Richard Meissner

On February 9, 2022, Richard Meissner, together with Lukas Schor, Christoph SimmchenChristoph SimmchenChristoph Simmchen is a German capital markets and corporate lawyer who joined Gnosis 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.Open the full entry and Tobias Schubotz, put forward GIP-29 on the Gnosis forum, proposing to spin Gnosis Safe off from Gnosis LtdGnosisGnosis 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, form SafeDAO, set up a Swiss foundation and issue the SAFE token. After the community voted in favor, Gnosis Safe was renamed Safe in July of that year and completed a $100 million funding round.⁠[1][1][1][2]

On November 13, 2024, Meissner, as Safe’s chief technology officer, co-hosted an AMA with Rhinestone co-founder Kurt Larsen at the account abstraction community hub at the Devcon conference, discussing EIP-7702 and account abstraction.⁠[3][3][3][3]

In June 2025, a small group of Safe core contributors formed the R&D team Safe Research, pledging to do applied research on self-custodial accounts and wallets for Ethereum around three pillars, security, censorship resistance and privacy, and to release all of its work openly. Meissner leads the initiative; its website, safe.dev, publishes research on topics including a policy engine, the economics of gas abstraction and encrypted multisig transactions.⁠[4][4][4][5][6]

On March 9, 2026, the Swiss commercial register published Richard Meissner’s registration as a member of the council of the Safe Ecosystem Foundation, with joint signing authority, bringing the council back to three members alongside Lukas Schor and Stefan GeorgeStefan 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. The foundation describes him as a co-founder of Safe, the author of the Safe smart contracts in use today and the most experienced maintainer of the core codebase, with expertise in contracts, protocol design and infrastructure.⁠[7][7][5][5][5][5]

In April 2026, Safe launched its transaction security network Safenet in beta. Meissner said the industry had spent years merely building better warnings, while attackers exploited the gap between what users sign and what they intend; Safenet has every transaction checked against defined security rules before execution by a network no single party controls, moving transaction security into the execution path itself, where it can be enforced on-chain and audited publicly.⁠[8][8][8][8]

In October 2026, Safe investor Greenfield CapitalGreenfield 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 open letter accompanying its complaint to the Swiss supervisory authority about the Safe foundation’s governance that the foundation’s deed requires at least three board members but that it had only two between September 2025 and April 2026, and that instead of bringing in a truly independent member the board appointed Meissner. The letter says that, like the other co-founders, he is a former Gnosis employee and was one of two co-shareholders and co-managing directors of Core Contributors GmbH, which until October 2025 operated the most widely used Safe{Wallet} instance and developed and maintained the core protocol on behalf of the foundation, and that within the company he was the key technical lead responsible for backend and DevOps, the area in which the Bybit attack originated. Greenfield said it did not question his technical ability but considered that his history and ongoing ties made him unsuitable for the board. As of October 14, 2026, no public response from Meissner had been seen.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9][9]

Safe Ecosystem Foundation: Official website: https://safefoundation.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

Safe Research: Official website: https://www.safe.dev/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

X: Public account: https://x.com/rimeissner (opens in a new window)⁠[10]