Safe Apps: Bringing multisig security to DeFi - Lukas Schor, Gnosis

um d5 is great but it as as you've often seen on rect or on twitter there is a whole lot that can go wrong in in really bad ways um we're securing literally billions of dollars with with code that you know a lot can go wrong and of course you have different exploits flash loans it gets pretty crazy um the people at gnosis are in a really good uh place to talk about this uh their their smart contract uh their multi-sig wallet i believe is securing many millions of dollars worth of value perhaps more um and uh it's a great time to learn about uh more about security in the d5 realm uh lucas from gnosis is going to provide us from some insight on that yeah hi everyone pleasure to be here thanks for joining um can i start off yeah take it away awesome uh all right uh so yeah i'm here to talk about safe apps and that's basically our way at noses how we will bring uh multisig security to d5 as we've seen before a lot can go wrong with with d5 and we're just providing one more piece towards making the entire defile landscape more secure with defense with safe apps but first some formalities that's the guy talking to you right now i'm lucas i'm product manager at gnosis and you can find me on twitter or telegram using this this handle um yeah for those that don't know what gnosis does we're actually building uh essential infrastructure for decentralized finance that includes basically how you create trade and hold digital assets and today i'm going to talk about nosy safe which is our hold part of what we do and for those that are not familiar with gnosis safe it's essentially a self-custodial account that allows you to securely manage digital assets it's a smart contract account which allows you to have stuff like multi-signature schemes which a lot of projects used to have collective fund management which is super important and not just one person in your team can run away with all your funds but that's like you actually have this on chain security but also like a bunch more advantages from uh this smart contract account thing but i'm not gonna go too much into what nosis safe is just here a little screenshot that's what our interface our web interface looks like we also have a set of mobile apps um as well as a downloadable desktop app of what you can see here so entire suite of interfaces how we can interact with this smart contract account and yeah we we got quite some traction recently uh with uh like end of last year we had hit 10 000 uh safe accounts created on ethereum mainnet a bunch more on xdi and another maintenance we support while 10 000 accounts doesn't sound too much uh even in d5 but the fact is that the the users that use nosy safe are actually projects mostly so that's no names such as maker synthetics are have users of gnosis safe but also one inch is storing uh like their most of their one inch wall tokens on the nose is safer comp and it's mostly projects but also high net worth individuals and recently we have a lot more doubts actually using nosis safe but yeah the bottom line is mostly people that store a lot of funds because they they require this additional level of security that is enabled through multi signature and yeah all in all we now store more than 50 15 billion us dollar worth of digital assets um about 20 percent of that is is in ether and 80 is erc20 tokens and actually on those the safe account gnosis safe contracts more than two percent of the entire supply is currently uh secured so um that's right at up there with the the if to deposit contract in terms of like how much effort is stored in just this one single uh set of uh smart contracts so a lot of trust obviously also this is uh yeah basically that that showcases the trust that people do have in these contracts they've been around along for quite some time uh we've got a bug bounty program running for uh over two and a half years now and yeah we yeah so it well it basically became the standard multi-signature wallet on ethereum and now basically we are uh pushing for these safe apps which is our way of how uh interactions with decentralized finance should work from these uh mostly safe accounts and we're basically what is what is safe apps we're basically putting the like how the adapts work on its head so usually you have dabs that are stand-alone decentralized applications and then you come and plug in your wallet with safe app apps it actually works the other way around so you interact with decentralized finance still through this one single interface and then developer can build their own dapps into this interface um so it's it allows users to interact with ethereum through the nosy safe interface while leveraging all these benefits that smart contract accounts enable such as patching transactions and multi-signature security which i will go more into detail later on um here's just a few examples um this is a little safe app that was built by by the balancer community that allows you to swap tokens through the balancer protocol yeah and here's a app built by the savior team that allows you to stream money that you have stored in your nosy safe multisig and here for example there was a stream open that runs from beginning to end of march and just consecutively streams those assets to the recipient and so you can already see that the user doesn't have to leave the noses safe they don't need to go to disable your app to do one thing and to the balancer app to the other thing so already uh quite some user experience improvements for the users and we have a bunch more safe apps that we are currently supporting that ranges from uh like trading on sushi swap uh that's uh an exchange from from zapper that we support one inch of course uh you can stake snx tokens you can upgrade your open zeppelin upgradable contracts you can manage your request invoices um yeah all that stuff but uh we're also working now together with projects to bring even more use cases to know to save involving managing nfts um yeah managing and controlling smart contracts and all things that are surrounding like the use case of nosy safe as a governance tool so really excited about new capabilities that will be enabled through these safe apps um yeah one benefit of safe apps uh i would ask you to like raise your hand if you've encountered this but i'm not just assuming that everyone is raising their hands uh because that's actually quite a common uh scheme that apps use when they have like complex uh smart contract interactions where they basically ask the user multiple times to sign a transaction and uh this is of course not the best user experience like a popular thing is like in a proven call which for the user is just one logical action but the user is required to sign multiple times on their meter mask and with safeapp because it is a smart contract account these app developers can just batch multiple contract interactions together in one single ethereum transaction obviously making this a much better experience for the user so you can see on the left side this was a balancer exchange interaction where a proof was made and then the second action you can see was actually the trade and the user would just sign this one transaction and wouldn't have to yeah be confused about having to sign multiple things at once and on the right side you can see how multi-signature comes into play as in this case only bob has signed this transaction but it still requires more confirmation from either charlie and alice or denise to actually execute on this so transactions are secured by whatever the user defines in this safe contract so you can define whatever security scheme you want to use for your use case you can have as much as many owners you want as you want and like say how many confirmations are needed out of those and basically this brings more security also to to tap into actions because we've seen in the past that even experienced users of d5 if they just use like a regular eoa account such as metamask can get tricked and this also just provides an additional level of security when you can actually have multiple people having to basically be compromised to uh yeah to to have something go go wrong and get wrecked um yeah 500 million that's the volume that was made just by the other safe app they've launched their safe app mid last year and this just shows that there's actually quite some volume coming through these safe apps and even though the user base is quite limited so far with ten thousand uh just over ten ten thousand saves the ones that are using these safe apps actually interact with them with quite a lot of funds and this means that uh they are quite interesting for anyone that wants to get more liquidity onto their protocol uh to build the safe app to basically reach those those users that are using the nosy safe um yeah by building one of these safe hubs and maybe one more thing uh definitely also those users that use gnosis safe they are the the least the least impacted by like high gas high gas prices because they they usually when they interact with defy they do that with a lot of uh funds and then it doesn't really matter if you pay like fifty dollars or one 100 for for a trade so that's also one more interesting thing to consider with safe maps uh just to summarize again uh that's the three things i mentioned so far the benefits of safe apps that you can actually build for multi-signature accounts in mind uh for example uh like if you can if you see a multi-signature account can sometimes it takes like some some time until the transaction is confirmed because multiple people have to confirm a transaction and some depths right now don't really know how to handle this because they assume a transaction being confirmed and mined by within a certain amount of time and if you build a safe app you can actually take that into consideration and build your user flow around this and we also make this easier for for developers um then you can leverage the transaction batching so you can batch multiple transactions together which also makes it easier to to handle these multi-signature accounts because you don't have to go through the the flow of collecting those signatures multiple times but just one time for one logical action on d5 and uh yeah third thing you can tap into this existing user base of 15 billion us dollar worth of funds stored and obviously like a ton more in nfts and other digital assets so yeah and we also provide a ton of developer tooling so even though it might not yet be the easiest way to create steps we definitely want to get there that safe building a safe app is is basically the easiest way to to build an interface to your protocol and yeah what we also would like to see or how we like to envision safe apps in the future is that they become these community driven depths where um like the protocol teams really focus on like building the protocol and the the uis to this are then being created and maintained by the community and maybe funded by by a dao or something like that and safe apps allow this because they make it easier for these steps to live on say ipfs most of our current safe apps are actually hosted on ipfs and we are working on processes how basically maintaining these steps as a community project is getting easier and how these steps are then getting listed and shown in our interface is being enabled for these community build ups so also super excited to see how how this basically involves this ecosystem yeah i'm just mentioning the bounty that we yeah oh go ahead sir i'm just mentioning the the bounty that we have at if denver uh we do have a five thousand dollar bounty uh for anyone building a safe app so even if your hack is currently just a standalone app try to make it a safe app as well uh richard uh who's the tech lead in the safe team did a tech demo recently at if denver showing how this can be done in like half an hour so definitely recommend anyone doing that some more information on the bounty down there if you want to get started with building a safe app here's the link to our documentation where you can find some tutorials and some yeah some some guides to get started and also a good place to get in touch with us is our discord at chat.notice.io i will also hang around there for half an hour after this talk in the voice chat in case you have any questions and that's basically it uh nosy safe dot io is the best place to just get more information about nurses safe if you're interested if you want to create your own knows the safe account and yeah see you on discord afterwards all right thanks lucas i love the focus on ui too every time i have to uh approve a transaction like a meta mask or with some flow it always gives me the tpgbs i'm like oh man this is not going to translate well to the mainstream but these issues as we can see are being solved across multiple platforms and the mainstream is coming