GIP-102: Should GnosisDAO provide financing for the new GnosisVC ecosystem venture fund?

GIP: 102 title: Should GnosisDAO provide financing for the new GnosisVC ecosystem venture fund? author: Ben, GnosisVC type: Funding status: Draft created: 2024-06-10 duration: 7y funding: $20 million

Summary

GnosisDAO should finance the new GnosisVC fund to promote further ecosystem growth and product lines in the selected target verticals. Abstract

GnosisVC fund will raise a total of $40m, wherein GnosisDAO will invest $20m and the remaining $20m will be raised from external LPs. GnosisVC will invest in early-stage projects to accelerate the development, adoption, and growth of DApps and fintech integrations strengthening the broader Gnosis Ecosystem.

GnosisVC fund will deploy into early-stage projects in line with the existing Gnosis 3.0 thesis with a focus on RWAs, Decentralized Infrastructure, and Financial Payment Rails as target verticals. Fund Structure & Terms

The fund will be set up as a Cayman-exempt limited partnership with a term of 7 years (+ up to 2 years extension) and a 2/20 fee structure (2% management fees and 20% carry per industry standards).

The investment period will last for 3 years, with the expected schedule of the capital calls being ca. one-third of the total commitment to be paid in per year.

Deliverables to LPs will include: Quarterly reports on the investment portfolio posted on DAO forum. Investment summaries are shared with LPs via a dedicated data room. Implementation Initiatives

Venture Fund: Support and incubate projects through funding, governance participation, and advisory.

Gnosis Ecosystem Integration: Onboarding and integrating portfolio companies into the larger Gnosis ecosystem through an introduction to existing Gnosis projects and by facilitating a collaborative environment.

Maintenance: Continued review and collaboration with existing partners and ongoing assistance for portfolio companies from GIP 38.

Reporting: Quarterly reports and updates on investments and portfolio companies will be shared with the DAO, as well as their contribution to the evolution of the Gnosis 3.0 thesis. Investment Thesis

GnosisVC will be deploying capital into projects that will strengthen the existing Gnosis ecosystem through but not limited to the following three investment verticals: Financial Payments

Incremental margins are the core of the payment stack. The vertical is very crowded with a deeply intermediated stack and heavy cross selling. Focussing on payments middleware around Gnosis Pay, the fund should have considerable experience and informational advantages to be able to build out an integrated stack from the point of sale onwards. Decentralized Infrastructure

The future of computing and data availability is open source. In the absence of a fully mature Zero-Knowledge cryptography stack, the decentralization of services and applications at scale must proceed hand-in-hand with an equivalent decentralization of the underlying component infrastructure. The development of such an internet-native substrate must be tackled from multiple avenues: data availability, composable compute environments, orchestration and coordination of tasks, tooling, and real-time analytics to name a few. As a case study, LLMs have captured the public imagination on a circa 6-year-old technology. While there has been a lot of focus on model quality, model tooling, hosting, and standalone end-user deployments are an equally important but frequently underestimated part of the vertical. Historically, some of the most impressive investments by Gnosis have been infrastructure-related (MatterLabs, Gelato, TheGraph). As such, we believe that this vertical stays true to the Gnosis DNA. RWA

The Defi crypto markets are saturated with liquidity and narrative-driven demand without sufficient credit products to deploy into. This is due to the current need for full collateralization, so capital is abundant while investment opportunities are still scarce, there is also huge latent demand for institutional adoption through stablecoins, yield-bearing instruments, and new liquid RWAs. 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.

Team

Investment Committee

Benjamin Senn, DAO Legal Consultant

Daniele Pinna, Quantitative DeFi Researcher 0xSideQuest

Colin Rix, Multi-Strategy Fund Portfolio Manager

Ariunaa Batzorig, DAO treasury & Portfolio/Asset Manager

Stefan George, CTO Gnosis (excluded from management fees and carry)

Advisors

Sebastian Bürgel, VP Technology Gnosis & Founder HOPR

Arthur Gervais, Assoc. Prof UCL & Founder D23E

For further information please contact info@gnosisvc.io Or enquire at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScIVwlz2D8IdaWDQp0t_2U9N_sHMc2XjGtYZICBuNzNutndNg/viewform