This tech startup suddenly had $1 billion—and no bank account to put it in.
No legal protections. No insurance. No safety net.
Gnosis raised $15M in 2017, which ballooned to $1B—all stored outside traditional banking.
What they did next changed everything about how you store your money :
In 2017, Gnosis ran one of the first ICOs ever, raising $15M worth of ETH for their prediction market platform.
But here's the twist: they never sold the ETH.
By 2020, that $15M had grown to over $1 billion.
Yet no bank would touch them. The system that should have protected this wealth refused to acknowledge it:
Banks wouldn't touch crypto companies. Too risky, they said. Too unregulated.
So Gnosis had a billion dollars sitting entirely on-chain with zero traditional financial infrastructure.
Most companies would panic.
But their response would reshape an entire industry:
While traditional finance turned its back, crypto projects held collective billions in treasuries.
No custody services. No insurance. No banking partners.
The entire system said: "You're on your own."
So they built something unexpected:
The Gnosis team faced an impossible challenge: How do you manage $1B when every transaction must happen on-chain?
No bank transfers. No traditional custody. No legal recourse if someone steals funds.
They had to invent tools that didn't exist. What they created would protect billions:
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