Gnosis Safe raises $100 million led by 1kx to unlock digital asset management. Announces rebrand to Safe.

Safe is solving one of the biggest barriers to mass adoption of web3: custody. The strategic raise brings together 60+ industry leaders championing smart contract accounts as the standard to unlock digital ownership.

[Zug, Switzerland] – July 12, 2022: Safe (previously known as Gnosis Safe), a leading digital asset management platform, today announces it has raised $100 million led by 1kx. Initially developed as an internal tool, Gnosis Safe has organically become critical infrastructure for web3 as a means to securely manage digital assets. 

Following a successful community vote to spin off from Gnosis, the Gnosis Safe project is rebranding to Safe and announcing a strategic funding round of $100 million led by 1kx. The round is also joined by Tiger Global, A&T Capital, Blockchain Capital, Digital Currency Group, Greenfield One, Rockaway Blockchain Fund, ParaFi, Lightspeed, Polymorphic Capital, Superscrypt and 50 other strategic partners and industry experts The funding is raised for the Safe Ecosystem Foundation, a non-profit organization protecting strategic assets and contributing to the further development of Safe.

The funding round is an important milestone for the development of Safe as a programmable ownership platform, enabling secure management of digital assets, data and identity across DAOs, retail and institutional users. The funding and strategic alliances will enable Safe to grow an ecosystem of applications and tools on top of its smart contract account protocol.

“Safe has established itself as the universal asset management primitive. From DAOs to treasury management tools to institutional custody, Safe has achieved an incredible product market fit throughout all segments of crypto and established itself as the absolute winner. At 1kx, we have been long users of Safe and believe that developers and users are only beginning to understand the power of composable asset management.” - Lasse Clausen, founding partner of 1kx.

Unlocking ownership for everyone in web3 Safe gained wide adoption for its self-custody solution used to process over 600,000 transactions and secure digital assets exceeding . Additionally, many highly valued NFTs, including 13% of all Cryptopunks, are currently secured using Safe.

Safe has built infrastructure that serves some of the biggest DAO treasuries (1inch, BitDAO), financial institutions (Bitfinex, GSR) and enterprises (Shopify, AB group). Also, individuals such as Vitalik Buterin and Punk6529 (participating in the round as an angel) use Safe to secure their most valuable personal digital assets.

Making web3 accounts smart

Traditional web3 accounts are controlled by a single private key, often derived from a 24-word secret phrase. As long as a user owns this private key, they control the account. However, these private keys regularly get lost or compromised, resulting in the complete loss of the assets associated with the account.

Safe, on the other hand, uses smart contracts accounts that can be individually configured to suit the custody needs of different user groups: 

• Authentications using multiple private keys (multisig) or community-control (DAOs)

• Recovery and inheritance mechanisms 

• Improved transaction experience (transaction batching, gas abstraction)

• Transaction checks and hybrid-custody

• Spending limits and automation 

“For mainstream adoption of web3 we need to overcome the risks and limitations of private key accounts. Safe provides a critical public good as a composable and use-case agnostic smart contract account that can control digital assets, data and identities. The transition towards smart contract accounts will be a joined effort by the entire web3 community.” - Lukas Schor, Co-founder, Safe It’s not a product - it’s an ecosystem Safe aims to foster a vibrant ecosystem of applications and wallets leveraging Safe smart contract accounts. This will be achieved through grants, ecosystem investments, as well as providing developer tools and infrastructure. “Safe is user-group and use-case agnostic infrastructure at its heart. Due to this role we are excited to involve a diverse group of industry leaders to accelerate the adoption of smart contract accounts. Leveraging the broad expertise and network of our partners, Safe is uniquely positioned to cover various ecosystem verticals such as DAO, DeFi, NFT, P2E, and institutional offerings.” - Christoph Simmchen, Co-founder, Safe Already today, the Safe ecosystem consists of many teams building on top of Safe. These projects provide specialized solutions across savings (Streams, Linen Wallet), treasury management (Coinshift, Parcel), DAO tooling (Utopia Labs, Orca Protocol), NFTs (Prysm, Castle) and wallets (Rabby, Metamask Institutional).

About Safe: 

Safe is the most trusted platform to manage digital assets and secures >$40 Billion in assets today. Its flagship web and mobile interfaces and expanding ecosystem, Safe is on a mission to unlock digital ownership for everyone in web3 including DAOs, enterprises, retail or institutional users by establishing a universal standard for custody of digital assets, data and identity with smart contract based accounts.

Appendix:

List of Contributors:

1. 1kx

2. Tiger Global

3. A&T Capital

4. DCG

5. Greenfield One

6. Rockaway Blockchain Fund

7. Blockchain Capital

8. ParaFi

9. Superscrypt

10. Lightspeed

11. Polymorphic Capital

12. Zee Prime

13. Brevan Howard Digital Assets

14. Blockchain.com

15. Collider Ventures

16. Coinbase Ventures

17. LongHash Ventures

18. Prycto

19. Republic Capital

20. The LAO

21. P2P

22. IOSG Ventures

23. CMT Digital

24. ConsenSys

25. MetaCartel Ventures

26. Kraken Ventures

27. Signum Capital

28. UOB Venture Management

29. Fenbushi Capital

30. SCB10x

31. GSR

32. Global Coin Research (GCR)

33. Bixin Ventures

34. Blockdaemon

35. Arweave

36. Ledger

37. Questbook

38. Polygon

39. Orenda 

40. Bollinger

41. Cryptocurrency Jobs

42. FalconX

43. Punk6529 (6529/OM)

44. Lefteris Karapetsas (Rotki)

45. Corbin Page  (Paymagic)

46. Onur Akpolat (Cosmos)

47. Hasu (Flashbots)

48. Andreas Glarner (MME)

49. Luka Müller (MME)

50. Joel Thorstensson (Ceramic)

51. Philip Stehlik (Centrifuge)

52. Markus Ament (Centrifuge)

53. Tarun Gupta (Coinshift)

54. Orest Gavryliak (1inch)

55. Evgeny Yurtaev (Zerion)

56. Eva Beylin (The Graph)

57. Anton Bukov (1inch)

58. Alex Bazhanau (Linen Wallet)

59. Manuel Garcia (Bootnode)

60. Sebastian Bürgel (HOPR)

61. Poolpi (Yearn)

62. Sergej Kunz (1inch)

63. Stephen Young (Nftfi)

64. Will Papper (Syndicate)