Safe FEX

 Safe Labs aims to balance security and convenience without compromise, reflecting a shift towards meeting both cypherpunk and enterprise needs.

• The North Korea-linked ByBit hack, the biggest-ever crypto heist, was a catalyst for Safe Labs' creation, despite Safe’s core contracts remaining secure.Safe, the popular multiparty crypto wallet previously called Gnosis Safe, has launched a new development unit, Safe Labs, in a move aimed at consolidating its operations and sharpening its product roadmap after it was targeted in February's $1.4 billion ByBit hack — the largest crypto heist to date.
• The new entity will serve as the core development arm of Safe, which until now had outsourced technical work to a separate development firm, a structure commonly used across the crypto industry, Safe Labs Chief Executive Rahul Rumalla said on Wednesday. Safe Labs will operate directly under the umbrella of the Safe Foundation, a nonprofit organization.
• In an interview with CoinDesk, Rumalla said the transition reflects a broader strategy shift toward building products that can meet both the ideological standards of cypherpunk culture and the practical demands of enterprise clients.
• “This framework that we are forced to operate in — it actually forces you to compromise one over the other: If you want more security, you have to compromise on convenience, and if you want more convenience, you compromise on security,” Rumalla said.
• “We at Safe Labs, we step back and we reject this framework. We don’t want to operate in this model where we have to compromise one over the other.”
• Post-Hack Pivot
• According to Rumalla, the ByBit hack was a “catalyst” for the creation of Safe Labs.
• While Safe’s core smart contracts remained uncompromised, its user-facing web application was infiltrated with malicious code by North Korea’s Lazarus Group. That attack enabled the hackers to trick ByBit’s CEO into signing off on a transaction that rerouted funds into their control.
• “What we saw with an attack like this is that our core values were used against us,” Rumalla said. “Anonymity, privacy, self-custody, transparency, open source — these were used against us.”
• Despite the breach, Rumalla said user confidence in the Safe platform remained strong. The application saw “practically no churn” in the aftermath and continues to process 10% of all transaction volume across Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible networks.
• “We’re not defending against cyberattacks,” Rumalla said. “We are defending cyber warfare, and that requires a mindset shift — not just at the project level, not at the company level, but as Ethereum or even crypto as a whole.”
• From Ideals to Infrastructure
• The move to formalize internal development echoes similar shifts by other major protocols, including Morpho and Polygon, which have both recently made moves to streamline decision-making and improve accountability with more traditional organizational structures.
• In parallel, Safe Labs is also refocusing on product design. The team is currently working on a “V2” version of its wallet, which Rumalla described as more “opinionated” — meaning bolder product direction, particularly for institutional users.
• “What we’re going to be launching and testing in the future is a subscription plan, essentially, that’s called Safe Pro — or Safe for enterprises, Safe for institutions — very much around that realm,” he said. “We’re going to basically package this opinionated product that’s more for the user segments that have higher security needs and more customization appetite.”
• “We need to operate at startup speed,” Rumalla added. "That in itself is the premise of why we need to operate as a separate, independent entity. We need to align where we need to align, which is on the mission, but we need to be a bit more independent in terms of how we execute."
• With more than $60 billion in total value locked and over $1 trillion in historical transaction volume, according to Rumalla, Safe remains one of crypto’s most battle-tested self-custody platforms. The team, now roughly 40 strong and based in Berlin, is betting that its next chapter — one that embraces opinionated product design without sacrificing its open-source ethos — will help define how wallets look in a world heading toward a trillion-dollar on-chain economy.
• "Our mission is simple: making self custody easy and secure," Rumalla said. "That's a win for everybody "