Safe{Wallet} - A new chapter with Safe Labs

At Safe Labs, we are committed to building the gold standard in self-custody tooling. As our industry matures, it is vital to ensure the long-term sustainability of critical open-source infrastructure and to fairly compensate those who maintain these community goods. 

This is particularly pressing when other commercial services are operating competing managed services on top of Safe’s backend infrastructure, without contributing to its development, security, or maintenance. This creates a long-term sustainability risk. 

For this reason, Safe Labs will execute a targeted license update that protects the service layer from third-party exploitation, while leaving the protocol layer and the user interface fully open source.

What is changing

• Safe Labs is adopting the Functional Source License (FSL) for new releases of specific service-layer components. We believe it strikes the right balance between openness, sustainability, and operational responsibility.

• The FSL is a source-available license with a built-in sunset clause. It allows anyone to read, audit, and build against the code, while temporarily restricting competing commercial use of the latest releases. This restriction applies only to services that offer a hosted or managed alternative to Safe Labs’ own service layer.

• After a fixed period, the license automatically converts to a permissive open-source license (MIT).

• This license update will affect only new releases by Safe Labs of specific service-layer components, not the protocol, and not the user interface layer. This includes currently five repositories: Safe Transaction Service, Decoder Service, Events Service, Config Service, and Client Gateway.

The FSL allows Safe Labs to responsibly operate and secure critical infrastructure today, while guaranteeing openness over time. It is a pragmatic license choice for infrastructure that must be both trustworthy and sustainable. 

We intend to offer clear commercial licenses for teams who want to build paid or managed services on top of the latest Safe Labs releases of Safe’s service layer. If you want to partner with us and become a certified Safe Partner, please get in touch: partnerships@safe.global

What is not changing

• No retroactive changes. Existing releases remain under their current licenses.

• Smart contract licenses remain unchanged. They stay fully auditable, forkable, and neutral.

• SDKs and developer tooling licenses remain unchanged.

• User interface licenses remain unchanged. (e.g., Safe Wallet, Safe Mobile, Safe Developer Dashboard) 

• Internal and non-commercial use remains free. This includes DAOs, protocols, treasuries, research, and personal custody.

Code remains visible and auditable. This is not a move to closed source. Moreover, all code released by Safe Labs under the new licensing will include a sunset clause. After a fixed period, the code automatically reverts to a permissive open-source license.

Partner with us: partnerships@safe.global

If you have more questions, please feel free to check our FAQs.

Safe{Wallet}

17 February 2026

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