Gnosis Launches Circles — A New Era of Decentralized Currency, Powered by CoW Protocol

Gnosis has announced the launch of Circles - a radically new approach to decentralized money. Circles is an attempt to reimagine money from the ground up: no central issuer, no fixed supply, no allegiance to any state or institution.

At the core of Circles is a simple but powerful idea: every user is their own central bank. New currency is created continuously by individuals. Value circulates through social trust - not capital concentration. It's money as a social system, not a financial product.

And making that system work in the real world? That's where CoW Protocol comes in.

Circles depends on reliable, permissionless trade execution without exposing users to value extraction or manipulation. CoW Protocol provides the infrastructure to settle trades fairly, efficiently, and securely, ensuring Circles users can transact with confidence in a truly decentralized environment.

What is Circles?

At its core, Circles introduces a currency system where every participant issues their own money, on equal terms. No pre-mines. No whales. No central banks. Just individuals creating and transacting with their own tokens-CRC (Circles) - backed by trust, not collateral.

The system is built on two key ingredients:

• Individual issuance: Every user continuously generates a small amount of CRC, by design. It's predictable, egalitarian, and immune to early-mover advantages.

• Social trust: Value flows through trust connections. You can only spend someone's CRC if they (or someone who trusts them) trusts you. It's like a peer-to-peer central bank network - where the "central" part is completely missing.

The result is a network-native form of money that grows with its users. It's unowned, unaligned, and designed for a multipolar world where no single power dictates the rules of exchange.

Unlike traditional currencies - or even many crypto assets - Circles isn't trying to be scarce or deflationary. It's designed to be inclusive by default, with issuance, supply, and access directly tied to participation, not prior wealth.

Thanks to CoW Protocol's infrastructure, CRC can now move securely across the network without value leakage, frontrunning, or middlemen.

The Problem Circles Solves

Money, as we know it, comes with baggage. Whether it's fiat currencies backed by states or crypto assets dominated by early adopters, the system tends to reward proximity to power: political, financial, or technological.

Circles was created to break that cycle.National currencies, like the US dollar, serve their issuing countries - not the world. If you're outside that sphere of influence, you're at the mercy of someone else's economic decisions.

Bitcoin, for all its innovation, isn't immune either. Its fixed supply has led to extreme wealth concentration - over 94% of the supply is held by less than 3% of users. It's not designed to grow with new participants. It's designed to reward the first ones through the door.

Circles does it differently.

• Issuance is distributed, continuously, to every user. No one starts with an edge.

• Supply adapts to participation. More people? More money.

• Value is earned through trust, not through mining rigs, financial engineering, or political connections.

There's also a built-in demurrage mechanism: money gradually loses value if it just sits there. That's not a bug; it's a feature. It nudges the system toward circulation, not accumulation. In a Circles economy, the healthiest wallet isn't the biggest, it's the one that's being used.

And unlike most systems where you rely on central banks or code to protect against manipulation, Circles relies on something more human: your social graph. Trust becomes the gatekeeper. Not perfect, but harder to game than most alternatives.

CoW Protocol's Role: More Than Infrastructure

At its core, Circles relies on users being able to trade their CRCs, to turn personal trust networks into real economic coordination. That means safe, efficient, and manipulation-resistant transactions are non-negotiable. And CoW Protocol delivers exactly that.

Here's what CoW Protocol makes possible for Circles:

• Trustless Trade Execution: Every user issues their own CRC. Trading between different CRCs-or between individual and Group-CRC-requires a neutral, reliable settlement layer. CoW Protocol handles this with batch auctions that prevent frontrunning and maximize fairness.

• MEV Protection by Design: Without protection, value leaks from users to arbitrage bots. Circles' commitment to fair distribution would fall apart in a hostile mempool. CoW Protocol's design protects users from MEV extraction, maintaining the economic integrity Circles is built on.

• Permissionless, Efficient, and Decentralized: No whitelists. No gatekeepers. Just a protocol that lets anyone connect and transact, no matter where-or who-they are. Exactly in line with Circles' vision of global accessibility.

The result? Circles users can focus on trust and participation, knowing that the trading layer they rely on is secure, neutral, and built to align with their values.

CoW Protocol didn't just provide the rails-it helped shape the terrain. When you're trying to redesign money from the ground up, you need infrastructure that doesn't quietly re-centralize control behind the scenes. CoW Protocol was the right fit because it stays out of the way-but still does the heavy lifting.

Why CoW Protocol?

Circles didn't just need infrastructure-it needed infrastructure it could trust.

Launching a new currency system, especially one this radical, comes with serious requirements: neutrality, security, scale, and a rock-solid commitment to user protection. That's why Circles chose CoW Protocol.

Because CoW doesn't just offer trade execution-it offers execution without compromise. It's what happens when you design for fairness from the start. MEV protection isn't a bolt-on; it's built in. Trustlessness isn't marketing-it's the baseline.

And that's exactly why more projects building for the long haul-not just the next hype cycle-are choosing CoW Protocol. If you're designing mechanisms for real coordination, real value exchange, and real users, you need infrastructure that won't quietly undermine your goals.

Circles is bold. It's ambitious. And it's now live. CoW Protocol helped make that possible-not with fanfare, but with fundamentals.

If you're building something big, something that needs to work when the market isn't watching, you go where the infrastructure matches your ambition.

You go to CoW Protocol.

Mooo.

Come talk to us.