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.
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.
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.”
1/ On How To Secure Your NFTs
Where are your NFTs out in the metaverse?
How do you store them?
How do you keep people from stealing them?!
How do you pass down your Grails to your grandkids?Let’s find out!
— 6529 (@punk6529) November 19, 2021
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.