By Matt Liston

In addition to growing interest in our platform, and how it will propel Gnosis forward, we are hopeful that our auction will provide a model of due diligence, responsibility, and management, for future token projects. Let’s take a look at the steps we have taken to execute the token auction as responsibly as possible.

10% of GNO tokens are reserved for the Gnosis team and distributed over a period of several years.

Unsold GNO tokens beyond 10% remain in the Gnosis LTD and are an asset of the company.

GNO tokens held by Gnosis LTD will be used to incentivize others to build applications on top of the Gnosis platform.

Gnosis LTD commits to hold at least 99% of these retained GNO tokens for the next 12 months.

Potential use of those tokens beyond that year should be in the interest of the platform and will be announced and explained with at least 2 month notice.

Tokens for Team Incentivization

Gnosis intends to distribute 10% to the core team over the course of several years to reward past work and incent progress on the platform. New employees will receive token allocations with an additional incentive-inspired duration release period. This sets a very high standard compared to previous projects in which tokens are often distributed immediately.

Additional Tokens Retained

Gnosis has no current plans to sell additional tokens beyond this sale. At later stages of development, costs for marketing, licensing, business development, and application development may grow substantially. Any future sales of tokens will be used to ensure long-lasting growth of the platform.

The percentage of tokens retained by Gnosis LTD is dependent on the length of time the sale takes to complete. This mechanism is detailed here. Of the tokens retained by Gnosis LTD beyond the 10% for team incentives, 99% will be held for a period of at least twelve months.

Our development roadmap calls for the finalization of the GNO to WIZ locking functionality roughly six months from the date of the sale. Once that functionality becomes available, Gnosis Ltd plans to use the majority of the retained tokens for its core functionality: the generation of WIZ. This will naturally result in an additional transparent lock down of GNO. A quick reminder — to generate WIZ from GNO, it is required to send the GNO to a lock contract for a lock time between one month and twelve months.

Responsible Use of Funds

In previous token sales, use of funds has become a concern. Projects have been accused of theft, irresponsible spending, and failure to deliver a viable product. It is worth noting that a beta version of Gnosis has been live on the mainnet for many months, and we are heads down continuing to develop our full vision for the platform. Gnosis is more than an idea, it’s a product coming to market. To adhere to our desire to be best-in-class with regard to transparency and security, we are deploying two organizational design structures regarding use of funds. The first is that any transfer of funds out of the Gnosis wallet requires Board approval by the Gnosis Ltd Directors, comprised of Martin Köppelmann, Stefan George, Joseph Lubin, and Jeremy Millar. Each of these individuals have long standing positive reputations within the Ethereum community. Further, funds will be kept in our industry-leading and widely used Gnosis multisignature wallet. This same wallet was deployed by Golem in their recent launch. Following Board level approval, the individuals possessing the required multisignature wallet keys need to come together to approve a transfer, safeguarding against rogue actors.

We believe that transparency with regard to retained tokens and distributions promotes a heightened and responsible standard for future tokens to follow. Each of these steps are designed to support the long term success of the project and the use of responsible business practices.