Gnosis Venture Studios, an arm of Gnosis known for developing on-chain financial solutions such as Safe and Gnosis Pay, has unveiled uRamp. URamp is a new platform that enables transactions between on-chain assets and traditional fiat currencies.
Cheap on- and off-ramps are still a barrier to Web3 dapps adoption, as most users are funneled through crypto exchanges or dedicated applications with relatively high onboarding fees such as MoonPay, which charges 1% for bank transfers and 4 .5% for Visa cards.
URamp is Gnosis’s attempt to simplify the user experience of exchanging between fiat currency and crypto, through its partnership with licensed stablecoin issuer Monerium, which, separately from uRamp, currently charges no fees.
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uRamp runs on the Gnosis Chain and is compatible with any EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) chain and allows the conversion of ERC20 tokens directly to and from users’ external bank accounts.
Gnosis Chain is also fully Ethereum compatible and is part of Gnosis’s “broader mission to build a future where global payments are settled through a secure and open, community-owned infrastructure,” according to Stefan George, co-founder of Gnosis.
“It is another step aimed at rewiring and resetting the pipes of our existing Web3 payment space in a more cost-effective and efficient manner,” he said.
The uRamp product complements Gnosis Pay, which allows users to spend stablecoins directly from a linked Safe on Gnosis Chain using a Visa debit card. Several other attempts to offer similar services are in the works by established players like Consensys and Mastercard, and newcomers like Cross Finance and Beam.
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“I now spend most of my time at financial institutions – and future financial institutions [are] Web3 projects, showing that they can actually become the next generation bank,” Marcos Nunes, CEO of Gnosis Pay, told Blockworks.
Both Pay and uRamp will initially focus on the euro stablecoin EURe, issued by Monerium, which Gísli Kristjánsson, Monerium’s chief technology officer, said is targeting the “underserved EUR market.”
“Seamless conversion between traditional and digital assets is key to accelerating cryptocurrency adoption,” said Kristjánsson.
BootNode, Gnosis’s engineering partner, was responsible for the journey from the proof-of-concept phase to the final product.
Read more: Gnosis Visa debit card debuts in Europe, allowing users to buy with euro stablecoin
The uRamp platform avoids the trading fees charged by centralized exchanges and more expensive intermediaries, while providing Web3 users with an IBAN – the international bank account number commonly used outside the US.
LI.FI’s liquidity aggregation technology gives uRamp users access to liquidity for transactions across various blockchains, including Gnosis, Polygon and Ethereum.
Nunes compares Gnosis’s offering to the early days of Skype and voice-over-IP.
“They were able to offer services on top of the telcos that couldn’t change their back-end infrastructure,” Nunes said, adding: “Users will gently force the banks to optimize the back-end and [this] will accelerate the growth of Web3 providers.”
