Gnosis Safe Launches SafeDAO, Safe Token

Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe) announced the launch of its SafeDAO and Safe Token today.

Even as the crypto bear market continues to batter the industry, decentralized autonomous organizations, better known as DAOs, remain a popular way for people to organize online, build communities, and raise funds.

Originally conceived as a digital asset management platform for DAO treasuries within the Gnosis ecosystem, Safe spun off after a DAO vote in July, followed by announcing the airdrop of 50 million SAFE tokens to thousands of Safe wallets last month.

Safe says its mission is to make ownership in Web3 more accessible, collaborative, and secure.

"The ‘DAO-fication’ of Safe provides two advantages in particular,” Safe co-founder Christoph Simmchen told Decrypt.

“Firstly, it ensures that Safe, in its role as a critical infrastructure for many projects, is not exposed to a single point of failure, but rather can be operated and maintained by the community in the long term,” he said. “Secondly, the structure of a DAO enables a way of decentralized focus, so that Safe can be expanded for many use cases and user groups at the same time because different groups can work on different verticals."

“Safe is critical infrastructure already,” Simmchen added. “Apart from being a digital asset management platform, it is a composable decentralized custody protocol as well and is used widely in Web3.”

“Every web3 project relating to assets, identity, and data can use Safe protocol,” he explained, calling Safe “use-case agnostic.”

Along with the launch of SafeDAO, Safe tokens can now be claimed by the over 43,000 eligible Safe users who will act as stakeholders who can delegate their vote to specific DAO members or, as the DAO calls them, “Guardians.”

“Voting power can be delegated to vision-aligned Guardians for those who foresee being less active in governance participation themselves,” the project explained.

A popular myth that Simmchen wants to bust is that Safe is a multisig, or a digital wallet that operates with multiple signature addresses.

“Safe is not a multisig; it is much more than that," he said. "Safe is a future-ready and customizable custody architecture which is characterized by its programmability, modularity, and composability leading to a vibrant ecosystem of projects building on top of it."

According to Safe, no one person can hold over 10% of the DAOs voting power. Simmchen explains that this is to show the decentralization of the DAO from the start. He said the Safe ecosystem aims to empower builders and contributors and to find decentralized growth in all pockets of web3 via proposals on SafeDAO.

“We believe that SafeDAO will ensure the development of this key infrastructure that a lot of the Web3 depends on,” Simmchen said.

Simmchen said the exciting thing about the Safe community is that it comprises diverse stakeholders, each with their own ideas about the project's future.

“Before the DAO launch, there was no structured way for the community to efficiently coordinate their future plans,” he said. “This is now changing with the SafeDAO, and I am excited to see where the discussion on future plans will evolve.”