Digital Asset Manager Safe to Offer Governance Token for SafeDAO

Digital asset management platform Safe said it will offer SAFE governance token to steward its newly formed decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

The motivating force underpinning the launch of SAFE was “to effectively decentralize” Safe, which was previously known as Gnosis Safe.

“As a public good and fundamental infrastructure of Web3, we know that only decentralized governance can guarantee the long-term neutrality of the project. SafeDAO will foster a thriving ecosystem building on top of Safe Protocol and balance the different interests of its stakeholders,” Lukas Schor, co-founder of Safe, said.

The DAO will govern the underlying protocol, which has close to $40 billion in all its Ethereum contracts.

Historically, many DAOs conduct airdrops to distribute their governance tokens, including Uniswap, Compound, Ethereum Name Service, dYdX and, most recently, Optimism. In this instance, SAFE will be claimed.

A pre-identified group of stakeholders are eligible to claim the tokens between Sept. 28 at 11:00 CET and Dec. 27 at 12:00 CET. The stakeholders include over 43,000 Safe users, 140 plus ecosystem contributors (Safe Guardians), over 60 strategic backers, core contributors and GnosisDAO. The unclaimed tokens will be returned to the DAO’s treasury.

Some 190 million SAFE tokens (about 19% of the total supply) will be allocated to key stakeholders. “No single known entity or person holds more than 10% of the initial voting power,” the press release said.

Safe, one of the largest decentralized custody and digital asset management platforms, features a smart contract wallet that needs a minimum threshold of people to authorize a transaction before it can go through. While Safe smart contracts mostly dominate on the Ethereum blockchain, they also run on several other blockchains, such as Arbitrum, Aurora, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, Gnosis Chain, Optimism and Polygon.