Christoph Simmchen

Christoph Simmchen is a German capital markets and corporate lawyer who joined Gnosis GnosisGnosis is a blockchain project founded in 2015 in the Ethereum ecosystem. It began by developing decentralized prediction markets, later shifted to infrastructure, incubating the multisig wallet Safe, the trading protocol CoW Protocol and the blockchain Gnosis Chain, and operates the crypto payment card Gnosis Pay. It is governed by GnosisDAO, made up of GNO token holders, with Gnosis Ltd as its main development entity; its co-founders include Martin Köppelmann, Stefan George and Friederike Ernst.Open the full entry as an early employee in 2017 and later became a co-founder of the smart contract account protocol Safe; from 2022 to 2025 he was vice president of the council of the Safe Ecosystem Foundation Safe GlobalSafe (formerly Gnosis Safe) is a smart contract account and multi-signature wallet protocol on Ethereum and compatible blockchains. It began as an internal project at Gnosis, was spun off in 2022, and is stewarded by the Safe Ecosystem Foundation, a non-profit based in Zug, Switzerland, with SAFE token holders participating in governance through SafeDAO; its official wallet interface is Safe{Wallet}. As of the end of June 2026, more than 63 million Safe accounts had been created, holding about $27.2 billion in assets.Open the full entry.

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Key facts

2017A Lawyer Joins Gnosis

Christoph Simmchen trained as a capital markets and corporate lawyer and, after completing a PhD at the intersection of blockchain and law, joined the Ethereum project Gnosis in 2017 as one of its first employees. In his in-house legal role he worked toward legal certainty for the crypto industry, taking part in public policy working groups and serving as an expert witness to regulatory bodies.⁠[1][1][1]

2022The Safe Spin-Off and Vice President of the Foundation

On February 9, 2022, Simmchen, together with Lukas Schor, Richard Meissner Richard MeissnerRichard Meissner is a German software engineer, co-founder of the smart contract account protocol Safe and author of the Safe smart contracts in use today. He has served as Safe’s chief technology officer and now leads Safe Research, and since 2026 he has been a member of the council of the Safe Ecosystem Foundation.Open the full entry and Tobias Schubotz, put forward GIP-29 on the Gnosis forum, proposing to spin Gnosis Safe off from Gnosis Ltd and set up a Swiss foundation. On March 15 that year, the Safe Ecosystem Foundation was established in Zug, and he formed its first council with president Lukas Schor and member Stefan George Stefan GeorgeStefan George is a German blockchain developer and entrepreneur, co-founder and chief technology officer of the Ethereum project Gnosis. The multi-signature wallet he wrote to custody the proceeds of Gnosis’s 2017 token sale later evolved into Safe, and since 2022 he has served on the council of the Safe Ecosystem Foundation.Open the full entry, serving as vice president with joint signing authority alongside the president.⁠[2][2][3][3][3]

In July 2022, when Safe announced its rebrand and a $100 million funding round, Simmchen, as co-founder, said Safe is at heart infrastructure agnostic to user group and use case and would draw on its partners to cover areas including DAOs, decentralized finance, NFTs and institutional offerings. At Safe he focused mainly on fundraising and investor relations.⁠[4][4][4][1]

2025Leaving the Council after the Bybit Incident

When the Bybit theft occurred in February 2025, Simmchen was still a member of the Safe foundation’s council. The Swiss commercial register published his departure from the council and the cancellation of his signing authority on September 1, 2025. Safe investor Greenfield Capital Greenfield CapitalGreenfield Capital (formerly Greenfield One) is a crypto investment firm headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, founded in 2018 by Sebastian Blum and Jascha Samadi; its early investments include Celo, NEAR and 1inch. It has invested in Safe since 2022, and in October 2026 it filed a supervisory complaint with the Swiss Federal Supervisory Authority for Foundations over the governance of the Safe Ecosystem Foundation.Open the full entry stated in an October 2026 open letter that he left the board in the months after the attack and later left his role with Safe altogether; the letter also asserts that after the Bybit incident Gnosis’s two co-founders forced Safe’s co-founders, including the then council members, to give up a large amount of SAFE, without identifying its sources. As of October 14, 2026, no public statement on this from Simmchen had been seen.⁠[5][3][3][5][5][5]

Related Organizations, Websites, and Public Accounts

X: Public account: https://x.com/CSimmchen (opens in a new window)⁠[6]