Gnosis, a sidechain to Ethereum, has announced the launch of two new products that could enable crypto wallet users to pay for online purchases using stablecoins and Visa’s payment system. Gnosis Pay and Gnosis Card are the first decentralized payment network to integrate with a traditional payment processor and the first Visa-certified consumer debit card directly connected to an on-chain self-custodial wallet.
Gnosis Card, which uses the Visa payment system, is a debit card directly connected to a user’s on-chain account, built on the Gnosis Pay decentralized payment network. Users’ wallets, in this case Safe wallets, will act like a bank account, and every Gnosis Card will be connected to the user’s Safe account. Gnosis Pay will also operate as a layer 2 to the Gnosis chain, allowing for faster and cheaper transactions.
From a user experience point of view, it’s exactly the same experiences everyone’s used to but under the hood of using crypto to settle your payments, said Stefan George, co-founder of Gnosis and chief technology officer of Gnosis Pay.
The idea for Gnosis Card came after George was on a ski trip in the French Alps and exchanged ideas with an executive at payment processor SaltPay. George was explaining how blockchain technology works and how it could function in everyday life. The idea came that we should try to actually work together to kind of bridge the world between what they are doing and what we are doing. Ultimately, I think that’s the only way we can actually get more adoption for crypto, George said.
Gnosis spun out Safe as a separate business last July, but the two entities remain closely connected, as is evident with the use of Safe wallets in Gnosis’ latest products. It’s a symbiotic relationship, George said. Safe is supporting Gnosis Pay through the development they’re doing on the smart contracts, which we are now leveraging for every single card that’s being shipped.