In an exclusive interview with crypto.news, Frederieke Ernst, co-founder of Gnosis, discusses the future of money and how the cypherpunk movement continues to impact crypto innovation.
In the bustling crypto landscape, Frederieke Ernst, co-founder and COO of Gnosis Pay and Gnosis Safe, has carved out a unique space for herself. A semi-retired physicist with a penchant for building and cryptography, Ernst’s journey from academia to co-founding one of the most widely used decentralized payment platforms is a testament to her innovative spirit.
Ernst’s fascination with cryptography began in childhood, sparked by a book gifted by her father: The Code Book (1999) by Simon Singh. “I was the 12-year-old kid who set up her own PGP server,” Ernst recounts. “No one else was using it, but I had a good time.”
After completing her studies in physics and neuroscience in London and Berlin, Ernst embarked on a career in academia, conducting postdoctoral research at Columbia and Stanford before becoming a professor in Hamburg. It was in 2017 that Ernst decided to leave academia and co-found Gnosis, alongside the onchain wallet’s original co-founders Martin Köppelmann and Stefan George.
Initially incubated within ConsenSys as a prediction market, Gnosis Pay and later Gnosis Safe emerged as a foundational pillar of Ethereum’s ecosystem. “We started with the goal of building a prediction market platform,” says Ernst. “Our conditional token framework […] became the backbone for projects like Polymarket.”
Seeing the prediction market landscape as more daunting than the payment vertical, Gnosis eventually expanded its portfolio, creating tools and infrastructure critical to Web3. Gnosis Safe, the largest non-custodial smart wallet today manages over $100 billion in assets, while CowSwap, a decentralized exchange aggregator that matches buy and sell orders directly between users, is used by retail investors to reduce fees and slippages across crypto transactions.
All of this is technology is led by creating safe guardrails for capital flow.
In recent years, Gnosis has focused on making blockchain technology more accessible to everyday users. Gnosis Pa
Go to Source to See Full Article
Author: Dorian Batycka
