Safe (SAFE): the first ecosystem with support for smart accounts
The Safe project is also no exception. In the spring of 2024, it presented the crypto community with its own eponymous management token, which will be discussed in this article.
What is Safe?
Safe is the project behind developing a modular platform to make smart accounts secure, portable, and cross-platform. The project's key focus was the Safe protocol, the main objective of which is to create a comprehensive system to improve the security and flexibility of user interaction in the ecosystem of smart accounts of different types.
The project was launched in 2016 under the name Gnosis to explore Prediction Markets. Even though most projects in the Prediction Markets segment never managed to implement in-demand products, Gnosis did so and created an entire infrastructure.
A year later, the Gnosis team released the first crypto wallet in the crypto industry with support for smart accounts, Gnosis Wallet, which quickly attracted users' attention. Smart accounts are a special type of crypto wallet with smart contract functionality. For example, smart accounts do not require using a seed phrase in case of loss or compromise, in which the user loses his assets, and also allow changing the account owner.
In 2021, the Gnosis project was transformed into a decentralized autonomous organization called GnosisDAO.
In 2022, the team launched a new SafeDAO division, renaming the Gnosis project Safe. Safe's main mission was to develop an ecosystem around secure smart accounts and actively embed them in the Web infrastructure, making them accessible to a wide range of users.
Safe ecosystem
The Safe ecosystem includes:
- Safe Wallet (formerly known as Gnosis Wallet) is a wallet that supports smart accounts and multi-signature. Safe Wallet was the first product of the Safe ecosystem, released in 2017. Nowadays, Safe Wallet is one of the most sought-after wallets among crypto users. This wallet was the first in the crypto industry to introduce smart account functionality back in 2018. It integrated a unique feature to reduce gas costs, and the wallet also had a modular architecture that allowed it to seamlessly add new features without affecting the entire platform: literally, like a constructor;
- Gnosis Chain is essentially one of the first Ethereum sidechains. Unlike Layer 2 networks such as Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism, which collect transactions into packets and send them to the Ethereum network for validation, Gnosis Chain functions exactly as a separate network;
- CowSwap — a decentralized exchange (DEX) based on the Ethereum blockchain that has a special mechanism to reduce slippage and commissions when trading digital assets;
- Gnosis Pay — the world's first decentralized payment system with support for Visa debit cards, which users can link to their cryptocurrency wallet and use to pay for products and services;
- GnosisDAO — a community created to develop, support, and manage the ecosystem transparently;
Gnosis Guild — a community of developers united by the idea of creating open-source products;
SAFE token
SAFE is a native ERC-20 management token of the Safe ecosystem, issued in April 2024 on the Ethereum blockchain. SAFE tokens were originally issued in 2017 through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO).
The SAFE token is designed to manage infrastructure components of the Safe ecosystem, such as:
- safe contracts;
- underlying interfaces;
- onchain assets;
- tokenomics.
A decentralized autonomous organization called SafeDAO is responsible for managing the above components: SAFE token holders can participate in votes to improve the Safe ecosystem. In addition, SAFE holders can participate in the Save Activity Program, which allows them to increase rewards for active activity in the ecosystem when tokens are blocked.
SAFE's maximum issuance (cap on the number of tokens) is 1 billion, of which only about 427 million are in circulation as of July 2024 — they were initially distributed according to the project's inherent tokenomics. 60% of the 427 million tokens distributed were allocated to the community reserve. The remaining tokens will be distributed linearly until 2030, with a decreasing inflation rate in 2026.
Prospects for Safe
The project has its developed infrastructure and an extensive user base, which can ensure high demand for the SAFE token. To this, we should add a strong partner base consisting of such notable players in the crypto industry as:
According to the Safe team, the options for using the SAFE token will expand as its ecosystem develops. The additional utility will be able to attract new users and investors, which should positively impact the dynamics of the asset since its listing has not been encouraging so far due to the general negative background in the crypto market.
The team's plans for the near future include launching Gnosis 3.0, a platform that combines traditional and decentralized financial infrastructures into a single ecosystem.
