The future of smart accounts with Safe's co-founders

Transcript

at milk road we believe that token networks powered by software and governed by communities have enormous potential to impact the world economy and Society at large this belief is Guided by three foundational principles self- custody open Innovation and Community ownership one of the best examples of living these principles is safe safe originated from a concept as Timeless as Innovation itself build something you would use this ethos led the the nosis team to develop a multisig wallet to manage their own asset security this tool quickly gain traction positioning safe as one of the pioneering onchain tools to achieve

product Market fit fast forward to today safe boast impressive metrics it secures over 100 billion in total value across more than 50 networks it processes over 1 billion in monthly eth transfer volume it supports 88 million safe accounts it handles 42 million transactions and over 200 projects are developing with safe's smart accounts and tooling capabilities today we are joined by Lucas co-founder of safe and Andre the head of governance at safe in this enlightening conversation we discuss the community vote to make safe token transferable as

of April 23rd and why safe Dow decided to separate tge from transferability we also discuss token utility the future of smart accounts and the various layers of abstraction including Network abstraction and the business model of safe now and in the future welcome to milk Road radio the easiest path to get smarter about crypto I'm Jay Hamilton and I believe that onchain is the next online this is the opportunity and I'm here to guide you to capitalize on it let's jump into this fantastic conversation with Lucas and Andre from safe crypto will go up more than 100x in

both users and value over the next decade if you're listening to this right now you're extremely early and have an incredible opportunity to capitalize at milk Road our mission is to make you smarter about crypto that's why we're doing today's podcast and why we send you a daily newsletter for free but if you're ready to level up as an investor let me tell you about milk Road Pro we crafted this resource for investors who are already spared about crypto and are looking for more actionable insights on how to invest successfully in one of the fastest growing Industries on Earth every week we break down the latest trends dive into tokenomics of popular and upand cominging tokens and get into the nitty-gritty of market analysis all to help you invest smarter plus we have a private Discord Community for pro members it's like your backstage pass to

the milk road crew exclusive insights Hot Tips and live amas with our team now if you're looking to level up as an investor then click the link in the show notes below and sign sign up to Pro today don't let this bull market opportunity slip through your fingers GM Lucas Andre welcome to milk Road radio JM thanks for having us thanks so much super excited to have both of you lots to talk about when we talk about safe but I want to start sort of at the origin of safe safe was really built with the classic adage that you build something you yourself want and the nosis team needed a multisig to secure

its funds and so they built that and then that sort of proliferated and became a suite of Dow Tools H and safe really was sort of the first Dow tool to find product Market fit as many others said oh wow we also need that as well take us back to the beginning and what was the initial vision for safe when you spun off from nois and how does that lead us to up until today so nosis as maybe few know originally started to build prediction markets so that's a primitive that aims to have like a

financial incentiv to Source information from people so in order to make predictions you have Financial stake that people can in a way bet on and then you can Source what's the most likely outcome that was the idea nosis did an Ico in order to to build this and they happen to run into a lot of challenges on the way because it was 2016 2017 and a lot of the infrastructure a lot of the things that we today expect which just not there yet and one of the things was they raised funds from the Ico and they were just like sitting on a lot of Eve and how do you manage this eve securely like you don't want to just put it on a private key and yeah risk that I know the key gets compromised and the entire

funding for the project is gone Stefan gor who's one of the founders of nosis then wrote his own wallet which was a multi signature wallet which allowed the founding team of noses to jointly control an account and to manage these Ico proceedings in a more secure way and they open sourced this multi signature wallet and that's one of the few things that worked quite well with nosis often times just buil something themselves and then open source it and happened that everyone else started using it so literally during the 2017 Ico C I would say like 90% of all the projects used the nosis multi signature wallet because it was just the most battle tested it was open source it was available and yeah how it happens there that once a

lot of people use something they want new features they want like a hosted version of it they want to have all all kinds of requests then come in and nosis had to build a team to deal with that and to to maintain the project and and the team was formed got further adopted and then the idea was like let's bring like this technology multi signature walls to everyone and that's when the safe project was started within noses and over time it just became so big that kind of didn't make sense to have it as a side project so that's when then it became a spin-off and yeah the safe then wasn't really a multi signature wallet anymore because this new project was much more like the te the core

technology under it is smart accounts which mean that they can program the ownership on chain and this programmability then have had all kinds of benefits for different user groups and one of them is Dows as you also mentioned because also nois itself formed into a DA and from the founding team controlling that wallet they wanted to give the ownership to like the entire Community like the gno token holders should decide how the the treasury should be used and then the safe was the perfect tooling for that because it can reprogram how the account is controlled and they just hand over the ownership to like a snapshot space which then can vote offchain and have like an onchain execution of these votes and so it was kind of the story of building for for

themselves and it happened that the market was moving along with it and yeah now we're here 100 billion dollars of assets on on safe people using it from like the largest Dow treasuries to vitalic bin himself and nft collectors and it's became this like Ubbi this tooling that's everywhere yeah we've I've certainly used use safe on a couple of projects that I participated in as well so very familiar so safe spun out from nosis back in 20122 and Lucas I heard you say previously that when this happened you guys sort of sat down and said okay what is our long-term Mission here what's our vision and you said that the goal was for all accounts in web 3 to be smart

accounts by 2030 whether they be Dow whether they be company whether they be individual accounts how are we doing towards achieving that goal I think we're quite far along on this journey at least when it comes to like high value user groups as mentioned like a hundred billion dollars of of assets that's coming from like DS market makers Venture funds like all these high value user groups which have mostly benefited from like the advanced security of smart accounts so the ability to have like a multi signature scheme but also say you have like a very secure setup with multi for all the funds but then it can give a spending limits for example to someone in your team for lower risk transactions

and kind of this balancing of accessibility and security was what what made it quite useful for these high value user groups but long term we think everyone using web free in any form any for any use case any User Group should benefit from Smart accounts because they're programmable account so it can have additional features so we see it a bit like the move from like the old Nokia phones to smartphones because you can finally you don't have to switch phones when you want to have like a new feature a new button or something like you you just have apps and you can put apps on the smartphone and it evolves over the needs and it can adjust to different users and this flexibility really will over time reach everyone in

web free so we we set our mission to convert every account into a smart account and it's been a a niche kind of idea maybe five years ago six years ago when we set off and nowadays I think it's very broadly accepted at least in the eum ecosystem that that's where we should be heading that's where the term account abstraction came up which means exactly that let's make every account a smart account and most people nowadays believe in that mission yeah I think smart account is better branding than account abstraction so much whoever came up with that with that term did a better job Andre I want to get you in in just a minute to talk about the safe token but before we do I just want to spend one I

want one more question around smart accounts because I want to make sure that our audience and listeners really understand why smart accounts are so important in order to improve really just the usability every day we all know using crypto right now is quite frankly a pain in the ass it's not simple it's not easy there's so many steps and clicks you have to make in order to make transactions anding bridging and all of that is going to be solved and we're heading in that direction but in your mind and Lucas or Andre feel free to take this question or would love to hear from both of you what are the major things that you see that smart accounts are going to enable uh in the future

I'll take that one and then I'll I'll pause for next few questions maybe so one of the key things is is onboarding because everyone coming into crypto space like they they need a wallet if they really want to do cool things so obviously you can onboard on the centralized exchange but you're very much limited what you can do there you can buy and sell some meme tokens but that's about it and if you really want to interact with with applications you need a wallet and then you have this situation where you need to write down a seat phrase because the wallet asks you do and you write down these like 12 random words on a piece of paper and then you realize okay maybe that's not a good idea because I don't know where to put the paper that no one else finds it but I also find it if I need it in the

future so if if they're smart enough they actually use a a password manager or or something like that to then secure the theeg phase but in any case it's like a huge struggle because private Key Management it's not a new thing it's been there since cryptography and it's unsolved problem to the large extent like how can you distribute private keys to a lot of people in a way that's secure and convenient at the same time and that's something smart accounts will solve over time because they allow for different kinds of private Keys actually to controls wallets so right now you have these ecdsa keys so that's the one that you write down on a piece of paper but smart accounts also support pass keys for example pass keys are private

Keys that's are very much used in web to space as well like Apple and Google and other big web 2 companies are very much pushing that because they want to get rid of passwords and pass keys are just a a better way to replace passwords and they're supported by all password managers and so on you can save them on iCloud keychain and so suddenly when you on board to crypto you don't have to write down a seeg phrase anymore you actually uh just add a pass key to your iCloud key keychain and that's then controlling your wallet and this just 10x improves the onboarding experience and it it actually makes it feasible for people who are not that technical to them on board but then even when you start using web free applications like there's all kinds of challenges like

okay I want to interact with this app but it's another chain how do I bridge to this other chain I to have this native token on this other chain because they don't use Eve or I need to bridge Eve to pay for gas fees and like all these things which I know so some people might have gotten used to it but it's definitely always for new users just a massive headache and the smart accounts can allow for sponsor transactions so suddenly the app that you're interacting with is paying for your transaction fees for example which it's obvious when you go to a website you're not paying for the fees that AWS charges to host that website it's actually the website paying it for the users because there makes sense but in web fre we got used to

having people pay these microtransactions to pay for gas fees that's another thing that can be solved and there's like a whole range uh of of ux problems like smart accounts will make possible that you don't have to care where what chain an application is on so you just interact with an app and whatever Network whether you take assets from one chain you move to order to another chain where then interactive open app these things should be abstracted away from the user so it's just a massive user experience and security UNL yeah it reminds me of a past interview that we had uh with one of the founders of web 3 o which is a smart account wallet provider and he was saying that they had worked with

McDonald's on a web3 campaign and that through that campaign They removed the seed phrase because no user that's signing up for McDonald's onchain activity wants to set up a freeze seed phrase or quite frankly really cares about self- custody at that point in their journey and he said they saw an 80% increase in conversion rate just from that simple change it's amazing what I think we've all gotten so used to it right like we're so accustomed to living in this world and operating in this way and then you go to a normie and you're like yeah like sure go ahead set up a wallet and they're like what what's a wallet oh and now I need a seed

phasing where do I put this oh I have to buy a safe what and I have to keep a safe in my house like it doesn't yeah it's not user friendly at all I mean I'm surprised how many people actually got to that point like how many people jump over those hurdles and actually use web free because it's it's non trivial we're all here for the meme coins right isn't that why we're all here I guess I do think that like we preaching like with self custody self custody can be can be scary right so the vision of everybody wants to be their own bank or should be their own bank it's definitely not um anything that that everybody buys into especially when the risk attach and I think like all the points that Lucas had mentioned it's so incredible that this

is so general purpose a general purpose technology and so flexible that you can start off so easy so the example you brought up with maybe I get on boarded through a McDonald's campaign but it's a reusable account so now I have like a one-on-one signer and now I get like more and more confident I have more and more use cases so I add maybe tofa so second signers TFA is very well known for for everyone nobody's thinking about it but in crypto somehow we secure things on these 12 words so I think like this sort of flexibility that one has only that is possible with with smart accounts and that is like gradually I think of it how a kid grows up with money and they have like the lenyard

around their neck and that little thing and when they have to pay like that it cannot be removed right to then a fully fledged wallet and in crypto we're basically just giving them one solution hoping it fits all needs and smart account can be really well use case specific all right let's go to the big news of the hour this show we are actually recording before April 23rd which is the big date that's coming up that we're going to discuss in a second whereas this actually is going to be published after April 23rd so hopefully not too much happens in the next two weeks to change anything but as of April 23rd the safe token will become transferable this is a major Milestone

and not all tokens are created equal they're not all created the same there's so many ways to create a token and in your case you did something unique that not many have done which was you separated tge with token transferability maybe you could tell us a little bit about the story and then of the steps that happened here and why you took these steps and then we'll talk about what comes after token transferability on April 23rd yeah absolutely and I think it's exactly what you're saying like separating um these events from one another and looking historically for when terms of SEO everything was in one also the fundraising was included with promise of

products with uh the token with Distributing right away and that just LED as we saw like to a lot of chaos at least I mean there is some of the projects that that made it through that that delivered not on a lot but definitely this one approach fits all is not something that going forward would work with safe as you said it was separated so the funding round was closed in September 2022 safe Dow launched the safe token launched but it launched non-transferable and a lot of people always confused what that means does that soulbound or how does that work and it's pretty interesting because it's generally esc20 contract and very you know that there is an unpause or a pause

function that can be called anc20 contract if added to it from the beginning so the token was launched as pause and has to be this function has to be called to unpause it and once it's unpaused it can never be paused again but this function allow to distribute the token to um certain stakeholders so to distribute it from the foundation to the foundation to backers to ecosystem participants that we call Guardians that have been building over the years on safe technology and to users and so the interesting part is it could be distributed without having it transferable at the same time so the timeline then was that after September almost like two months afterwards in

November there was a first vote on token transferability no 2022 and that one didn't pass and there were couple of reasons for that uh especially that the Dow was very early on and uh a lot of internal processes uh still had to be figured out also like the vision for the Dow how should it fit into the broader safe ecosystem kind of saying okay so we're not ready for it and we're opting for Progressive decentralization and um after the vote got rejected the Dow agreed on a road map on what Milestones have to be achieved to bring this to a vote again and and here like five miles Milestones have been agreed upon by the delegates

and by the token holders one of them that the user air drop passes that was just by time one was to agree on a constitution so what is like the north star of the Dow what kind of purpose does it have goals how does it want to achieve this then it was the governance framework so how do we make actually decisions within the Dow how do we apply resources what are we going to fund how are we going to fund this so This got into the resource allocation framework and then very last stone for all of this was how does the token tie into this so what do we want actually from the design space of the token so there was the token utility and after working through these five Milestones together with delegates and with guardians so the ecosystem participants once the last

Milestone was achieved the da set up the proposal again to make it transferable that was in May and when it passed in actually yesterday April 15th 8 Days Later can become transferable so on the 23rd of April I want to dive into some of those Milestones particularly around token utility but before we do that why don't other tokens decide to separate tge and token transferability if it's so easy to do and it clearly allows for a focus on governance in the beginning which we all I mean every token when they launch you ask them what their token utility is and

they all say governance that's the main token utility initially especially because most tokens haven't yet figured out look it's easy to look at ethereum and be like yeah they figured out this deflationary token mechanism well we forget that ethereum has been around for a decade and they've had a long time to figure that out it is difficult to figure out that type of tokenomics so why is it that most tokens don't separate these and what do you think maybe do you think that more tokens should be separating these two events I think it's Just Like A New Concept a new way of approaching it and since we've launched this one we were covered by different like Dows newsletters and people have looked at this and seen it as okay so this is real progress of

decentralization this is something where there's no distractions there's no transferability out there's no also the Dow treasury is not available presenting so I think people see like kind of the advantages but also the challenges and look at us kind of how how this went I do think there's other that have gone this route at a smaller scale and have experimented with it but I definitely think Progressive decentralization is definitely nothing new and everybody does it in a different way tying it to the Token making the token transferable on different Milestones I think at our scale that is unique but I think definitely it can serve and I already heard like it serves as a blueprint for for other projects what do you expect to

see on April 23rd obviously when this episode comes out we'll be past that date any expectations on your end any any challenges or fears that you have I I think everybody is within all very well prepared in the sense of like having worked for a long time towards it I think what the most people are excited about is um about having new people join the Dow so new governance activity and so far it was very possible to be very active in the D otherwise we wouldn't have reached all these Milestones but it was always through delegation or was not really possible to get own voting power because we couldn't transfer it so I

think definitely one of the things that is exciting and maybe it's scary but it's more exciting is kind of having new people join it out and a really new activity to it and bringing it to to a new level and I think that the good thing is that all of these Frameworks are not just Frameworks just to have them but it's really to kind of prepare for that scale and so we have like quite a resilient structure from the get go now so especially when it comes to Define exactly stakehold to capture resistance Etc so I think that is something that is that is exciting and I know that a lot of people are kind of interested to getting more involved and that probably is one of the major things you always hear like how can we get

involved how can we be part of this and there will be a very clear path forward for that I just want to go back for a second so you mentioned this pause function in an erc20 contract so is it as simple as you just flip a switch basically and then it becomes transferable is it that simple well at the end it seems like a switch but there is there's a process beforehand and it's it's very interesting because it's save D governance is offchain so it's offchain votes through snapshot which a lot of people know as a tool where decisions can be made and then they can be executed through it's called reality e um on chain so there's a sort of bridge that brings an on offchain

decisions onchain so that is how it works and through this transition onchain then this unpa function is being called and that would be the switch at the end but it all comes out of or goes back to to to the Dow vote on Snapshot that has passed yesterday and obviously when a token becomes transferable there is opportunity now to speculate on it to buy and sell out of it is that a factor that you consider when so many we've recorded a few podcasts recently we've had ethery on the podcast and we've had mode on the podcast so my mind is very

much in points programs which I know is not your objective by any means but my mind is very much in this incentive mechanisms and how chains are and blockchain is able to use Capital formation in order to incentivize users and incentivize developers uh and so we've talked a lot about having the need to have a season one and then a season two and how far can you go with that and the the considerations that go into the insuring that users and developers stick around combined with building out long-term product Market fit now in your case you have very strong product Market fit so maybe you don't need to consider these incentive mechanisms as much but

is the concern on your end of people as a result of April 23rd selling tokens and just moving out or do you think that'll balance out because as you mentioned more will just move in yeah I think these are kind of like two questions one is the idea of what like host speculation having a like potentially a price out influences like the road map or influences certain things and I like I think this is something this is something exactly we talked about if you like decouple the protocol the building of it building out structures from then launching the token like you have these resilient structures is not it's not like that the team has just formed has formed a road map decision and then the

token is out so I think that the effect of any sort of speculation that happens in the market around it is nothing that influences internally any sort of of operations or product not also not within the Dow this second question around incentivizing and uh rewards is also something that that uh we're looking at so also on the 23rd we will launch a Rewards program you might also call it a points program but I think this is like a catchall for a lot of different things how it's being done for Us rewards program is primarily about discovering exploring how safe users are using the safe technology and there's so many different ways as I said at the

beginning it's like a general purpose technology and sometimes it feels a little overwhelming there's so many things you can do so what we're exploring through that is for instance making your safe account more secure for instance turning on a recovery module and you get incentivized for this adding a second signer there may be certain things that need a little bit of extra push for people to do and that is something that uh I think that incentive and Rewards program are good at if structured correctly and the second part is highlighting different parts of the safe ecosystem and maybe people here know that you don't have to use for instance safe wallet our own interface for but there's several interfaces there that built on top of safe so being able

to explore these through an incentive program different industry verticals from Identity to bridging Etc this is something that we will explore with this with this points program or with the rewards program and I think that's kind of like decoupling this plus having a quite a product with product Market fit but that is so general purpose that it makes sense to highlight certain things there's a huge chance more that challenge yeah and it makes a ton of sense that you're launching a whether you want to call it points program Rewards program in sent of program various words for the same thing that's called safe pass I believe that Launches on April 23rd as well we'll we'll link to that in the show notes because I

think all of our listeners if you're not already involved in safe even if you are involved in using Safe products you should check out the rewards program because you might be able to win some get some rewards for your activity I want to go to the Token utility tell us a little bit about what is the purpose of safe token how is it being used how have you thought about the token utility as you built it and token utility has been the last Milestone towards Tok like there was a lot discussion a lot of lot attention around it so how uh we approaching it is that there is no thing like now token utility is done right but it's something that that also evolves and evolves in parallel to the product and uh par to to how users use it if one

has a look at the token utility um framework as it's outlined and agreed upon by the Dow what it first does is outline the to utility right now and it is at the core governance which means the decision about the treasury of The Da also the decisions about like meta governance so how certain decisions are being made but it also opens up a clear path for the design space and future explorations of it and we did feel that this also was the push through the delegates to kind of showcase okay so how can the topen tie in right now or in the future and how we are thinking about it often a lot is like different layers so different layers of abstraction at

the middle you have account abstraction that abstracts it away from a lot of complexities when it comes to the keys but then the next layer you have Network abstraction so abstracting it away from the complexities of having gazillions of l2s out there and and not knowing anymore how to manage funds across it and then the next one which is more industry specific is payment abstraction so being able to pay for goods and services and without actually thinking in which digital currency it would be and the last one is security abstraction so really being able to have this modularity within smart accounts but still to have them safe secure and to

have them in a way that they're really interoperable and that different smart account standards work across different standards that is something where we outlined or was outlined the design space for it and where now the Dow actually is being funded and is being incentivized to actually look how the token can play into these abstraction layers and we do have a resource allocation that's called oprra it's outcome based res location and one of the strategies exploring different utility Explorations so there's a working group that has actually also yesterday on the 15th has uh been approved and that is looking alongside the product stack um for future

explorations of the token so it's kind of showing the direction like knowing where we are which is the core governance and kind of like shining the light to the right direction instead of having a blank canvas and next that's wonderful is there any timelines that you I mean obviously these are all working groups that I'm sure are rapidly prototyping and testing out different things but these four sort of categories of abstraction you talked about particularly I mean Network abstraction is one that just stands out to me as such a need in the space as you said we're not slowing down in launching more chains uh we're actually speeding up which is not a bad thing by any means all these chains are able to create

Innovation and new use cases and focus on building features and different product Suites that help different developers in different ways do do you have any and Lucas maybe this question goes to you as well any timelines and when you see progress happening around Network abstraction or these other categories that you mentioned as you say it's it's non-trivial because there's quite some complexities to each of them and we're really at the beginning but definitely the network abstraction part like I think we need to make significant proess progress this year because we are at the point where there's like new l2s popping up everywhere and this is not a a sustainable way to onboard people to web free and we need a solution where people come they get a wallet and they

don't have to care what network they interact with and especially with smart accounts and there's this thing that maybe in the next weeks we will hear more about is like a key store rollup which is really the one of the ways to achieve this network obstruction by having like a it gets a little bit technical but having like a place where your account lives your account logic but then all the different layer TOS on there you can as a user like CK proof towards this account so just verify that this is your account and then execute the transaction on this layer TOs and this is the technical thing that's that's under the hood and this will then allow for this network abstruct abstracted world and there are certain needs there within these key store

rollups which may benefit from a token being part of it because like these CK proofs or like how these key store rollups work in general there's always the tradeoff that has to be done between decentralization of it like how trustless is it speed of it how how fast can you actually make these authentications and when you change something on this key to roll up how fast is it propagated and so on and cost because it can be very trustless and go via layer one or it can be less trustless and be more of a trusted system to propagate this information and like to make these trade-offs and to to implement them like a token can play a huge role so I think that's of the the

key things probably this year which should be explored next to maybe like other topics also to just build on what Andrea has been saying around these different abstraction layers like another way to look into this or another way to look at this is to see smart accounts like a smartphone which you can uh build applications on it and then what we eventually want to build is the app store for this Smartphone if you think about how apps work on a smartphone like you go to an app store which you trust in a way way and you have a curation mechanism behind it and then you download apps and sometimes they're for free and sometimes you pay for it and sometimes they're for free but then you pay for it within the app and like all these things actually have

a comparison then to Smart accounts like you have like these features that will be implemented for smart accounts we call them modules and sometimes they're also called plugins that can be created and there's always this challenge like which ones I trust and which ones I don't trust so there's some need for verification for curation that's behind it but there's also a need then for these plugins to monetize so they want to charge fees could be like a defi plugin there's this idea of having a account native yield so you just deposit assets to your account and these plugins just create yield out of it and there need to be ways for then these plugins to become like a sustainable business or to somehow monetize and like these

things can then all benefit from having a token involved because it can be like a curation mechanism like a decentralized curation mechanism so it's more like a a community controlled App Store so to say but it can also be a way to facilitate payments between users and plug-in providers and so on so these are all things that will be relevant in the long run being said that probably the network abstraction part is the one that's in the short term the the most critical you bring up uh monetization and revenue and business models and I want to chat about the business model for safe and understand that but before we get to that you guys have had just an an incredible year so far hitting so many milestones we mentioned the 100

billion Milestone of tvl making you the smart contracts storing the largest tvl other than the eth stake Staker smart contract so yeah just incredible what are the other major Milestones that you guys have hit this year that you've been really excited to see for me personally one exciting one is reaching 10 million smart accounts being deployed and one of the major contributors to that is worldcoin which is interesting because probably 99.9% of worldcoin users so worldcoin being a a proof of personhood protocol they have a wallet and that's building on safe but most people they have no no idea that safe is used under the hood which is great I love that it's

in a way how Linux works as well people probably interact 10 times per day with a Linux system but they have no clue that there's Linux running on this ATM they get the money from and and stuff like that that's a long-term Vision that save become so ubiquitous and everywhere but still no one knows about it but it touches everyone's lives exactly and worldcoin deploying 10 million smart accounts or the ones that are maybe too early to tell and know when this is airing but like entire l2s where everyone using a specific L2 is using safe under the hood this is going to be a major unlock milestone for for safe but yeah maybe Andre also has some of his favorites yes no I think these ones were like the major highlights I think

there's some shift like where people do know also that they're interacting with safe like where they're excited about it so for instance when this air is for like crypto the game will just be done they using save for the pot to distribute and that is just something really interesting because it is something that is that easy to set up something that a team field comfortable that I think 800 players feel comfortable to do p their funds there yeah there is definitely the part of safe under the hood and invisible to the end user but there's also the part of safe as a trusted brand and as a trusted trusted technology so yeah we see tons of more social apps using it to to

onboard more users Andre I know that you're uh participating in crypto the game how you feeling about your chances you going to win first of all I have no idea how I came that far I think because I stand out which has been like the right strategy so I'm just the right amount of inactive to not be eliminated immediately but also not a Target at all because I am not really good at any of the games nor do I include any cabals or anything so somehow this managed to fly under of the radar no it has like it's interesting it's it's more of a networking event by now and you said it's The Unofficial it's the inofficial conference that's happening yeah we'll see that's great fun Lucas this episode

comes out May 5th I don't know if that changes your ability to talk about entire l2s that are going to launch on safe as the default account does it I mean there's multiples but one people know by now so I leave it that that okay let's go to the business model of safe obviously you're you know building this under thehood Tech as you said that is being used from worldcoin to crypto the game to socialy apps to even nosis their new nosis pay card being used across so many use cases and so many different apps what is the business model how to saf make revenue is there a set business

model or are you still exploring and figuring that out as you go so one thing I think we did really well in the past was to not sell any equity in some company to investors because for safe really the the thing that is is most important is is the safe token and it having utility within the ecosystem and this is actually even part of the safe Dow Constitution so this North Star of the safe Dow to have the utility of the safe token really be attached to the ecosystem uh growth so safe not just being a product it's really uh this underlying infrastructure for this emerging ecosystem with at some point every account being a smart account it

hopefully has quite some relevance to be like the the underlying Foundation to that and so that we're thinking more in how can utility of the the safe token be implemented within this ecosystem and that then goes back to this like app store topic around security and payment abstraction where this could be interesting and network abstraction that's really the core Focus it's still we've seen this also with other projects like Unis swap Unis swap also has this idea of there can be both monetization on the interface level but there there's also some value in the protocol itself and so safe also has safe wallet which is like a showcase wallet that's

building on safe and it would be a missed opportunity to also not capture some of that value there in some way but the key thing there is is to have it in a way that's actually Community aligned so that it actually some of the value that's captured there actually goes back to the to the ecosystem and there we have the foundations built with like the resource allocation FR framework and the way the Dow operates and I think that's also something in the in the next weeks where we can share a little bit more how we're thinking about this part of the equation yeah it's something that uh we've talked Lots about on our show and in our newsletter in the past is this concept of value acral to token holders

is just an enormous potential that blockchain offers that we I mean I guess you could say that holding a stock or an equity and having dividends is sort of similar uh but this is a a much newer a much more direct way to do that and to do it with governance attached and so seeing Unis swap sort of being the first to think about that voting around that thinking that they might go in that direction it's really exciting to see so so it's awesome to hear that safe is also thinking in that way before we wrap up I just want to give you both a chance to tell us what you see as next and the future whether it be a year a few years

out in each of your roles from the governance side and more from the building of all the Safe products side what's on your road mapap for the rest of this year and Beyond maybe I'll start from the the government side or from the Dow side I I think after Inception of the Dow September 2022 working through the road map together with delegates and Guardians having that a transferable token I think like if we talk one year from now on one will really see the impact but hopefully the impact a dow can make on like the scalability of an ecosystem so very often it's being said Dows are dead or being looked at the inefficiency and down yes and a

decentralized decision making having a lot of decision makers can come and slow down but overall executing on the prise of like owning the ownership layer and having other people being able to contribute in a really scalable manner to an open Tech stack and seeing how our token and how the structure around it to all the people that are involved how that can really facilitate this I think that's going to be really interesting to see all the builders that will be building not only through grants programs but also through larger initiatives not being value extracted or somehow feeling that they're subscribing to something but they're actually owning the infrastructure that they're building on I think this for counter for counter

struction is kind of like something that we will see and that I'm very excited about Lucas what's on your road map for the rest of the year bunch of things one key one will be how do we actually have this network obstructed world for web free this this is going to be key Focus another one is going to be achieving better Recovery Solutions or also we sometimes call them hybrid custody Solutions because they will allow to onboard really the next uh 10 100 million users to to web free with some handholding so the idea being that you don't have to on board to a wallet and from day one have full self custody but you can maybe onboard via centralized exchange to a wallet where the

centralized exchange account still can recover your wallet in case you lose your keys and or this Recovery Agent could be like a trusted entity like a bank or something and there there's quite some Dynamics there like a lot of interested parties also institutional parties that want to explore that and that's something that I'm quite excited about other ones will be general onboarding of onboarding tools for for safe like pass keys will be something which will explode and this will also contribute a huge amount to the growth of of smart accounts and then maybe finally an inter interesting thing that's currently being discussed in the ethereum core development Community is a way that you can actually upgrade your

current like Legacy wallet to a Smart wallet there's some EIP so some e Improvement proposals that are being discussed e 474 and EIP 503 which would make exactly this possible that you can say I created originally with metamask my seat phrase account but now actually want to upgrade it into a smart account and this is really going to be a huge unlock because it will mean that everyone that's using web free right now can become a smart account users and it will be easier also for applications and other stakeholders to really optimize for smart accounts because they don't need to serve these Legacy wallets anymore because when in doubt they could just upgrade them to to Smart accounts

yeah so important that we don't leave all the Legacy wallets behind that would be a a big Miss and I know that there's those eips coming up in a lot of a lot talk if anybody wants to learn about those follow Lucas on Twitter and he's talking constantly about EIP was it 347 is did I get that one right 3074 3074 man it's all these VIPs is so hard to remember all the numbers holy gez I also like that you mention this Progressive self- custody and Andre you kind of mentioned this at the beginning of the show actually not everybody wants self- custody and I know that the decentralization Maxis that are listening to this are going to be be like well everybody must have self-

custody and self- sovereignty and censorship resistance and I believe in that stuff and that's important but there is a large Spectrum here and we need to develop tools and technology for the full spectrum not just for one very small Niche end of the spectrum do you guys have any ideas or have you done any research on how many people actually want self- custody and from like a Normy perspective do they even really care about that I think the number of people who really want self custody is quite small mostly it's a a necessary evil to get what people want which is flexibility or control they don't want to be locked into like a custodial system where the custodian dictates what

they can do and what they cannot do they want to do whatever they please and assets wherever and like that's a cool thing about self- custody but no one wants the responsibility no one wants to have the security challenges obviously that's something people take into account and that's why I think where a maxion is that people should have the right for self- custody I think there should be a possibility but most people probably would deviate to something that would look more like a hybrid custody system where they have a bank that maybe is checking each transactions and is blocking malicious transactions but if they start blocking transactions they actually want to go through they should have the right they should have like a a master key or set of keys that they can take out and say

like now I cut the courts with this bank because I don't trust them anymore and I go full self custody or migrate to another trusted party like that's really the thing that we should be after and that's what we achieve when we have accounts be built on a decentralized leder and having this composable architecture for user accounts because right now if you have a bank account they can just say like I cannot migrate your JP Morgan Bank account to UBS because that's not the same system and so on but if you have everything built on the same system that will be possible and then I'm going to Lobby to wherever to make sure that this becomes a human right that people actually can like in Europe you have the right to own your data or to have your data deleted and so

on like there should exactly also be a right for for self- custody and I think that's one of the things which maybe five 10 years out I don't know maybe 20 years but at some point that's something to to strive towards very well said I completely agree uh okay before we wrap up here uh just want to give you both a chance to tell our us users where they can follow you uh whether it be on X or whatever platform and any final call to action or something you might like to see our listeners take action on I think a good way to follow us is on X or Twitter I think that a good way to keep up with the da is actually going through our for our website and going there and

then to be navigate to the governance Tab and being able to see everything that goes on with the Dow otherwise of course we're also on podcaster and any sort of of platform and Andre I know your tweets of Andre on X or Twitter we'll put the the link in our show notes sorry if uh too many people blow up your DMs I hope you're okay with that Lucas what about you I'm also next sometimes at sh Lucas s c h o r my DMs are open so slide in there if you have any questions on Smart eons and yeah fantastic wonderful well thank you both so much for the time today been an absolute pleasure uh to all of our listeners by the time you hear this the safe token will be transferable I hope

that those that are not already holders of safe tokens take this an opportunity to join in to really a leading Dow that is showing the way for governance a great way for anybody in the space to learn about governance and see what the opportunities are to get involved and also to learn the playbooks and for anybody out there launching a token I really hope you think about this concept of separating tge from token transferability it is a new playbook that I hope more projects will take on Lucas Andre thank you so much for your time today thanks for listening everybody have a great day thank you for listening to milk Road radio the easiest path to get smarter about crypto if you like this episode share it and hit subscribe or follow so you don't miss

out on the next one there's also a link in the description to our free 5minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game then we'll leave a link to milk Road Pro as well your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto is risky so you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and we'll see you in the next one