GnosisDAO, the decentralized autonomous organization behind the Gnosis Chain, has approved a proposal to launch a $40 million venture fund aimed at accelerating early-stage blockchain projects.
According to an Oct. 23 announcement, GnosisDAO will contribute $20 million to the fund, while the remaining $20 million will come from external limited partners (LPs). The fund, dubbed GnosisVC Ecosystem, will prioritize investments in projects working on real-world assets (RWA) tokenization, decentralized infrastructure, and financial payment rails.
“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, said Stefan George, co-founder of Gnosis, claiming the DAO now have a “more targeted investment strategy aligned with the Gnosis 3.0 thesis.”
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The new thesis, introduced in March 2024, includes a focus on infrastructure, from nodes to artificial intelligence, decentralized computing and storage, and payments middleware around Gnosis Pay.
“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,” noted Benjamin Senn, general partner at GnosisVC.
At launch, the fund is already invested in projects like Monerium, an onchain fiat infrastructure for Web3 builders; Naptha AI, a decentralized platform for AI workflows; and Schuman Financial, a MiCA-compliant stablecoin protocol. Since 2019, GnosisVS has invested in over 60 startups.
The Gnosis ecosystem has been around since 2015. Originally an Ethereum-based prediction market platform, it evolved to financial infrastructure solutions like Gnosis Pay and spun off projects such as the multisig wallet Gnosis Safe, now known as Safe. According to DefiLlama, the Gnosis chain holds assets worth $267.5 million at the time of writing.
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Gnosis Chain total value locked. Source: DefiLlama
Joining established ecosystems has been an attractive option for developers and startups seeking capital for Web3 projects. In June, Bitget and Foresight Ventures launched a $20 million fund to support early-stage projects within The Open Network (TON) ecosystem, closely integrated with Telegram.
A few months later, in September, MEXC Ventures, Foresight Ventures, and Mirana Ventures announced a fund targeting the expansion of the Aptos ecosystem, particularly supporting projects that leverage the Move programming language.
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