Gnosis, the popular cryptocurrency wallet, is currently creating a multi-app ecosystem that allows digital assets to be held in trust. The company announced that Safe, a digital asset management platform, has raised $100 Million in funding.
The crypto fund 1kx led the round and included 63 additional contributors including Tiger Global and A&T Capital as well as Blockchain Capital and ConsenSys. Individual investors include Punk6529 , a prominent NFT influencer.
This announcement marks the official rebranding of the company, which was spun off from parent company Gnosis in April after a community vote.
First, Safe was a well-known crypto wallet known for its use customizable smart contract. While control over many Web3 and crypto accounts is dependent upon one private key, Safe uses smart contract to personalize account security. This allows for authentication that requires multiple private keys (multisig) or community approval.
Safe’s smart contract can include inheritance and recovery mechanisms in the storage of digital assets.
These enhanced and customizable safety features earned Safe a broad customer base, including individuals such as Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the multi-hundred-million dollar treasuries of DAOs including BitDAO, and business platforms like Shopify. According to Dune Analytics , safe wallets store around $40 billion in digital assets.
Safe has grown from a single product to include a variety of applications and wallets. With Safe’s smart contract technology, teams can create custom solutions and build on it. According to the company, over 30 companies have built on Safe.
This ecosystem is Safe’s future, according to the company’s leadership.
“We originally built something very generic that could be used for many different purposes,” Safe cofounder Lukas Schor explained to Decrypt. “Now, we see that the future looks more like these tailored solutions that suit different user groups.”
Lasse Clausen is the founding partner of 1kx and leader of today’s $100m fundraising round.
According to Schor, today’s fundraise will enable Safe to “shift more towards supporting these teams and to foster[ing] the ecosystem, rather than building our own product.”
This large fundraise is notable given the crypto bear market. It also occurs at a time where the security of digital assets that are highly valuable remains an ongoing issue for the crypto community.
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