Safe Global

Safe traces its origins to a multi-signature wallet that Gnosis wrote to self-custody the proceeds of its 2017 token sale. As no mature solution existed at the time, Gnosis co-founder 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 wrote his own multi-signature wallet code, which was later open-sourced as the Gnosis Multi-signature Wallet; as many projects followed with token sales of their own, it became the de facto standard for multisigs, securing more than $1 billion in assets within a few years.⁠[1][1][1]

In 2018, Gnosis launched Gnosis Safe, a new general-purpose smart account that used a proxy-singleton architecture to save gas, introduced a modular design for adding features, and underwent more than six months of formal verification. A retail-oriented Gnosis Safe mobile wallet supported seedless onboarding, batched transactions and paying gas fees in ERC-20 tokens, but was discontinued because of minimal adoption, as there were not yet retail users on Ethereum.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

The team then introduced a web application for teams, “Gnosis Safe for teams” (later simply Gnosis Safe), which co-founder Lukas Schor presented at Devcon in Osaka in 2019. The product found product-market fit within a few months, the exchange Bitfinex used it for cold storage of customer assets, and more than $1 billion in assets moved into Safe smart accounts within less than a year.⁠[1][1][1][1]

From 2020, helped by its modular architecture and tools such as SafeSnap, Gnosis Safe became the main vehicle for DAO treasuries; market makers, venture firms, high-net-worth individuals and NFT collectives followed, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin moved the majority of his ETH into Gnosis Safe that year. The product subsequently expanded to multiple blockchains and introduced “Safe Apps” for using Ethereum applications inside the wallet.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

On February 9, 2022, Lukas Schor, Richard MeissnerRichard 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, 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 the Gnosis Safe project 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, as had been done with CowSwap, to set up an independent SafeDAO and a Swiss foundation to hold off-chain assets such as intellectual property, code repositories and strategic investments, and to issue the SAFE governance token with a fixed supply of 1 billion. The proposal said that Gnosis Safe then held $100 billion worth of assets on Ethereum mainnet alone.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

The foundation was established in Zug on March 15, 2022 as Safe Ökosystem Stiftung (Safe Ecosystem Foundation), and its commercial register entry was published the same month. Its first council consisted of Lukas Schor (president), Christoph Simmchen (vice president) and Stefan George (member), with Wadsack Zug AG as auditor.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

After the GnosisDAO community voted for the spin-off, Gnosis Safe was renamed Safe on July 12, 2022 and announced a $100 million strategic funding round led by 1kx, joined by more than 60 firms and individuals including Tiger Global, A&T Capital, Blockchain Capital, Digital Currency GroupDigital Currency GroupDigital Currency Group (DCG) is a crypto asset investment and holding company headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, founded by Barry Silbert in 2015. It invests in blockchain startups with permanent capital and owns subsidiaries including the digital asset manager Grayscale. In 2022, its crypto lender Genesis suffered losses after major client Three Arrows Capital defaulted and filed for bankruptcy the following year, leaving DCG and Silbert facing a lawsuit by the New York Attorney General, an SEC penalty, and multiple civil suits.Open the full entry and Greenfield OneGreenfield 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, with the funds going to the Safe Ecosystem Foundation. At the time Safe had processed more than 600,000 transactions and secured more than $40 billion in digital assets, and 13% of all CryptoPunks were held in Safes.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

In September 2022, SafeDAO and the SAFE token launched, and about 43,000 eligible Safe users and previously appointed Guardians could claim tokens until December 27, 2022. Initial voting power was split as follows: 40+ core contributors 35.7%, 60+ backers 28.6%, 43,000+ users 17.9%, GnosisDAO 8.9% and 140+ ecosystem Guardians 8.9%, with no single known entity or person holding more than 10% of the initial voting power. SAFE was non-transferable at the outset, with the community to decide whether to enable transfers.⁠[5][5][5][5]

In 2023, Safe launched the Safe{Core} developer suite, and the number of Safe smart accounts created passed 1 million; that year the community ratified the SafeDAO Constitution (SEP-4) and the foundation’s organizational regulations, and a grants program was launched.⁠[1][1][6]

In March 2024, Safe announced that more than $100 billion in digital assets were secured in its smart accounts and that active accounts exceeded 7 million, and appointed former Solaris managing director Julian Grigo to lead its institutions and fintech business.⁠[7][7][7]

After milestone proposals on a constitution, a governance framework, a resource allocation framework and token utility had been ratified, a proposal was submitted in March 2024 to unpause the SAFE contract and enable transfers; SafeDAO approved SEP-22 through on-chain governance that year, making SAFE freely transferable. SAFE has a supply of 1 billion tokens, exists only on Ethereum mainnet and vests over up to eight years, with the SafeDAO and GnosisDAO treasuries together allocated 55%.⁠[8][8][6][9][10][10][10][10]

On or about February 21, 2025, about $1.5 billion in virtual assets was stolen from the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit, and on February 26 the US Federal Bureau of Investigation attributed the theft to North Korea (activity the FBI calls “TraderTraitor”). Forensic findings published by the Safe{Wallet} team said the attackers used a compromised Safe{Wallet} developer machine to push a disguised malicious transaction proposal to the Safe used by Bybit; the review by external security researchers found no vulnerabilities in the Safe smart contracts or in the source code of the frontend and services. Safe{Wallet} subsequently restored service on Ethereum mainnet in phases after rebuilding all infrastructure and rotating all credentials.⁠[11][11][12][12][12][12]

The Safe Ecosystem Foundation said that it is not involved in operating Safe{Wallet} but had joined the crisis response task force set up by the stakeholders involved.⁠[12][12]

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) criticized Safe’s incident update on X for “using vague language to brush over the issues,” asking how the developer machine was compromised, why a developer machine had access to an account operated by Bybit, how multiple signers were fooled at the Ledger verification step, and what lessons other multisig wallet providers and users should draw.⁠[13][13][13][13][13]

Gnosis co-founder Martin KöppelmannMartin KöppelmannMartin Köppelmann is a co-founder of the Ethereum project Gnosis and chief executive officer of Gnosis Ltd. He and Stefan George first developed a Bitcoin prediction market before founding Gnosis under Consensys; after the 2025 Bybit theft he was appointed an adviser to the Safe Ecosystem Foundation.Open the full entry replied that there was no bug in the interface code; rather, the attackers reached the server through a compromised developer machine and modified the interface specifically to target Bybit’s Safe, so that it displayed one transaction while sending a different one to the hardware wallet for signing. He said the team would make it easier to verify Safe transactions on hardware devices and would push ahead with Safenet, which adds a professional co-signer, and with interface diversity.⁠[14][14][14][14][14][14]

According to the forensic conclusions of Safe{Wallet} and Google’s security firm Mandiant, the attackers compromised a developer’s Apple computer on February 4, 2025, hijacked the developer’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) session tokens to bypass multi-factor authentication, and injected malicious JavaScript into the Safe{Wallet} website between February 19 and 21; preparing and carrying out the attack took 19 days.⁠[15][15][15][16][16]

On March 3, 2025, the Safe Ecosystem Foundation, the Safe development company Core Contributors GmbH and Gnosis Ltd. signed a memorandum of understanding on comprehensive collaboration to manage the aftermath of the Bybit attack. In an ad hoc release under Article 88 of the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) on March 5, the foundation also announced the appointment of Gnosis co-founder and CEO Martin Köppelmann as an adviser and said its council was assessing changes to its governance structure, likely including personnel adjustments.⁠[17][17][17][17]

On June 5, 2025, the foundation announced Safe Labs, a fully owned commercial subsidiary to build enterprise self-custody products, and appointed Rahul Rumalla, previously chief product officer at Core Contributors, as CEO. From October 15 of that year, Berlin-based Safe Labs GmbH took over the Safe{Wallet} web app at app.safe.global, while the foundation remained responsible for the protocol, core contracts, governance and the SAFE token.⁠[18][18][19][19][19][20]

The Swiss commercial register published Christoph Simmchen’s departure from the council on September 1, 2025, and on March 9, 2026 published Richard Meissner’s registration as a council member and Stefan George’s change from member to vice president. As of October 2026 the council consists of three people, president Lukas Schor, vice president Stefan George and member Richard Meissner, and the foundation is supervised by the Swiss Federal Supervisory Authority for Foundations (ESA).⁠[3][3][3][3][3][21][6]

The foundation prepared a MiCA white paper for the SAFE token, with the original version notified to the Central Bank of Ireland on October 31, 2025; a modified version was notified on May 1, 2026 and published on May 14, adding SAFE’s new use for running or delegating to Safenet validators.⁠[22][22][22][22]

In February 2026, the foundation reported that the project’s annualized revenue at the end of 2025 exceeded $10 million, up fivefold from about $2 million at the end of 2024, and set targets of breaking even and doubling revenue in 2026 and reaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue by 2030; it also said Safe processed $600 billion in transaction volume in 2025 and that the Ethereum Foundation had moved its entire treasury of more than 160,000 ETH to Safe. The foundation acknowledged that the project was not yet profitable.⁠[23][23][23][23][23]

On April 2, 2026, the foundation launched Safenet in beta at the EthCC conference in Cannes, France: independent validators check proposed Safe transactions against defined security rules and issue cryptographic attestations, and a Guard contract on the account verifies the attestation on-chain before the transaction can execute, giving SAFE its first economic function beyond governance. The beta is run by six genesis validators, Greenfield, Gnosis, Safe Labs, Rockaway, Blockchain Capital and Core Contributors GmbH, each staking at least 3.5 million SAFE.⁠[24][24][24][24][24]

In the second quarter of 2026, Safe smart accounts processed nearly 130 million transactions, the highest quarterly total to date; monthly active accounts reached 2.73 million in June and total accounts 63.4 million; assets held at quarter-end were $27.24 billion, including $6.48 billion in stablecoins; and project revenue for the quarter was $1.98 million, up 42% year over year. As of the report, 54.8 million SAFE were staked in Safenet Beta.⁠[25][25][25][25][25]

On October 4, 2026, Greenfield Capital, an investor in Safe since 2022, published an open letter saying it had filed a supervisory complaint (Aufsichtsanzeige) concerning the Safe Ecosystem Foundation with the Swiss Federal Supervisory Authority for Foundations, seeking a restructured council, the replacement of Stefan George and the addition of independent members. The letter asserts that Gnosis operated two wallets competing directly with Safe{Wallet} while Stefan George sat on the council, a conflict of interest; that after the Bybit incident Stefan George and Martin Köppelmann, threatening that Gnosis would sell SAFE equal to about 10% of supply, forced the other council members and co-founders to give up a large amount of SAFE, which was then redistributed; and that the council had only two members between September 2025 and April 2026, with the replacement, Richard Meissner, not being independent. The letter says the post-Bybit events come from several unnamed sources.⁠[26][26][26][26][26][26][26]

The letter also argues with data that Safe has lagged the market: from January 2024 to August 2026 the value held in Safe accounts fell from $66 billion to about $30 billion while total DeFi value locked grew about 40%; total stablecoin supply grew about 135% while stablecoins held in Safes on Ethereum mainnet grew only about 11%, and Safe’s share of circulating USDC fell from 12.8% to 2.5%; and institutional custody assets at Coinbase and BitGo grew sharply over the same period. Greenfield also acknowledged Safe Labs’ progress on product and commercialization, saying the complaint concerns the foundation’s governance rather than the Safe Labs team.⁠[26][26][26][26][26][26]

Foundation spokesperson Samuel Akpan responded that the foundation had not received a formal inquiry from the ESA and declined to comment on the details of the complaint. As of October 14, 2026, no public response to the allegations from Gnosis, Stefan George or Martin Köppelmann had been seen; on the forum, several industry figures defended Stefan George and noted that the allegations rested on unnamed sources.⁠[27][26][26]

The Safe Ecosystem Foundation is a non-profit foundation registered in Zug, Switzerland, whose purposes include developing and maintaining Safe technology, promoting applications built on Safe and holding and managing related assets; Safe smart accounts themselves are a protocol deployed on Ethereum and other networks and are not operated by the foundation. The foundation council is its supreme governing body, and its statutory auditor is Wadsack Zug AG; in 2024 it set up the subsidiary Hecate Ventures AG to manage its treasury and investments, and in 2025 the for-profit subsidiary Safe Labs. SAFE holders take part through SafeDAO’s Safe Ecosystem Proposals (SEPs), which are discussed on the forum and voted on through Snapshot, with proposals requiring on-chain action executed on-chain.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6][6][9]

Safe Ecosystem Foundation: Official website: https://safefoundation.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[28]

Safe Labs: Official website: https://safe.global/ (opens in a new window).⁠[19]

X: Public account: https://x.com/safe (opens in a new window)⁠[28]

X: Public account: https://x.com/SafeFndn (opens in a new window)⁠[28]

X: Public account: https://x.com/SafeLabs_ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/safe-ecosystem/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]