In brief
- Gnosis is expanding its services beyond the Ethereum mainnet to cut costs.
- The wallet allows larger teams, DAOs, and high-net worth individuals to safely secure their crypto funds.
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.
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 Arbitrum, another Etheruem scaling solution, once it goes live later this year.
Gnosis Safe differs from more common crypto wallets which are only protected by a string of words and numbers called a private key. If someone gains access to your private key, you can kiss your crypto funds goodbye.
The Gnosis Safe wallet instead uses smart contracts to create more sophisticated ways to protect your crypto. Another key difference is that Gnosis Safe offers multi-signature functionality, meaning that more than one person must sign off on a transaction before it can be executed.
These features have made the wallet particularly interesting for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), larger teams to help with general operations, and high-net-worth individuals. Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, uses the service to manage his funds, for example.
Gnosis cuts costs, expands services
Now, by expanding beyond Ethereum, Gnosis Safe offers projects lower gas costs and flexibility to keep their crypto safe, Lukas Schor, the product manager behind Gnosis Safe told Decrypt.
“A DAO may want to access apps available on alternate networks to [Ethereum] mainnet. For example, Superfluid is popular for DAOs streaming payments and is available on Polygon but not mainnet,” he said.
Other advantages may likely improve the quality of governance within a DAO. When gas fees are too high, on-chain voting, or votes made directly to the blockchain, becomes far too expensive. Part of the latest expansion means that Gnosis Safe is also building tools that would allow for layer 2 voting alongside the robust security to keep assets safe.
Schor is also aware of the slew of exploits on the Binance Smart Chain, adding that the Gnosis Safe team “will be quite careful listing dApps from fully anonymous teams.” As for Arbitrum, only whitelisted developers can currently use this scaling solution.
The Gnosis Safe launch “depends solely on Aribtrum launching their mainnet to users,” said Schor.