for December 2026 or January 2027, conditional on EEZ dependencies; an older Gnosis blog link mentions spring 2027, so the date is not firm.

Critics on the forum objected to the central composer and to building the power to censor into the design; one asked whether the ability to hold transactions is temporary or permanent. Ernst replied that a centralised sequencer is needed for technical reasons, that Gnosis would not run AML or KYC checks for others, and that it would step in only in obvious malicious cases such as an infinite-mint bug. Once staking ends, GNO is meant to draw value from fees, through a fee share or a buyback, but the GIP leaves the design to a later proposal.

GNO token: 3 million supply, a large burn and a $30 million buyback

GNO has two uses today: voting on GIPs and staking on Gnosis Chain. It carries no automatic right to fees or dividends. CoinGecko lists a total and maximum supply of 3 million GNO and about 2.64 million in circulation, and the Gnosis treasury docs describe the supply as hard-capped at 3,000,000.

The cap is the result of burns. Under GIP-116, proposed by karpatkey and approved on Snapshot on 29 November 2024 with 92,114 GNO for and none against, the DAO burned 3.15 million GNO from the eight-year vesting contract into which 80% of the supply had been locked in November 2020; the DAO announced the burn in January 2025 as a step toward the 3 million target first set in GIP-35, a 2022 vote that called it a 70% cut from the original supply. Its own announcement gives a cumulative burn figure that does not reconcile cleanly with the cap, so we rely on the supply as listed by CoinGecko and the docs.

The DAO has also bought GNO back. GIP-100, proposed in May 2024 by the fund Thanefield Capital, asked for a $30 million buyback; it passed on 10 June 2024 with 87,477 GNO for and 418 against. Half was spent through time-weighted CoW Protocol orders placed only below a calculated book value, half at karpatkey’s discretion. karpatkey’s report for January 2025, posted on 21 February, said the programme was completed at the end of January. The number of tokens bought and the average price were not in that report.

The treasury and the GNO redemption vote

The treasury is the reason many investors hold GNO. The docs put it at more than $175 million in November 2025, citing DefiLlama. The text of GIP-151, written in June 2026, valued the treasury excluding GNO at $151,220,464, and added GnosisVC, a fund of which about $13 million had been called, at a 60% discount, for a total of $156,420,464 open to redemption. It counted the eligible supply at 1,364,058 GNO: the 3 million total minus tokens held by the DAO and Gnosis Ltd.

Getting there took two votes. GIP-150, a redemption that would also have issued a claim token on illiquid investments and on Gnosis Ltd’s value, failed on 12 May 2026 with 167,692 GNO for and 432,545 against; its text also pointed to about $25 million of illiquid off-chain investments that it said had not been disclosed before. GIP-151, a one-time, opt-in redemption at net asset value developed “jointly with the Gnosis founding team”, passed on 26 June 2026 with 157,749 for, 2,500 against and 1,492 abstaining. The treasury manager Noca opened the redemption site on 3 July and closed the deposit window on 17 July 2026 at 12:00 UTC. Deposits could not be reversed, and Noca described the contract as “internally audited at Gnosis”, not by an outside firm.

Noca did publish the price. From a snapshot at 00:00 UTC on 17 July it counted $164.7 million of treasury assets excluding GNO against 1,330,414 eligible GNO, for $123.80 per token, plus $3.91 for the GnosisVC share: $127.71 per GNO in all, paid mostly in ETH (56%) and stablecoins (28.9%). Claims opened the same afternoon. What is still missing, as of 6 November 2026, is the outcome: neither the number of GNO redeemed nor the assets paid out appears in the forum thread, the DAO summaries through September or the treasury page. A holder who skipped the window still owns a share of a treasury whose size after redemptions has not been stated.

Gnosis Pay card: from a consumer card to a B2B platform

Gnosis Pay launched in 2023, by Gnosis’s own account, as a Visa debit card that spends straight from a self-custodial Safe account on Gnosis Chain, with accounts in euros, pounds and dollars among other currencies. The company behind it is Gnosis Pay Co Ltd, registered in England on 7 June 2023 (Companies House number 14919639). The cards are issued by Monavate Limited, an electronic money institution authorised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 901097), under licence from Visa Europe, according to gnosispay.com. Getting a card means passing identity checks (KYC), so a Gnosis Pay account ties a name and address to wallet addresses, a fact that matters for what follows.

Its own website claims more than $209.5 million of volume processed, 3.9 million transactions and 84,600 accounts deployed; we could not check those totals. The DAO’s August 2026 summary is more modest for a single month: 180,432 payments, down from 188,768 in July, on volume flat at about $8.3 million. GNO cashback on the old app ended on 30 September 2026. In September Gnosis Pay made its turn to business clients official: consumer interfaces wind down by the end of 2026, and the company sells white-label stablecoin card programmes to other firms instead. Its enterprise docs list programmes in the EU, the UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand.

June 2026: a signature bug in the Zodiac modules

On 1 June 2026 monitoring flagged the first large unauthorised transfer at 06:17 UTC; the team found the root cause at 08:06, took card services offline, and bridge validators paused the bridge to Gnosis Chain. According to Gnosis Pay’s post-mortem, the flaw sat in two Zodiac modules, Delay and Roles, that the card uses to queue and limit withdrawals. When checking an ERC-1271 contract signature, the code read the value returned but ignored whether the call itself had failed, so a contract that reverted while returning the “valid” answer passed as a signature. That let attackers queue withdrawals from accounts they did not own. The bug dated from Zodiac version 3.4.0, released on 30 October 2023.

Attackers took about $1.5 million, mostly GNO, EURe and USDC.e, and another $300,000 or so became inaccessible, across 5,281 wallets holding at least $1. ChainSecurity reviewed the repaired modules by 4 June, and service was back for 99% of users on 6 June. Gnosis absorbed the losses and says no user lost funds. On the day, Köppelmann first urged users to withdraw, then deleted the advice, saying most of them could not, Cointelegraph reported. The post-mortem itself carries a byline of 3 July 2026, although the page metadata now shows 6 November 2026; we cite it as the July document.

November 2026: customer data taken from the legacy card system

On 3 November 2026 Gnosis Pay’s monitoring detected unauthorised access to the system that runs its Gnosis Pay-branded consumer cards. The company says containment began within two hours, credentials were replaced and the vulnerability fixed. It emailed affected customers on 6 November and said it was informing its partners, its card issuer and data protection authorities, which it did not name. Funds were not affected and the enterprise platform behind white-label programmes was not touched, according to the company. It did not say how many customers were affected.

The company’s blog post speaks only of “certain customer information”. The notice sent to customers, quoted by Protos, lists the name printed on the card, the shipping address and the Gnosis Pay account reference, and says exposure varied by user. Lefteris Karapetsas, founder of Rotki, said his email also listed his full home address, his card number and all wallet addresses linked to his account, according to Protos. That claim is unconfirmed: Gnosis Pay has not said publicly that card numbers or wallet addresses were taken. Until the old system retires on 20 December 2026, Gnosis Pay has made 3D Secure mandatory for all online card payments and increased monitoring of cards and wallets. Our news report on the Gnosis Pay data breach covers the customer reaction and what affected users can do.

The worry is specific. A list linking a home address to a set of self-custody wallets is more sensitive than a leaked email address, because it tells a reader who holds what and where they live. Nothing published so far links the breach to any attack on a customer. It was also not the first data incident around the card: in July 2024 a breach at the KYC provider Fractal ID reached some Gnosis Pay users, who were told by email on 17 July, The Block reported; Fractal said about 0.5% of its 1 million users were affected.

Audits: the bridges are reviewed, the card mostly after the fact

The Gnosis Chain docs keep a list of bridge audits with the auditors’ reports. It includes Quantstamp on the TokenBridge contracts behind the Omnibridge (6 November 2020), two ChainSecurity reviews of the Omnibridge (27 April 2021 and version 6.0 on 7 September 2021), Least Authority on Hashi and its integration (18 July 2024) and Omega on the USDS migration of the xDai bridge (a report filed as October 2025, alongside an internal Gnosis Ltd review). Omega and ChainSafe also reviewed the sDAI upgrade of the xDai bridge on 31 August 2023. Gnosis Chain also runs a bug bounty through Immunefi.

The card is thinner. We found no published external audit of the Gnosis Pay account setup before the June 2026 exploit, and the review that followed, by ChainSecurity, has no public report we could locate. The post-mortem promises an independent end-to-end assessment by an outside firm, wider audits of external dependencies and a process to apply upstream fixes quickly; none has a date. The redemption contract was audited only internally.

Gnosis Chain TVL against other chains

DefiLlama counted $86.2 million of value locked on Gnosis Chain on 6 November 2026, down from $147.3 million a year earlier, a fall of about 41%, and about 70% below the peak of $291.4 million on 17 December 2024. Stablecoins on the chain include about $14 million of dollar tokens and about €14.3 million (roughly $15.9 million) of euro tokens such as Monerium’s EURe, DefiLlama data for 6 November 2026 show.

DefiLlama lists Gnosis Pay as a crypto card issuer but shows no TVL for it, and we could not retrieve fee or revenue figures for the chain. The card competes with stablecoin cards from crypto firms and payment networks, ether.fi’s Cash card among them, but none publishes card volume in a form we could compare.

Why we rate Gnosis 4 out of 5 for risk

We score Gnosis 4 on our 1-to-5 scale, where 5 is the riskiest. These facts drive it. The card suffered a contract exploit and a data breach within five months. The chain is about to change its security model, from a large validator set to a sequencer run by Gnosis Ltd with interim proving, on a date that is not fixed. Its bridges rest on a 4-of-7 multisig after the DAO stopped funding Hashi, and in December 2025 its validators showed they can rewrite balances without a prior vote. And GNO governance is decided by a few dozen to under a hundred voters, with a redemption whose outcome has not been published. Against that, the team reimbursed the June losses in full, publishes detailed post-mortems and governance texts, and showed in 2025 that it can act fast after an exploit, which some users will read as protection and others as a weakness.

What to watch

The next dates are close. The legacy Gnosis Pay consumer system retires on 20 December 2026, and consumer apps wind down by the end of the year. The EEZ genesis of Gnosis Chain is targeted for December 2026 or January 2027. The $15 million budget for Gnosis Ltd runs to 31 August 2027. Still missing: the number of customers hit by the November breach, the outcome of the GNO redemption, and the independent end-to-end security assessment the card team promised in its post-mortem.