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🦉Gnosis Weekly Recap ~ 19 June 2025

Gnosis Team

• 9 min read

🎭 DappCon 2025: A Retrospective

As the dust settles on DappCon 2025, we find ourselves reflecting on what can only be described as a monumental week for the Ethereum ecosystem. June 16–18 transformed Berlin into the epicenter of Web3 innovation, bringing together over 1,000 builders, researchers, and visionaries for three days of rigorous discourse that went far beyond the typical crypto conference experience.

From Protocol Berg's focused technical discussions to DappCon's expansive programming across privacy, governance, and human agency in decentralized systems, this week featured: 100+ talks with 1 mission; build the open internet.

🙏 Thank You to Our Community

To every attendee, speaker, sponsor, and community member who made DappCon 2025 possible—thank you.

What struck us most wasn't just the caliber of technical discussions, but the genuine connections formed in hallway conversations, the late-night protocol debates that extended well past official programming, and the shared commitment to building systems that serve people, not platforms.

You turned Berlin into more than a conference venue. You created a space where Ethereum's foundational values—credible neutrality, censorship resistance and ownership—weren't just discussed but lived.

Special recognition goes to:

  • The 100+ speakers who shared cutting-edge research and battle-tested insights
  • The Protocol Berg participants who set the technical foundation during June 13-14
  • Our specialized track partners: Web3Privacy Now, Safe, and our VC Day participants
  • The volunteers and organizers who made every session run seamlessly
  • The broader Berlin Blockchain Week community (June 7-22) who welcomed us into the city's thriving crypto scene

🌟 Gnosis Ecosystem Spotlight

Voices That Shaped the Conversation

While every talk contributed to DappCon's success, several moments from the Gnosis ecosystem deserve special recognition for their impact on the broader Web3 discourse:

🎯 A Decade of Building for Agency: Gnosis at 10

In her opening remarks at DappCon 2025, Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst marked Gnosis's 10th anniversary while outlining a vision focused on enabling individuals to reclaim control over their money, identity, governance, and data.

From Prediction Markets to Full-Stack Infrastructure

Ernst traced Gnosis's organic evolution from prediction markets designed to harness collective intelligence, through building essential infrastructure as needs emerged: Safe for secure custody, Cow Protocol for MEV protection and DEX aggregation, and Gnosis Chain as "arguably the most decentralized smart contract network after Ethereum itself."

Bridging to Mainstream Adoption

The roadmap now includes practical tools like Gnosis Pay and Metri for everyday users, Gnosis HQ for on-chain business operations, Circles as a bottom-up currency system, and Gnosis VPN for censorship-resistant connectivity.

DappCon 2025: Building Over Speculation

Ernst positioned DappCon as distinctly focused on building rather than speculation, emphasizing the transition from aspirational ideals to operational tools that non-crypto natives can use. The central theme: agency—creating infrastructure for "the world that we actually want—open by default and controlled by the people who use it."

🎤 The Fireside Chat: Four Foundational Minds

Perhaps the week's most anticipated moment brought together Robin Hanson, Martin Köppelmann, Joseph Lubin, and Vitalik Buterin for an unrehearsed conversation about the future of decentralized systems.

💫 Circles: Money, Reimagined

Martin Köppelmann's presentation, Circles: Money, Reimagined began with a fundamental insight: money is technology—the world's most ubiquitous protocol that shapes how we transact, and it's not neutral. His deep-dive into Circles revealed an elegant monetary system built on three core rules: every user issues 1 CRC per hour, all balances face 7% annual demurrage to encourage circulation, and selective trust networks prevent sybil attacks while enabling transactions through the web of trust. Köppelmann highlighted Circles 2.0's hierarchical group structure that scales from local communities to continental networks while maintaining resilience through distributed governance.

🔗 The Circles Web of Trust: When It Works, When It Fails, and What to Do About It

Paul Boes' main stage presentation examined the Circles Web of Trust through the lens of what he called "trustworthy personhood" and how Circles approaches proving personhood in decentralized systems. His analysis covered the practical realities of when trust networks function effectively, scenarios where they break down, and actionable strategies for addressing these challenges. Boes provided a candid assessment of Circles' approach to identity verification, offering valuable insights for anyone building reputation or social verification systems in the crypto space.

🌐 Gnosis VPN: Building True Web3 Products

Sebastian Bürgel's presentation on what it really takes to build consumer-facing Web3 products resonated with founders across the ecosystem. His honest assessment of the challenges in creating truly decentralized alternatives to centralized services sparked important conversations about product-market fit in Web3.

⚡ Recent and Future Hardforks: What Does This Mean for Validators and Users?

Philippe Schommers, Head of Infrastructure at Gnosis, delivered a practical guide to understanding hard fork impacts on Gnosis Chain's validator and user communities. His presentation broke down the technical implications of recent network upgrades and outlined what validators and users can expect from upcoming hard forks. Schommers addressed critical questions around validator preparation, user experience during upgrades, and the coordination required to maintain network security throughout the transition process. The session provided essential clarity for Gnosis Chain's stakeholders on how network evolution affects their day-to-day operations and long-term planning.

🧠 AI x Prediction Markets

Gabriel Fior's exploration of Gnosis AI demonstrated how prediction markets become even more powerful when enhanced with artificial intelligence. The integration of forecasting algorithms with crowd wisdom pointed toward a future where collective intelligence scales beyond human limitations.

🔮 Launching Futarchy: Decision-Making Reimagined

Robin Hanson's presentation on "Launching Futarchy" provided a practical framework for how prediction markets can improve governance and organizational decision-making. Hanson, the economist who coined the term "futarchy," demonstrated how betting on policy outcomes creates better incentives than traditional voting mechanisms. His examples of implementing futarchy in DAOs showed how organizations can move beyond token-weighted governance toward outcome-based decision systems. The session laid important groundwork for his later appearance in the day's fireside chat, establishing futarchy as a governance primitive ready for implementation rather than just academic theory.

📱 Apps of Ethereum: The Onboarding Reality Check

Tomasz K. Stańczak's "Apps of Ethereum" presentation delivered a refreshingly honest account of his own adventures trying to onboard into the Ethereum ecosystem. As the new co-lead of the Ethereum Foundation, Stańczak's firsthand experience navigating wallets, gas fees, and application interfaces provided a crucial perspective on where Ethereum still falls short for everyday users. His candid assessment of onboarding friction points resonated with developers who've become blind to the complexity they've normalized. Most importantly, Stańczak's talk signaled a clear shift in Ethereum Foundation priorities toward usability and user experience—declaring it's time to finally stop using the "still early" excuse and focus on creating genuinely good user experiences.

🛡️ SafeCon: The Future of Digital Ownership

SafeCon (June 18) delivered on its promise to be the definitive gathering for smart account development. Lukas Schor's opening keynote outlined Safe's vision for universal smart account adoption, while the day's programming showcased how close we are to making self-custody accessible to everyone.

Security took center stage with panels on transaction protection and the "1TS: 1 Trillion Security on Ethereum" session featuring Fredrik Svantes (Ethereum Foundation) and Rahul Rumalla (Safe Labs), demonstrating the scale of assets now secured by smart contract infrastructure.

The standout moment was the "Kill the Private Key: Road to Full AA from 7702" panel featuring Kristof Gazso (Pimlico), Richard Meissner (Safe), Bror Tirosh (Ethereum Foundation), and Francesco Andreoli (MetaMask). This session provided developers with actionable strategies for implementing account abstraction using EIP-7702, leaving attendees with clear next steps for their projects.

Richard Meissner's technical deep dive into "The Fight for Self Custody" and panels on mainstream applications proved that smart accounts aren't just coming—they're here, and the infrastructure is ready for the next wave of consumer applications.

🏆 DappCon VC Day Winners

The inaugural DappCon VC Day showcased innovative projects pushing the boundaries of decentralized technology. After presentations from emerging builders, three standout projects earned recognition for their technical innovation and practical applications:

🥇 Onit - A prediction market protocol enabling fully customizable markets for any question, allowing users to deploy sophisticated forecasting mechanisms that reward accurate predictions.

🥈 XO Market - Open conviction markets that let users create, trade, and share their beliefs through decentralized market mechanisms, expanding beyond traditional binary predictions.

🥉 Concero - Building decentralized messaging infrastructure for secure cross-chain communication, simplifying deployment for applications requiring blockchain interoperability.

The day also featured promising projects including Peanut Protocol, focused on seamless multi-chain token transfers and fiat integration, and Forest AI, which accelerates AI innovation through continuous rolling funding mechanisms for high-performing models.

These projects represent the practical evolution of decentralized technology, moving beyond theoretical frameworks toward real-world applications that address concrete user needs and technical challenges.

🔄 The Distribution Challenge: Stefan George's Call to Action

Stefan George, Gnosis co-founder, concluded DappCon 2025 with an important reality check. Reflecting on DappCon's origins in 2018—when the top dApps had just 4,000 users—he highlighted a persistent problem: despite massive infrastructure investment (73 operational Layer 2s, 82 more in development), centralized exchanges are capturing the value.

The Infrastructure Paradox

George presented stark data showing that while the ecosystem has unlimited block space and improved UX through account abstraction, distribution remains the unsolved challenge. Base has 20x more users than Ethereum, and Coinbase's recent sponsorship of a US Army parade exemplifies how centralized players benefit from billions in decentralized R&D while operating with fundamentally different values.

Fighting for Distribution

"Centralized exchanges are eating our lunch," George declared, pointing to wallet data showing how Binance and Coinbase-promoted solutions increasingly dominate self-custodial usage. His call to action was clear: distribution must be the first question when building anything new.

The solution requires picking battles carefully—competing locally where decentralized builders can offer fundamentally better value than global centralized players. Projects like Gnosis Pay and Circles exemplify this approach: identifying specific pain points and building bottom-up rather than trying to compete head-to-head with well-funded centralized alternatives.

George's message crystallized DappCon 2025's underlying tension: having built the infrastructure for decentralized finance, the community now faces the harder challenge of ensuring it serves the values that inspired its creation.

📊 By the Numbers: DappCon's Impact

  • 1,000+ attendees across three days
  • 100+ speakers from 40+ countries
  • 30 startups pitched at VC Day
  • Countless GitHub repos starred, partnerships formed, and late-night protocol discussions that will shape Ethereum's roadmap

🔮 What We Learned: Key Themes

Three major themes emerged from DappCon 2025:

1. Privacy as Infrastructure, Not Feature

From the Web3Privacy Now track to Shutter's encryption demonstrations, privacy emerged as fundamental infrastructure rather than an optional add-on. The regulatory environment and user demands are converging to make privacy-preserving technology essential for mainstream adoption.

2. Account Abstraction's Moment

SafeCon demonstrated that smart accounts aren't coming—they're here. The combination of EIP-7702, improved UX patterns, and battle-tested infrastructure like Safe means 2025 could be the year externally-owned accounts become legacy technology.

3. Human-Centric Coordination

Perhaps most importantly, speakers consistently returned to technology's role in enhancing rather than replacing human decision-making. From Circles' web of trust to futarchy's prediction-driven governance, the focus remained on tools that amplify human agency rather than automate it away.

🚀 Looking Forward

DappCon 2025 proved that when you gather the right people with the right questions, magic happens. The conversations that started in Berlin conference rooms are continuing in Discord channels, GitHub repositories, and development teams around the world.

As we process everything that happened this week, one thing is clear: the open internet isn't a distant vision—it's being built right now by the people who gathered in Berlin.

The Gnosis ecosystem will continue pushing the boundaries of what's possible in decentralized finance, governance, and infrastructure. But this week reminded us that we're not building alone. We're part of a global community committed to creating systems that serve humanity's highest aspirations.

✍️ Gnosis is Hiring!

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