We look at Safe/Gnosis Safe, the most popular programmable smart contract / multi-sig wallet. How to get started, its main uses, and why people should use multi-sig wallets.

Be sure to watch our YouTube video on it!

Safe: A term that should instantly notify you that the crypto project it’s associated with is bullshit.

Except in the case when it’s preceded by the word Gnosis. Gnosis Safe, or as they’re now known just as safe, is the most popular programmable smart contract wallet often used for its multi-sig (multiple signatures) capabilities and customization with a traditional wallet, also known as an externally owned account (EOA).

An EOA wallet has a single private key that secures your funds. These are wallets like Metamask, Ledger, or Rainbow. But if you expose or lose that single key, that single point of failure, you’ll lose all your funds faster than a black hat hacker steals from a DeFi protocol. Additionally, the code on some of these wallets can be closed source and we can’t guarantee how secure they actually are.

Visual from Safe documentation

A smart contract account or wallet, on the other hand, is an account controlled by open-source code, and you can customize your account to be more secure, including requiring multiple keys to sign a transaction. These are often known as multi-sig wallets. If you expose one of your private keys, for example, in a two-of-three multi-sig, that exposed key can’t be used to corrupt the system since it can’t initiate a transaction without the other key.

Since the wallet is a smart contract, you can then replace the bad key with a fresh new key, and your wallet will continue to be safe. These keys connected to a smart contract account can be from Metmask, Ledger, or even other smart contract wallets. The Safe multi-sig wallet is currently the most popular multi-sig wallet out there used by protocols like Aave, Synthetics, and hopefully, you.

Getting Started

Multi-sig wallet visual from Safe documentation

If you’re a paranoid hardo, you can first do a quick month-long audit on the code base and then copy-paste one from Source. But if you want, you can also just go to the website and open the app and we’ll go ahead and click Create New Safe. And to create a safe, we’ll need at least one private key. I’m just gonna go ahead and connect my meta mass, but you can use whatever you.

The Safe documentation and walkthrough makes it really easy to create your own Safe quickly.

Create a new Gnosis-Safe

You can also create and interact with safes from JavaScript, the command line, and more. They have developer SDKs for you to get started working with Safe programmatically.

Recommendation

I highly recommend everyone get familiar at least with a 1-of-1 multi-sig. This will get you familiar with smart contract wallets and even adds a layer of protection to your funds. And according to Dune analytics, the 1 of 1 safes are the most popular out there at the moment.

This has been a lily pad look at safe multi-sig wallets. Leave a like if you wanna see more videos like this, and we’ll see you next time.