Gnosis Rebrands as Safe, Raises $100M To Build Multi-Wallet Ecosystem

Digital asset management platform Safe, previously known as Gnosis Safe, has raised $100 million in funding, the company announced this morning.

The funding round was led by crypto fund 1kx and included 63 other contributors, including Tiger Global, A&T Capital, Blockchain Capital, ConsenSys, Polygon, and individual investors such as prominent NFT influencer Punk6529. 

The announcement also marks the company’s official rebranding, after spinning off from parent company Gnosis following a community vote in April. 

Ethereum Wallet Gnosis Safe Expands to Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and Arbitrum

Though gas fees on Ethereum today are much lower than during the crypto market’s peak earlier this year, the Gnosis Safe team is still intent on cutting costs and launching on less expensive crypto networks. Gas costs on Ethereum from January 1, 2021, to present. Source: Etherscan By launching its Gnosis Safe service, a type of super-secure crypto wallet, on Polygon and Binance Smart Chain, the project offers users cheaper solutions away from the Ethereum mainnet. Gnosis Safe will also launch on...

Safe first emerged as a popular crypto wallet noted for its use of customizable smart contracts. Whereas control of many crypto and Web3 accounts hinges upon a single private key, Safe utilizes smart contracts to customize account security, allowing for authentication that requires the use of multiple private keys (multisig), or community approval.

Safe’s smart contracts can also integrate recovery and inheritance mechanisms into the storage of digital assets.

These enhanced and customizable safety features earned Safe a broad customer base, including individuals such as Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the multi-hundred-million dollar treasuries of DAOs including BitDAO, and business platforms like Shopify. Safe wallets currently store some $40 billion worth of digital assets, according to data from Dune Analytics.

Gnosis Safe now stores more than $1 billion in ETH and ERC20s

Ethereum software wallet Gnosis Safe is now holding more than $1 billion in combined ETH and ERC20 tokens for clients, according to the company. The Gnosis Safe Twitter account shared an image that claims just over $1.08 billion in combined assets, which Gnosis co-founder and product manager Stefan George explained is calculated by tracking the sums of all tokens in addition to ETH and using current pricing information provided by CoinPaprika. Gnosis Safe uses smart contracts to power its multi-...

Safe has since expanded from a single product offering to a multi-application and multi-wallet ecosystem in which teams can build on top of Safe’s smart contract technology and fully customize it to adapt to specialized use cases. The company says over 30 teams are building on top of Safe to date.

The company’s leadership sees this ecosystem as Safe’s path forward.

“We initially built something that was very generic, that could suit many different use cases,” Safe co-founder Lukas Schor told Decrypt. “Now we see that the future is more like these tailor-made solutions that fit different user groups.”

Lasse Clausen, founding partner of 1kx, leader of today’s $100 million fundraising round, concurred, telling Decrypt in a statement that “developers and users are only beginning to understand the power of composable asset management.”

Today’s fundraise, per Schor, will allow Safe to “shift more to supporting these teams, to foster[ing] this ecosystem, and away from building our own product.”

The sizable fundraise, notable in the current crypto bear market, also comes at a time when the security of highly valuable digital assets remains an enduring issue for the crypto community.

The value of stolen Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs alone totals over $18.5 million. Last month, actor Seth Green endured a much-publicized PR disaster when an NFT he intended to make the focal point of a TV series was looted by a hacker.