Gnosis Safe Rebrands as Safe, Raises $100M

  • Asset Management
  • 14.07.2022 09:50 am

Safe (previously known as Gnosis Safe), a leading digital asset management platform, today announces it has raised $100 million led by 1kx.

Initially developed as an internal tool, Gnosis Safe has organically become a critical infrastructure for web3 as a means to securely manage digital assets.

Following a successful community vote to spin off from Gnosis, the Gnosis Safe project is rebranding to Safe and announcing a strategic funding round of $100 million led by 1kx. The round is also joined by Tiger Global, A&T Capital, Blockchain Capital, Digital Currency Group, Greenfield One, Rockaway Blockchain Fund, ParaFi, Lightspeed, Polymorphic Capital, Superscrypt and 50 other strategic partners and industry experts (see below). The funding is raised for the Safe Ecosystem Foundation, a non-profit organization protecting strategic assets and contributing to the further development of Safe.

The funding round is an important milestone for the development of Safe as a programmable ownership platform, enabling secure management of digital assets, data and identity across DAOs, and retail and institutional users. The funding and strategic alliances will enable Safe to grow an ecosystem of applications and tools on top of its smart contract account protocol.

Unlocking ownership for everyone in web3

Safe gained wide adoption for its self-custody solution used to process over 600,000 transactions and secure digital assets exceeding $40 billion. Additionally, many highly valued NFTs, including 13% of all Cryptopunks, are currently secured using Safe.

Safe has built infrastructure that serves some of the biggest DAO treasuries (1inch, BitDAO), financial institutions (Bitfinex, GSR) and enterprises (Shopify, AB group). Also, individuals such as Vitalik Buterin and Punk6529 (participating in the round as an angel) use Safe to secure their most valuable personal digital assets.

Making web3 accounts smart

Traditional web3 accounts are controlled by a single private key, often derived from a 24-word secret phrase. As long as a user owns this private key, they control the account. However, these private keys regularly get lost or compromised, resulting in the complete loss of the assets associated with the account.

Safe, on the other hand, uses smart contracts accounts that can be individually configured to suit the custody needs of different user groups:

Authentications using multiple private keys (multi-sig) or community-control (DAOs)
Recovery and inheritance mechanisms
Improved transaction experience (transaction batching, gas abstraction)
Transaction checks and hybrid-custody
Spending limits and automation

It’s not a product - it’s an ecosystem

Safe aims to foster a vibrant ecosystem of applications and wallets leveraging Safe smart contract accounts. This will be achieved through grants, ecosystem investments, as well as providing developer tools and infrastructure.

Already today, the Safe ecosystem consists of many teams building on top of Safe. These projects provide specialized solutions across savings (Streams, Linen Wallet), treasury management (Coinshift, Parcel), DAO tooling (Utopia Labs, Orca Protocol), NFTs (Prysm, Castle) and wallets (Rabby, Metamask Institutional).

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