Entretien avec le Dr Ernst Friederike, cofondateur de Gnosis : histoires et sagesse sur la voie de l'entrepreneuriat
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Entretien avec le Dr Ernst Friederike, cofondateur de Gnosis : histoires et sagesse sur la voie de l'entrepreneuriat
Dr. Frederike a partagé son passage du monde académique à la création d'une entreprise dans la sphère cryptographique, ainsi que certaines de ses réflexions sur le développement actuel des infrastructures cryptographiques.
Dédié à des analyses Web3 approfondiesInterview : Sunny, TechFlow
Guest : Dr. Ernst Friederike, Co-founder of Gnosis
"We don't envision a solitary island building skyscrapers, but an archipelago made up of multiple islands—some may be low-rise buildings, others high-rises—all interconnected and trustworthy."
-- Dr. Ernst Friederike, Co-founder of Gnosis
Two weeks ago, Gnosis began distributing crypto savings cards to early users (see image below). This marks Europe’s first large-scale compliant payment application launch, following the recent wave of similar offerings in Asia and America (see previous TechFlow article). Behind this payment product is Gnosis. If you still don’t know what Gnosis is, perhaps it's time to do some research.
Beyond the crypto savings card, Gnosis SAFE, under the Gnosis umbrella, is currently the world’s largest account abstraction wallet, with 6 million accounts, 30 million total transactions, and $7.3 billion in total value locked. These figures far surpass competing products like Starknet and zkSync. Such user statistics reflect the team’s long-term dedication and deep product development. Gnosis’ CEO and CTO were respectively the second and third employees at ConsenSys, and the project was originally incubated within ConsenSys. Dr. Ernst Friederike of Gnosis is also one of the most fascinating figures in Western crypto circles.
She, Dr. Ernst Friederike (hereinafter referred to as Dr. Friederike), is also a co-founder of Gnosis. If you follow crypto podcasts, you’ll likely recognize Dr. Friederike as one of the hosts of the renowned English-language podcast Epicenter, alongside Sunny Aggarwal, founder of DeFi protocol Osmosis. Her background is remarkably diverse—a physicist, professor, podcaster, woman in crypto, and co-founder of one of the space’s largest projects.
In the following interview, Dr. Friederike shares her journey from academia to crypto entrepreneurship, along with insights into the evolution of today’s crypto infrastructure. From her candid reflections, we can clearly see how multiple identity roles shape a successful female crypto founder.
Social media post of the Gnosis crypto savings card (Source: Official Twitter)
Journey of Transformation: From Physicist to Co-founder of Gnosis
TechFlow: Given your academic background and entrepreneurial experience, I’m curious—what skills or experiences from your path have been most transferable or valuable during Gnosis’ development? Additionally, could you elaborate on how your training and expertise as a physicist have influenced your approach to problem-solving in blockchain technology and entrepreneurship?
Dr. Friederike:
Since childhood, I've always enjoyed inventing things, identifying problems, and making systems work. Becoming a physicist was a natural extension of that interest. I loved being a physicist—formulating hypotheses, reading others’ papers, designing my own experiments, building them, bringing home massive datasets, analyzing data, doing statistics. I know it sounds nerdy, but for me, it was always incredibly fun and fulfilling.
Accordingly, I spent a long time in university—I completed my undergraduate and graduate studies, then earned a PhD, followed by several postdoctoral research positions. Eventually, I secured a professorship at a European accelerator in Hamburg, Germany. Previously, I worked at SLAC at Stanford—not the messaging app "Slack," but the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
There were several things about academia that didn’t sit well with me. I found it quite restrictive, with many rules to follow. Fundamentally, the incentive to make discoveries for the benefit of humanity has always been central to science for me, but these two aspects didn’t align well.
I mean, some people discover things purely for the joy of exploration, and I fully understand that. But others want to see their discoveries applied in ways that benefit humanity. Personally, I found my motivation leaning more toward application.
In academia, there's a tendency to inflate publication counts by fragmenting research results across multiple papers rather than consolidating them into comprehensive works. I never liked that practice. However, I deeply valued the freedom academia offered. Fundamentally, you express interest, write a proposal, secure funding, and conduct research—you aren’t forced to pursue anything beyond your chosen path. While academia suited me well, I couldn’t imagine spending the next 40 years in that environment.
To put it bluntly, talent distribution in physics is extremely uneven. Some individuals are orders of magnitude more capable than I am—even hundreds of times better. While I consider myself a competent mathematician and qualified physicist, I’ve always maintained a broad skill set. I’ve always been a generalist.
I was fortunate to meet many brilliant physicists at Columbia University and Stanford. In my earlier career, while pursuing my PhD, I realized I would never become an outstanding physicist like them.
In fact, being a generalist suits me better than being an entrepreneur.
Meanwhile, Gnosis co-founders Martin Köppelmann and Stefan George, whom I’ve known for a long time, and I frequently discussed crypto-related topics. From a technical perspective, it was truly fascinating—all physicists can code, and their backgrounds are technical, mostly computer engineers. We constantly talked about this field, its synergies, and what could be built upon it.
Later, Martin met Joe Lubin (co-founder of Ethereum) at a Bitcoin meetup in New York. Joe said what they were building on Bitcoin was interesting, but they should build on Ethereum instead. Martin asked which was easier—but at that time, Ethereum hadn’t launched anything yet. Joe shared Ethereum’s whitepaper with him, and after studying it, we found it incredibly compelling.
Afterward, Martin and Stefan joined Joe as the 2nd and 3rd employees at ConsenSys. Due to pregnancy, I had the opportunity to pause my academic work, and together we founded Gnosis as an independent company outside ConsenSys—this was the beginning. I gave myself a chance to explore whether this was what I wanted to do, or if I should return to academia.
Now I’m still at Gnosis. Clearly, this path has worked out well for me.
Gnosis: Building Infrastructure from Ethereum’s First Prediction Market Application
TechFlow: Could you elaborate on Gnosis’ evolution from its initial focus on prediction markets to broader ecosystem development, including projects like Safe Wallet and Cow Swap?
Dr. Friederike:
Initially, the idea behind Gnosis was to create a prediction market platform—a system enabling information to be traded, aiming to combat misinformation, what we now call fake news. At the time, this term wasn’t common, but that was the original vision. As early adopters—and actually the first application deployed on Ethereum—we had to build substantial infrastructure ourselves. We pivoted to focus on ecosystem infrastructure, which over several years led to Safe Wallet, Cow Swap, and Zodiac.
As founders, we’ve always considered how to achieve technical excellence while empowering people with autonomy to accomplish things independently. We remain committed to fairness. That’s why we built an MEV-resistant DEX in Cow Swap and a self-custodial wallet. Recognizing the importance of self-custody should be a higher priority because it reduces reliance on others. Theoretically, individuals should be able to choose to delegate custody to someone else and trust their decisions, but it shouldn’t be mandatory.
This philosophy has consistently guided our work—that’s how we spun off several ventures, retaining partial ownership via Gnosis DAO. Operationally, we maintain connections with all teams, but execution-wise, it’s no longer our responsibility—and everything has progressed smoothly.
TechFlow: It's well known that you’re skeptical about scaling via Layer 2. Could you explain why you believe L2s have limitations and other solutions are needed?
Dr. Friederike:
A few years ago, we asked ourselves: “What does the current ecosystem truly need?” We were dissatisfied with the direction of scalability discussions. Essentially, easier scaling primarily relies on Layer 2, with Layer 3 seen merely as a fallback when L2 becomes congested or too expensive. From an engineering standpoint, this unnecessarily limits scalability.
Looking back, there was once a vision to scale Ethereum via smart contracts—envisioning 64 private execution environments performing 1,028 different executions, connected in a trustless manner to collectively form Ethereum. Yet, this vision was delayed by five to ten years, with focus shifting to L2s to simplify Ethereum usage.
The Cancun upgrade embodies this approach, making data storage and L2 availability cheaper and easier.
We find the original vision of interconnected, trustless shards highly appealing. While there’s little debate about the necessity of Layer 2 and beyond, we believe we need more credible, interconnected chains with trusted neutrality and high decentralization.
We envision not a solitary island building skyscrapers, but an archipelago of multiple islands—some low-rise, others high-rise—all interconnected and trustworthy. The only trade-off is losing synchronicity; however, this asynchrony is an inherent feature of such interconnected systems.
TechFlow: How does the decision to merge with the X Dai chain align with Gnosis’ vision for scalability and decentralization in the blockchain ecosystem?
Dr. Friederike:
For us, this wasn’t an unacceptable condition. Instead, we chose to merge with a prominent Ethereum sidechain—one of the earliest, known as the X Dai chain. This chain was used for iconic projects like the Burner Wallet.
Initially, X Dai was highly centralized, operating on a Proof-of-Authority consensus with only 20 entities authorized to produce blocks. To address this, we followed a path similar to Ethereum’s transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. We launched a beacon chain and focused on decentralizing the network as much as possible, attracting home validators—individuals verifying transactions from home using simple devices. This significantly increased validator numbers, growing from 100,000 to 170,000, roughly 20% of Ethereum’s total validators.
While our chain may not be as decentralized as Ethereum, it remains highly decentralized and functions as an Ethereum layer-2 network. Moreover, we use ZK technology to build a trustless bridge to Ethereum, ensuring interoperability and making Gnosis Chain compatible with Ethereum smart contracts.
Creating an On-chain Payment Network Using Gnosis Infrastructure
TechFlow: What’s next for Gnosis? You’ve launched the Gnosis crypto savings card for cryptocurrency users. Is decentralized payments the next goal?
Dr. Friederike:
Once we’ve built such infrastructure, we consider what comes next. We focus on current infrastructure development. We explored various use cases that could genuinely impact people. In the past, using Web3 products was extremely challenging. Although tools now exist to simplify this, it’s still difficult for many. But we believe the right mindset can make it easier. We asked: where can we add the most value? What’s the lowest-hanging fruit? That led us to payments.
In crypto, we often talk about peer-to-peer cash transactions, but in reality, ordinary people mainly use payment services like Venmo, WeChat, or PayPal. While the payment use case is relatively simple compared to others, we recognize placing it on a decentralized layer could greatly benefit most people. In Northern Hemisphere regions, payments usually aren’t a bottleneck, as most have access to low-cost, reliable options. However, in high-inflation countries like Argentina, Brazil, or Turkey, people seek alternatives—like holding USD. This seems disconnected from the Web3 world, where holding stablecoins requires almost no effort. We believe opening these options and bridging Web3 with traditional payment systems is crucial.
For example, in Europe, we’re familiar with IBANs. In principle, we could offer wallets with IBANs, allowing users to receive funds directly into their wallet and conduct separate transactions within it. All infrastructure is ready—we just need to build a new on-chain bank offering products traditional banks can’t. This includes international remittances at dramatically lower costs compared to traditional methods like Wise. Similarly, “accredited investor” rules act as gatekeepers, preventing certain individuals from investing in specific instruments regardless of their knowledge. Our goal is to democratize banking services, providing dollar accounts for the unbanked.
We’ve partnered with Visa, enabling users to hold funds in their own wallets and pay anywhere Visa is accepted—over 100 million merchants globally. However, to make this accessible to ordinary users, we must drastically improve user experience. Current complexities, like managing private keys, aren’t suitable for the next hundred million users. With current abstraction and technical tools, we can greatly enhance UX.
In summary, we’re currently building infrastructure for decentralized payment networks, bridges connecting to traditional payment systems, and wallets enabling access to these services—wallets suitable for anyone accustomed to services like Wise, Revolut, N26, or Monzo.
TechFlow: How will Gnosis’ payment solution overcome crypto adoption barriers?
Dr. Friederike:
That’s the issue—we must build it so these barriers disappear.
Fundamentally, tools like Monerium allow you to assign an IBAN to a wallet, simplifying the process. You can send euros from your Wise, Revolut, or any other account to an IBAN, and it appears directly in your wallet. You don’t need to enter a centralized exchange or relinquish custody of your assets.
I think saying “people should use crypto” is somewhat inaccurate. I believe people shouldn’t have to use crypto or be required to understand how to use it. For me, it’s simply better technology than what we currently have. Just as you wouldn’t want people to understand TCP/IP just to browse the internet, you shouldn’t expect them to understand cryptography—or even know it’s crypto.
You just need to build a product using this cryptographic technology. Because it uses this tech, it can outperform equivalent Web2 products. In my view, leveraging account abstraction principles, registration could be done via email or phone number. Each time you log into your wallet, passive verification via biometrics could be added; you shouldn’t have to remember passwords or private keys. It should be optional—if you choose, you can look up your laptop password, but no one should be forced to.
Ultimately, making this technology easy to use is something our ecosystem must achieve. Sometimes we almost take pride in how hard it is to use, thinking we’re special because we can. I think that’s wrong—it means we need to improve user experience.
I believe features like easy onboarding, social recovery, institutional recovery, and GAS abstraction should become standard in Web3 apps. Whenever you surf the internet, you generate costs; if you search Google or use Google Cloud, there’s real cost involved.
Of course, searching “what to do in London this weekend” might be a service you receive, but Google will never bill you “you generated 3 cents in cost for us, please pay.” Their business model is ad-based—they sell ads, and when you search “things to do in Hong Kong this weekend,” they sell ad space to those actually offering services. They pay for your attention. Thus, Web2 services effectively abstract their business model from the customer.
I think Web3 should follow the same path. You shouldn’t say: “Okay, I’ll pay 3 cents to send this transaction.” If commercially it makes sense—because it provides you some service and you bear the cost—then it should be included in that service, which is exactly what gas abstraction enables. They say we cover your gas costs and compensate elsewhere. Then, there are features batching transactions together.
When you use Web3 products now, it’s “approve this, now transact, now re-approve.” We can’t expose regular users to this workflow. Integrating these functions seamlessly—to achieve the smooth experience we get from mobile apps and today’s internet—is our goal.
We don’t need to convince people to use crypto, just as we don’t need to convince them HTTPS is better than HTTP. App developers need to use better tech, but in a way that hides the backend technological leap. It should simply feel better—that’s where we must get to.
Basically, if you look at today’s ecosystem, a large portion is speculative. That’s fine—people should be allowed to speculate on anything. But as an ecosystem, I think we should aim higher.
We can’t just say we’re meme coins. I believe crypto’s enduring promise has always been creating a better internet and better ways for society to function. We must make that real. I think this is what frustrates those who’ve worked in this space for a while. In the early days, cypherpunks believed you should use any crypto tech you want, have peer-to-peer cash, etc. I think that ideal was overshadowed by “crypto bros” who thought “we came early, we deserve rewards.” But the real ideal is “we can build something better than what we have now.” I believe this spirit must persist for crypto to endure long-term.
Because if the “early mover” narrative no longer works, and everyone interested has already joined, then no one brings new ideas. Delivering real utility is absolutely essential—that’s what we must do.
TechFlow: Do you think supply-driven (builder-driven) approaches are currently more important than demand-driven ones in building the internet of value? Because we don’t have many altruists or visionary leaders like Jeff Bezos, nor effective accelerationism. Well, I understand this skewed distribution. Do you think pushing industry progress from the supply side is more critical?
Dr. Friederike:
I think a big part comes down to funding. There are many idealists, but very few who are both idealistic and skilled at building businesses. It’s about sticking to your ideas, embracing them, and monetizing them. That’s how you get others to invest in you; otherwise, if you’re not turning it into a business, they’re just donating. People with ideas who are also great entrepreneurs are rare.
Part Four: Advice for Young People
TechFlow: I think your journey is a great example. Transitioning from academia to entrepreneurship, you gave yourself a full year—showing remarkable patience and calmness in taking risks. I find that deeply admirable. What qualities do you think an idealist—someone who can truly get things done—needs to become a great entrepreneur?
Dr. Friederike:
I think that’s a great question—I actually need to reflect on it more. One issue is that saying “I want to make money” carries shame, especially in left-liberal circles where it’s frowned upon. But I think there’s nothing wrong with that—it needs to change. You can be thoughtful and want to make money.
I think it’s a cultural issue—I’m not entirely sure. And I wonder how it differs across countries, because I’ve visited China, Taiwan, Hong Kong many times. I think it’s quite different. What about London versus Hong Kong? Do you see differences?
TechFlow: For me, I really like London. There’s an atmosphere—you can think freely, actually meet many interesting people striving to realize their ideas. Compared to the US, London is a bit conservative. People care about actual problems, not just opportunities. But London has potential—an untapped potential somewhere in the UK. In Hong Kong, capital is definitely more abundant, but people lack true freedom to think. You need an environment with less peer pressure and greater freedom—where you can think freely, speak openly, with adequate capital. That’s what we see in the US. But in Asia, people’s desire for money is very strong. I think we operate in survival mode, not in a mindset of changing the world.
Dr. Friederike:
Perhaps the universal principle at play is the philosophy of abundance—“there’s enough, you have enough.” With sufficient resources, you have enough, no need to fight for survival. Fundamentally, it’s not zero-sum; giving something to others doesn’t necessarily mean you have less. Maybe that’s the post-scarcity philosophy. Perhaps there’s a connection here.
TechFlow: I really envy European founders—they truly have free thinking… it’s wonderful. I attended the Berlin DeSci conference. It felt like university, attending lectures—very cyberpunk, very idealistic, actually filling yourself with blood to create things. As for me, I’m still considering whether to combine my biology background with blockchain to do something interesting.
Dr. Friederike:
I think it’s a great field, especially synthetic biology, longevity research, what VitaDAO is doing, and the entire open science movement. I find it very powerful and exciting.
Also, I think something often underestimated—and I didn’t appreciate enough when we started—is having people you collaborate with well, where you can share wild ideas without diminishing each other. It’s a bit like finding the right life partner. I don’t think you consider that at the time. But over the years, I’ve seen many founders split—some breakups were very ugly. I didn’t cherish this enough back then, but I really enjoy working with Martin and Stefan because we share the same mindset.
More Q&A About Dr. Friederike
TechFlow: Were you a crypto-punk during university?
Dr. Friederike:
Back in school, I read a book by Simon Singh about cryptography. I thought it was cool—the coolest thing. What you can do with math is just insane. That’s magic. I was probably too young to be among the original cypherpunks, but the ideals are definitely similar—I think absolutely yes.
TechFlow: You know languages, math, physics. What specifically in cryptography opened your eyes? What made you choose this field over physics?
Dr. Friederike:
For me, it was the idea: you can coordinate with others in a trustless way, without a central agent deciding who’s right or wrong. To me, that opened doors to many new technologies. I mean, cryptography is a gift that keeps giving. The zero-knowledge proofs we have today are magical, and fully homomorphic encryption will be even better—proving you are someone or your funds are legitimate without revealing where they came from.
I think this is very important. Looking at how tech evolved, initially the internet was highly collaborative, with little business model built around it. But now, if you see how internet companies make money, it’s data. We’ve grown accustomed to our data being mined and used, powerless to stop it. I don’t think it should be this way. If people want to use crypto to protect themselves, it should be easy. Obviously, if you want, you can sell your data. You can sell your blood, if you wish.
But I think it should be a conscious choice, not abstracted away from you—saying: “Look, I want sovereignty over my data, over my communications. I don’t want Google reading my emails and showing me ads based on what I wrote to friends.” I think this has become normal—even bank account data. Banks give anonymized access to data mining firms to analyze consumer behavior. They won’t know it’s you, but they know a 22–30-year-old in London shopped at Pop Shop and Sephora, then analyze it. I think this shouldn’t exist.
I think people should know more about this. If they find it concerning, they should be protected—because you can easily influence people, as seen in the entire Cambridge Analytica scandal. If you micro-target people enough, everyone has buttons to press.
In a world where our data is fair game—because it’s unprotected and unencrypted—we can actually build a better internet. We can absolutely use this to build a better internet and a better world for ourselves.
I know it sounds a bit crazy, but I think it’s absolutely true.
Further Reading: Link
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