Safe

Safe is an open-source smart-account system for EVM networks. Its accounts hold their own onchain balances, owner lists and signing thresholds, making it a common choice for shared treasuries, DAO operations and businesses that need several independent addresses to approve the same action.

An EVM account owned by a threshold, not one key

A Safe has no private key of its own. Its contract checks that approvals belong to current owners and meet the configured threshold before it executes a transaction. In a two-of-three Safe, for example, any two configured owners must authorize the same action.

Owners can be externally owned addresses, hardware-wallet-controlled addresses or compatible contract signers. Changing owners or the threshold is itself a Safe transaction, so shared control belongs to the account holding the assets rather than relying on several people informally sharing access to one seed phrase.

Propose, confirm and execute the identical transaction

A Safe proposal specifies a recipient, value, optional contract-call data and operation. One owner or an application can prepare it, then owners sign the identical transaction hash separately. Safe's transaction service can display pending confirmations on supported networks, but the contract makes the final decision only when valid signatures meeting the threshold are submitted onchain.

After the threshold is reached, an executor submits the transaction and pays the network cost; that executor need not be an owner. Because a proposal can call another contract, approval may cover a treasury payment, token allowance, governance action or a change to the Safe's own configuration, not just a token transfer.

EVM contract calls, modules and guards

Each Safe exists on a specific EVM chain. Comparable Safes can use the same owners and threshold on several chains, but their balances, history and contract state remain separate. Its scope is EVM assets and contract calls, not native Bitcoin multisignature spending.

Modules can add automation, recurring actions or limited allowances, and guards can add checks beyond the owner threshold. Those extensions make Safe useful for accounts with custom controls, but they also matter to account authority: an authorized module can use a route that does not collect ordinary owner signatures, while a faulty guard can block execution.

Signer availability is the recovery boundary

Safe does not provide a universal recovery phrase. Recovery depends on retaining access to enough owner accounts or deliberately approving a recovery design in advance. Replacing a lost owner normally requires the current threshold to approve an owner change.

The quorum therefore balances control and availability. Raising it limits any single owner, but spending and emergency changes become impossible if too few owners remain reachable. Nunchuk solves a related shared-control problem for Bitcoin through PSBTs and hardware signers; Safe instead enforces its threshold in an EVM smart contract and can approve arbitrary contract calls.