How to set up a Gnosis Safe

With all the hacks going on and people getting their wallets drained of high value NFTs I recently wrote this piece for a community I was in and decided it is more important to share it far and wide.

Based on what I have heard, creating a Gnosis Safe is daunting for people, so here is a simple guide to get it all setup and learn more about it and why you should have at least one of these.

What is a Gnosis Safe?

  • You deploy a fully audited and well used contract where you are the owner
  • This works very similarly to any other wallet, but instead it is a multi-sig wallet meaning you can configure the policies for how transactions are made from that address e.g. 2 wallets need to confirm each transaction, or more if you want
  • It can hold your NFTs & ERC-20 tokens
  • Gnosis provide a superb web UI and mobile app to keep an eye on things and configure your safe, so no technical knowledge required

Why have a Gnosis Safe?

Multi-sig wallet for your most valuable NFTs & ERC-20 tokens

  • Every transaction requires 2 or more signatures (you set the policy, more is safer)
  • If one of your signing wallets (e.g. Ledger or Trezor) gets compromised, just swap out the signing wallet and reinstate another
  • Unless someone gains access to multiple of your wallet seed phrases or private keys (depending on your signing policy), then they cannot access your funds or NFTs - due to it requiring multiple signatures to confirm transactions
  • Only use this safe for the most basic web3 transactions (SEND and RECEIVE)

How to create a Gnosis Safe

  • Wait for gas to be low to make it as cheap as possible, recently we have seen gas < 10 Gwei and that is a great time to go through this guide
  • Connect to one of your hardware wallets as a deployer of the safe, you will want to
    make sure you have about 0.02 ETH (at gas less than 25 Gwei)
  • I recommend getting the family pack of Ledgers from Ledger
    https://shop.ledger.com/products/ledger-nano-s-3pack - you will use these ledgers EXCLUSIVELY as signers for your multi-sig
  • Go to https://gnosis-safe.io/
  • Create a safe
  • Select Ethereum
  • Give it a name
  • You should add at least 2 owners, but you can do this later if you prefer
  • Click create safe, this takes a few minutes as it will deploy your safe contract
  • Now you have a safe, which has a standard Ethereum wallet address that you can send NFTs and assets to

Next Steps

Make sure your policy is configured

If you skipped the step earlier to configure your policy to have more than 1 signer, please do that now.

Add the address of your safe to your MetaMask address book

  1. Go back to your various wallets, create a transaction
  2. When you paste your safe address, click add to address book
  3. Save is as GNOSIS-SAFE or something similar to make sure you rememer
  4. Also worth memorising the start and end of your safe address, so you are familiar with it as a backup

Get comfortable with it

  1. Test that you are happy how it works
  2. Play around with the UI
  3. Set dark mode :)
  4. Download the iOS or Android app to your phone, add your safe as a read only safe

Test send IN to your safe

  1. Send a low value NFT or small value amount of ERC-20 tokens to your safe
  2. First time you send to the safe, it can take a few minutes to show up, be patient
  3. Make sure you see it show up

Test send OUT of your safe

  1. Go to the NFT in your Gnosis Safe UI
  2. Click send
  3. Create the transaction
  4. This can all be done by creating a new transaction, signing from how ever many are required from your policy (2 minimum) and the transaction will publish

Setting up ENS Subdomain (optional)

When I set mine up, I also configured my ENS to have a subdomain for my safes e.g.

  • safe.<myENS>.eth // NFTS
  • bank.<myENS>.eth // ERC-20

(You can have multiple safes in you want like above example)

  1. Go to https://app.ens.domains/
  2. Go to your main ENS on your main wallet holding that ENS name
  3. Click subdomains
  4. Create
  5. Type safe in the name which will mean you have “safe.YOURENS.eth” you decide the name
  6. Confirm and pay the gas to create that subdomain
  7. When you are on the URL for the subdomain, click ADD/EDIT RECORD
  8. Type in the wallet address of your safe in the ETH address part
  9. Save

Add that ENS subdomain to your safe

  1. Now go back to your Gnosis safe
  2. Apps > ENS > My Account
  3. Now you should see the safe ENS that you set earlier and can set it up to be assigned to your safe wallet
  4. Set it as the ENS for your wallet
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