Christoph Simmchen

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]

On February 9, 2022, Simmchen, together with Lukas Schor, Richard Meissner 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, 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]

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 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]

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