Why we are building Sefu.

Last week, we launched Sefu with the release of a small helper tool, Sefu Requests. Today, we want to share background on why we are building Sefu.

The Promise of Web3, and its Reality

For over a decade, crypto has held the promise of a neutral, trustless base layer for more resilient and fairer economic and societal systems.

Today, crypto is already solving real world problems for a few million people. From enabling SMEs to trade internationally, to making it easier for talents to access global work opportunities, to giving access to stable currencies to people based in countries hit by high inflation.

The other reality is that today, the benefits of web3 are only accessible to a crypto-native minority that is able to navigate the complexities of the technology while avoiding its many pitfalls - from scams, to security vulnerabilities, to irreversible mistakes, to regulatory constraints.

We believe that the thousands of talented people investing their time and energy in building solutions to these problems will make the benefits of web3 accessible to billions of people over the next decade. With Sefu, we want to contribute to this effort.

What’s next?

Today, small businesses wanting to do business across borders face a large number of challenges - from costly transactions, to the censorship of- and from payment platforms. This is something we have experienced first-hand, having lived and run businesses in East and West Africa.

Crypto has the potential to unlock incredible value for startups and SMEs across the world. It gives every business, no matter its size or location, trustless access to a global pool of talent, suppliers, capital, and customers.

So what is missing to reach mass adoption? We need products that provide the ease of use of web2 while abstracting away the permissionless infrastructure of web3.

We believe that innovation in multiple fields of web3, specifically within the Ethereum ecosystem, will combine over the next year or two to make this possible:

• Cheaper transactions with the rise of L2s and the introduction of (proto-)danksharding

• Security without compromising UX thanks to innovation in account abstraction

• Privacy solutions and ideas emerging (see Aztec, Nocturne, and EIP-5564)

• Simple on-ramp solutions, such as Stripe’s newly launched product

These innovations will enable interfaces that are more user-friendly than your current bank app, but rely on trustless web3 “rails” in the background.

When it comes to self-custody, the current experience feels like this.

We believe that the efforts from the likes of Base and many others in the space will soon drastically improve the self-custody user experience and make it mainstream.

Our Piece in the Puzzle

So where do we come in?

A big advantage of building in crypto, is that we get to benefit from composability. We are able to build on top of leading, battle-tested protocols such as Safe and ENS.

Safe is the leading multisig custody protocol on Ethereum and EVM-compatible chains. There are currently over 2.3M Safes created across chains, with a total value of over $60 billion dollars held in them.

We are building a suite of opinionated products on top of protocols such as Safe to make it easier than ever for SMEs and startups to operate onchain.

Making opinionated products means that we will take some decisions for the end-user (e.g. which wallet do I use? where is my private key stored? how is my multisig set up?), so they can focus on what matters.

While building these opinionated products, we always want to stay true to web3’s core promise of permissionlessness and will always make sure that users are not locked in with our solutions.

A good example of this approach is the first small interface we released, Sefu Requests. It provides a much better user experience than the alternative options (i.e. having to use the Safe iPhone app or interacting directly with the Safe API), while not locking users in.

With this approach, we want to make the experience of managing a business onchain feel like the user-friendliest web2 apps.

Getting your business onchain should be easier than opening a bank account, we want to make this a reality.