Safe and Base Team Up To Promote Ethereum Smart Accounts

Safe, an on-chain asset custody protocol, has teamed up with Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 from Coinbase, to promote the development of smart accounts.

Announced on Feb. 27, the partnership includes Base offering up to 1 ETH worth of gas fee credits alongside modular tooling to developers building smart accounts using Safe’s open-source tech stack on the Base network.

Smart accounts leverage  account abstraction to enable advanced custody features and user-interface improvements compared to conventional web3 wallets, including multi-signature authentication, account recovery, and recurring payments.

“This initiative aims to empower more developers to tap into the benefits of smart accounts and make decentralized applications more accessible, secure, and efficient for users worldwide,” Safe said in an announcement. “With over 230 million unique Ethereum addresses worldwide, and daily L2 transactions surpassing L1 transactions, the need for dynamic and scalable solutions has never been more apparent.”

“Smart account adoption is vital to making on-chain apps easy to use for everyday people, and the key to unlocking this future-proof technology is reducing the barriers to developers,” added Nick Prince, product manager at Base.

Safe supports the Base Sepolia testnet, facilitating a robust testing environment for developers. Safe’s core stack already supports more than 6M safe accounts that have executed in excess of 30M transactions.

In June, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder and chief scientist of Ethereum,  described the move from traditional web3 wallets to smart accounts as a cornerstone of Ethereum’s transition “from a young experimental technology into a mature tech stack” offering a user experience facilitating mainstream adoption.

Safe, initially conceived as Gnosis Safe, a leading multi-signature protocol,  spun out of the Gnosis ecosystem in mid-2022 following a  governance vote.

Safe followed up by rebranding, establishing a Swiss foundation to protect its off-chain assets, closing a $100M funding round, and  airdropping SAFE tokens to nearly 22,000 users. At the time, Safe was used to custody approximately 5% of the combined cryptocurrency capitalization.

Safe now custodies  $3.9B worth of ETH and  $92.1B in ERC-20 tokens, equating to 1% of Ethereum’s supply and 4.3% of the combined cryptocurrency capitalization, according to Dune Analytics.

Gnosis pivoted to refocus its operations on Gnosis Chain, an Ethereum sidechain established through Gnosis’s merger with xDAI in December 2021. Gnosis Chain now boasts a total value locked (TVL) of $306M, according to DeFi Llama.

Base is the fifth-largest Layer 2 network with a TVL of $936M, according to L2beat.