Stefan George

Stefan George says he got into blockchain in 2013, when he and 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, later his Gnosis co-founder, started a company based on Bitcoin that built a prediction market for Bitcoin. In 2015, the two concluded that Ethereum was better suited to fully decentralized prediction markets and met Joe Lubin of Consensys, who persuaded them to develop the project as part of Consensys; that project was Gnosis.⁠[1][1][1][2]

In 2017, Gnosis spun off from Consensys and held a token sale, raising $12.5 million in ether; he says ether was only about $50 at the time and the team managed the treasury well, allowing it to grow the team as ether rose. To custody the proceeds securely, he wrote his own multi-signature wallet code, later open-sourced as the Gnosis Multi-signature Wallet; many token-sale projects subsequently adopted it, and Gnosis kept developing it into Gnosis Safe, later Safe.⁠[1][1][3][1][1]

He also recalls that a Gnosis developer came up early with the automated market maker design later used by Uniswap and Balancer, but that the team saw its flaws in capital efficiency and front-running and turned instead to batch auction mechanisms, which became Gnosis Protocol, launched in 2020.⁠[1][1][1]

In 2020, the hedge fund Arca, a GNO holder, called on Gnosis to buy back outstanding GNO at the book value of its balance sheet. In a December 2020 interview, Stefan George argued that GNO’s market capitalization was miscalculated because it did not count the actual number of tokens in circulation; he said the newly formed GnosisDAO should create more value for GNO holders and encouraged Arca to make its tender offer to the DAO.⁠[4][1][1][1]

In October 2021, Stefan George announced that ETH and ERC-20 tokens worth $100 billion were stored in Gnosis Safe contracts. In September that year, he was interviewed on CNBCCNBCCNBC is an American business and financial news cable channel launched by NBC in 1989; it merged with its rival FNN in 1991 and since January 2026 has been part of Versant Media Group, spun off from Comcast.Open the full entry Africa as co-founder and CTO of Gnosis, discussing security and regulation in cryptocurrencies.⁠[5][2][2]

When Safe was spun off from Gnosis, the Safe Ecosystem Foundation was established in Zug, Switzerland in March 2022, with Stefan George, Lukas Schor and 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 as its first council members; he was registered as a member without signing authority. In March 2025, when the foundation issued an ad hoc release on its cooperation with Gnosis after the Bybit incident, council member Stefan George was named as its contact.⁠[6][6][7]

On March 9, 2026, the Swiss commercial register published Stefan George’s change from council member to vice president of the Safe Ecosystem Foundation, with joint signing authority. The foundation describes him as having co-founded Gnosis in 2015 and written the original multi-signature wallet code in 2017 that evolved into Safe, with expertise in digital asset security, self-custody and Ethereum infrastructure.⁠[6][6][8][8]

In April 2026, a GNO holder put forward GIP-150, proposing to let holders redeem a pro-rata share of GnosisDAO treasury assets. Stefan George said publicly that he voted against it, explaining that he wanted long-term holders, that value created in Gnosis Ltd would be destroyed if it passed, and that most of Gnosis’s assets, such as ETH, COW and SAFE, are strategic, so allowing redemption at any time could massively reduce Gnosis’s influence; he also said projects that fail to deliver a net return would have to be restructured. His was the largest single vote against the proposal, which failed with about 72% against; the proposer’s side criticized the founders for swinging the result with their tokens.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9]

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 filed a complaint with the Swiss Federal Supervisory Authority for Foundations over the Safe foundation’s governance and called for Stefan George’s removal from the council. Its open letter asserts that while he, as Gnosis co-founder and CTO, sat on the council, Gnosis developed and operated two wallets competing with Safe{Wallet}, a permanent conflict of interest; it further states that after the Bybit theft in February 2025, he and Martin Köppelmann demanded that Safe’s other council members and co-founders give up a large amount of SAFE, under the threat that Gnosis would sell its entire position of about 10% of supply and publicly distance itself, and that the redistribution took place after the others gave in. Greenfield says these accounts were reported and confirmed by different sources but has not identified them.⁠[10][10][10][10][10][10]

As of October 14, 2026, no public response from Stefan George to these allegations had been seen. On the SafeDAO forum, a former Gnosis employee, Marcelo Ruiz de Olano of KPK, LongHash Ventures, Blockscout founder Igor Barinov and Gonçalo, formerly of Consensys, defended him: Marcelo Ruiz de Olano said he had worked with him for more than five years and that the allegations rested on unnamed sources; Igor Barinov recalled that he was already working on multisigs around 2015; and Gonçalo called the team’s incident response after the Bybit hack exemplary. Greenfield’s Jascha Samadi later said he was not calling Stefan George a bad person and acknowledged that he had contributed more to Ethereum than most, but said the question was whether the council’s conduct after Bybit was compatible with its responsibilities.⁠[10][10][10][10][10][10]

Gnosis: Official website: https://www.gnosis.io/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

Safe Ecosystem Foundation: Official website: https://safefoundation.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

X: Public account: https://x.com/StefanDGeorge (opens in a new window)⁠[11]