Disclaimer: I wrote this with a half-drunk cold brew in one hand and the ETH/BTC chart open on the other screen. Take the vibes, not investment advice.
Wait, do we really need another wallet?
Honestly, the very first reaction in our Telegram group was a collective eye-roll. “Great, yet another wallet—because clearly we don’t have Ledger Live, Fireblocks, Argent, MetaMask Institutional, and thirty Chrome extensions already,” joked @0xRamen. But the more we dug in, the more we realized Safe’s latest move isn’t just a vanity rebrand. It might be plugging the biggest hole in the self-custody story: enterprise UX that doesn’t feel like configuring a Cisco router from 1998.
Here's what actually dropped this week
• On June 11 2024, Safe (yup, the smart-contract wallet formerly known as Gnosis Safe) unveiled a new subsidiary, Safe Labs. The mission statement: build “enterprise-grade self-custody solutions” on top of Safe’s existing infrastructure.
• Current TVL: $50 billion worth of assets are secured across 3.6 million Safe wallets according to Dune dashboards. That’s not exactly niche.
• The parent DAO spun off from Gnosis in July 2022 with a $100 million valuation and later raised $4.4 million in a strategic round led by 1kx and Tiger Global—though the latter never bragged about it on Twitter.
• Safe Labs will be headed by Lukas Schor (co-founder of Safe) and, interestingly, is hiring ex-Microsoft Azure security engineers. That tidbit came from a leaked Notion screenshot—so yeah, pinch of salt.
Voices from the trenches
“If this gives my CFO a dashboard where he can sign multi-sig transactions without asking me what MetaMask is, I’m all in.” — Arianna, treasurer at a mid-size L2 startup.
“Enterprises keep repeating the same FTX custody mistakes. Maybe Safe Labs forces them to level up.” — Mariano Conti, ex-MakerDAO, on Farcaster.
Not everyone’s bullish, though. Cobie dropped a spicy take in his sub-stack comments: “Enterprises will still screw up op-sec. A new brand won’t fix human negligence.” Hard to argue—remember when Vitalik’s ENS got phished and he literally co-wrote the spec?
Why this could shake up your stack
I’ve noticed funds sitting on the sidelines because multi-sig workflows are a compliance nightmare. The moment you say “Hey auditor, sign this Gnosis Safe tx hash,” they ghost you harder than a Tinder match who finds out you trade memecoins on the weekend. Safe Labs claims they’ll ship SOC 2-compliant reporting baked into the wallet. If that’s legit, the next $10 billion in institutional inflows might not head straight to Coinbase Custody after all.
And let’s remember: ETH gas has been chilling around 8 gwei this month. Multicalls that cost $120 last cycle are literally a coffee now. Moving a DAO treasury onchain in 2024 isn’t the same pain we suffered in DeFi Summer. Timing matters.
Random thoughts while flipping between charts
• ETH hovering at $3,530 as of writing. If Safe Labs lands a few Fortune 500 pilots, I could see treasury diversification flows pushing ETH back over the psychological $4k—just anecdotal speculation.
• Shout-out to Zapper and DeBank folks: imagine a toggle that switches your personal Safe interface into an “Enterprise mode”—payroll, vesting, role-based approvals. Feels like an inevitable collab.
• Can we address the elephant? Account Abstraction (ERC-4337) devs are salty that Safe is “too early,” calling it a custom stack that won’t plug into native AA once L2s standardize. In my experience, builders who ship first usually win the mindshare battle, specs catch up later.
• Side quest: Remember when Silvergate collapsed in March 2023 and every trading desk panicked about on-ramping? If Safe Labs nails fiat bridges (rumor: they’re courting Stripe’s crypto team), that single feature could destroy the last excuse TradFi risk committees have.
So, where do we go from here?
I can’t pretend we’ve kicked the tires yet—Safe Labs’ alpha version is gated to design partners until Q4 2024. Still, sign-up forms are live, and a few of us in the community are scheming to get whitelisted. Don’t be surprised if you see screenshots leaking on Bluesky by September.
My gut says wallets are the new L2s: five will matter, the rest will be UX clones fighting for crumbs. Safe already crushed the “DAO treasury” vertical. If they capture the mid-market enterprises who currently juggle spreadsheets and hot wallets, that’s a moat deeper than Solana’s validator queue.
For anyone reading this after doom-scrolling through SEC vs. Binance headlines, remember: self-custody isn’t a meme. It’s literally the only part of the stack regulators can’t rug. If Safe Labs makes it suck less, we should at least give it a fair shot.
Call to action: If you manage a fund, startup, or Discord community wallet, poke around Safe’s public GitHub this weekend. Drop your pain points in their Issues tab. The faster we beta-test, the sooner we get rid of those 3 a.m. “Who has the private key?” Slack messages.
