What Is Safe Wallet (Formerly Gnosis Safe)? Multisig Smart Accounts Explained

Q: Who holds the keys to a Safe?

The owners do. Safe has no key and cannot move your funds . Third-party modules that you enable can change that, which is why you should only add audited modules .

Safe, formerly Gnosis Safe, is a self-custody wallet built on smart contracts. A Safe account has no single private key. Instead, it lists a set of owner wallets and a threshold, such as 2 of 3, and a transaction only goes through once that many owners have signed it ¹. Teams, DAOs and individuals use Safe to hold funds without one key being a single point of failure. You can use your accounts through Safe{Wallet}, the official web and mobile app ². The contracts also work without it, so you can reach your funds through other interfaces or the command line ¹¹.

Facts checked October 23, 2026 18 cited sources No score on this page, no affiliate links

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At a glance

What it is: Multi-signature smart account plus the Safe{Wallet} interface and developer tools ¹²
Custody: Self-custody: owners' keys control the account ¹
Former name: Gnosis Safe (renamed and spun off from GnosisDAO in 2022) ¹⁴
Steward: Safe Ecosystem Foundation, a non-profit foundation in Zug, Switzerland ¹⁵
Commercial arm: Safe Labs, a for-profit subsidiary created in 2025 ¹⁵
Token: SAFE (1 billion fixed supply; SafeDAO governance and Safenet) ¹⁵
Networks: Contracts deployed on hundreds of EVM networks; Safe{Wallet} support varies by network ⁶
Fees: Gas paid by the executing signer; 0.05–0.70% widget fee on in-app swaps and bridges ⁷⁸⁹
Audits: Reports published for every contract version from v0.0.1 to v1.4.0 ⁵
Scale: 60M+ accounts per the foundation's Q1 2026 report ¹⁵
Profile updated: October 23, 2026

How a Safe account works

A Safe is a smart contract on the blockchain, not a key pair. You set three things when you create it:

Owners (signers). These are ordinary wallets, such as MetaMask, Ledger, Trezor, a WalletConnect mobile wallet or the Safe mobile app ¹⁰.
Threshold. The number of owner signatures needed to execute a transaction ¹.
Network. Each Safe is deployed on a specific chain. You can deploy the same address on other chains separately ⁶.

To send funds, one owner proposes a transaction and the others sign off. The owner who adds the final required signature submits it on-chain and pays the gas. Confirming signatures are gasless off-chain messages ⁷. Changing owners or the threshold is itself a Safe transaction, so it needs the current threshold too ³.

Safe's own guidance suggests using more than one signer even if you're an individual. It also suggests setting the threshold above 1 but below the total number of owners, so that losing one key doesn't lock you out. A common personal setup is three signers, such as a software wallet and two hardware wallets, with a threshold of 2 ¹⁰.

Modules and guards. Modules add other ways to move funds: spending allowances, recurring payments, recovery and automation. They bypass the normal multisig flow, so a badly written module can expose the account. Guards run checks before and after each transaction. A faulty guard can block every transaction ³⁴. Owners add or remove either one with a threshold-approved transaction.

Products

Safe Smart Account: the core contracts, open source and audited version by version ¹⁵.
Safe{Wallet}: the web and mobile interface for creating accounts, managing assets, signing, swapping, bridging and connecting to dapps ²⁸⁹.
Safe{Core} and infrastructure: SDKs, the Transaction Service indexer and modules (allowance, passkey, recovery, ERC-4337) for developers who build Safe accounts into their own products ²⁶.
Safe{Staking}: native ETH staking with Kiln from inside Safe{Wallet}, in multiples of 32 ETH ¹⁸.

Some service-layer components operated by Safe Labs moved to a Functional Source License. They remain source-visible and become MIT-licensed after two years. The contracts, interfaces and SDKs stay open source ¹².

Fees

Action	Cost
Creating a Safe, sending, changing settings	Network gas only, paid by the executing signer; Safe takes nothing ⁷
Swaps in Safe{Wallet} (via CoW Protocol)	Widget fee: 0.70% up to $50k, 0.35% to $100k, 0.20% to $1M, 0.10% above. Stablecoin-only pairs: 0.15% down to 0.05% ⁸
Bridges in Safe{Wallet} (via LI.FI)	Widget fee: 0.35% up to $100k, 0.20% to $1M, 0.10% above. Stablecoin-only pairs: 0.10% down to 0.05% ⁹

The swap and bridge fees go to CoW Swap or LI.FI, and part of each fee is passed on to the Safe Foundation. The app shows the fee rate before you confirm ⁸⁹. You can avoid these fees by trading through an external dapp connected to your Safe, where that dapp's own fees apply instead.

History and organization

2017–2018. Gnosis built a multisig wallet to hold its own ICO funds, then launched Gnosis Safe as a general-purpose smart account in 2018 ¹⁴.
2022. GnosisDAO spun the project off as Safe. A $100 million raise led by 1kx was announced on July 11, 2022. SafeDAO and the SAFE token launched on September 27, 2022 ¹⁴.
2023–2024. The Safe{Core} developer stack launched in 2023. Safe reported $100 billion in assets secured in March 2024 ¹⁴. SafeDAO approved making SAFE transferable in 2024 ¹⁵.
2025. Safe Labs was created as a for-profit subsidiary to sell Safe technology to businesses ¹⁵. In October 2025, The Defiant reported that Safe Labs was taking over the multisig wallet ¹⁶.

The Safe Ecosystem Foundation is a non-profit Swiss foundation in Zug. It looks after the open-source technology but does not run wallet software ¹⁵. SAFE has a fixed supply of 1 billion. It is used in SafeDAO governance and to secure Safenet, the foundation's newer protocol ¹⁵.

Security model and risks

What multisig protects against. One stolen or lost key can't drain the account if the threshold is higher than 1 ¹⁰.
What it doesn't protect against. If signers approve a malicious transaction, the contract executes it. In February 2025, attackers changed what the Safe{Wallet} website showed, which led Bybit's signers to approve a transaction that handed control of a cold wallet to the attacker (see the incident record) ¹⁷.
Verify before signing. Check the transaction hash and the decoded data on a hardware wallet screen, especially for large transfers. After the attack, Safe added better hash-verification tools ¹⁷.
Interface and indexer dependency. The hosted app and its backend are conveniences, not requirements. Your funds stay reachable through other interfaces and the command line if those services fail ¹¹.
Modules and guards. Third-party modules carry their own risk. In 2026, Safe warned users about a vulnerability in specific Zodiac module versions, while saying the Safe contracts and Safe{Wallet} were not affected ¹³.
Address poisoning and phishing. Copy addresses from your Safe's own address book, not from transaction history. Never share a seed phrase with "support."

Incident record

2 outcome unclear

Attackers hacked a Safe{Wallet} developer's machine and used stolen AWS session tokens to plant malicious JavaScript on the Safe{Wallet} website (Feb 19–21)

Feb 21, 2025outcome unclear

The code tricked Bybit's signers into approving a malicious transaction on its Ethereum cold wallet. Safe attributed the attack to a state-sponsored group, TraderTraitor/UNC4899

Outcome: Interface supply-chain compromise, not a smart-contract bug. Safe's response was documented, but user funds were not returned
Loss: ~$1.4–1.5B in Bybit funds
Recovered or reimbursed: Mostly not recovered; Bybit reported about 3% frozen as of early March 2025. Safe reset its infrastructure and added transaction-verification tools. Mandiant ran the forensic investigation

Source: decrypt.co

Vulnerability in certain third-party Zodiac modules (Roles Modifier v2.1.0/2.1.1, Delay Modifier v1.1.0)

2026 (advisory)outcome unclear

Outcome: Third-party module issue; Safe contracts not affected
Loss: No losses stated
Recovered or reimbursed: Users told to remove the affected modules

Source: help.safe.global

Hacks in DefiLlama’s public database are also scored as the security record on the Safe rating page.

Questions about Safe

Is Safe the same as Gnosis Safe?

Yes. Gnosis Safe was renamed Safe when it was spun off from GnosisDAO in 2022 ¹⁴.

Who holds the keys to a Safe?

The owners do. Safe has no key and cannot move your funds ¹¹¹. Third-party modules that you enable can change that, which is why you should only add audited modules ³.

Do I need the Safe{Wallet} app to access my funds?

No. The contracts are open, so you can use other interfaces or the Safe CLI if the hosted app is down ¹¹.

How is Safe different from a custodial business account like Coinbase Business?

A Safe is self-custodial: its own owners approve every transaction on-chain ¹. With a custodial business account, the provider holds the keys and runs approvals on its own platform.

What is the SAFE token for?

SAFE is used in SafeDAO governance and to secure Safenet. You don't need SAFE to use a Safe account ¹⁵.