"The Only Thing Where I Probably Agree With Arca is That GNO is Under-appreciated:" Gnosis' Stefan George
In this week’s episode I speak with Stefan George, the cofounder and CTO of Gnosis. Gnosis is one of the OG Ethereum projects. It was founded in 2015 by Stefan and Martin Koppelman as a prediction market platform on Ethereum and it’s now an ecosystem of financial applications, with a decentralized multi-sig wallet, called Gnosis Safe, and a decentralized exchange. Most recently, Gnosis announced it will join other DeFi projects and launch a DAO, where it would transfer a large chunk of the ether and GNO tokens in its treasury for the community to manage. This treasury is sizeable at around $100M dollars, due to the rising price of the 250,000 ETH they raised in a 2017 ICO. And this stash has been the core of a dispute with one of Gnosis token holders, hedge fund Arca. Arca claims the Gnosis token is trading below the value of the Gnosis treasury, and so they have proposed that Gnosis buy back their tokens at a value that’s between the current market value and the value of the treasury —or the book value. Stefan argues the GNO market cap is miscalculated because it’s not counting the actual number of tokens in circulation and should be higher. He also says the Gnosis DAO should drive more value to GNO holders.