Gnosis Visa debit card debuts in Europe, letting users buy with Euro stablecoin
The Gnosis Card, a Visa-enabled debit card connected to an on-chain, self-custodial wallet, officially launched Monday on a stage at the Ethereum Community Conference, or EthCC.
The card and its payment network, Gnosis Pay, have been in development for over a year according to Gnosis CEO and co-founder Martin Köppelmann.
The project combines Visa payment technology with Gnosis’ asset management platform called Safe.
Gnosis partnered with Monerium earlier this month for European transactions, so now users can pay for items in the real world and online with the Gnosis Card using Monerium’s euro stablecoin, EURe.
At present, this is the only way to successfully complete transactions with the Gnosis Card, co-founder of Gnosis Friederike Ernst told Blockworks.
“You can have any tokens in the wallet — but if you’re out of EURe the [transaction] will decline. We will open this up to other [stablecoins] in Q4,” Ernst said in an email.
Users can also connect their desired wallet to the card, including MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet and more.
In a previous iteration of the project, the card itself was a hardware wallet, which contained a chip holding the private key to sign messages, Ernst explained.
Gnosis realized this version of the card was impractical for a number of reasons, but mainly, users wouldn’t be able to use the Gnosis Card virtually, such as through Apple Pay or Google Pay.
So the team scrapped that idea and went with the current model: having a smart contract wallet linked to the card that uses token allowances.
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