Lukas Shor I Future of Multisigs I Safe I Pragma London 2024

[Music] so with that we are ready for our next interview and for this I'd like to bring on Lucas who's a co-founder of safe to talk about the future of safes and how we see multisig evolving in the future so please welcome Lucas on stage by the way cik it's uh it's my first time at pragma and you manage every time to get a better venue than the last time so I know how I do it but heads up to that this is uh this is especially thanks to the rest of our team I had zero involvements on this one but um it is usually fun for us to think about churches or Banks as as venues and we've kind of been historically on that theme uh where you either see a crypt or a vault and uh I think it's just uh we got to have a little bit fun here so uh I'm glad that you like it I I've heard the same thing from a lot of you in the audience and I love this venu too it's it's awesome I didn't realize you can book churches so uh I'm like this is this opens a whole new set of possibilities for the future um so we've definitely been talking a lot about how safes have evolved uh in the last year and uh We've obviously seen a massive growth uh in just directly from developers and even protocols and companies um so the thing I guess I'm curious about is maybe we just spend a quick few seconds here on just understanding how did this actually start so uh can you walk us through like the history of safe and and this kind of spin out from from nosis and uh and maybe complement this with the newsis 3.0 Vision that just kind of came out a week ago yeah yeah as you said safe is a is a spin-off from from nosis and actually it's funny to think about like nosis itself is a spin-off from consensus which you could argue is a spin-off from the fum foundation so it's kind of like the fourth generation of spin-off at this point real life rollups exactly um uh and yeah how kind of that came together was as um Stef within consensus was experimenting with prediction markets and and then as a as a spin-off ASN nois wanted to solve this thing called prediction markets which is like incentives in order to surface information at the end of the day um and as they went along with that they realized there's like such so much infrastructure missing in crypto and that was from like U self custody to like how do we actually trade these prediction Market tokens and like bunch of other things and uh it just didn't exist so there was 2016 and the then nosis was actually forced to build these things themselves so they they they started building these teams uh one was then becoming like the safe team one ended up then as as now cow swap team uh and and some others like there were some things that were very successful and some things that were not so successful uh including prediction markets itself um but yeah it just happened that then from the idea of building prediction markets nosis actually turned into like a venture Studio of sorts uh building like bunch of very important infrastructure um and yeah yeah especially with self- custody nosis like did in Ico in 2017 and they suddenly had to self custody lot of of crypto um so back then there were no good solutions that were suitable to do it on your own so Stefan sat down and and wrote some initial smart contract as a was back then called nosis multi contract uh open sourced it and suddenly all the other IO projects during that time started using it themselves bunch of assets on on these multi signature wallets and uh then the idea came like like back then called smart contract wallets now smart accounts they can actually be also very helpful or very useful for for anyone using using crypto so that's when uh the project run safe formed like how can we bring smart accounts to to everyone using crypto um so new set of smart contracts that was more general purpose not just for teams uh that was also like flexible so you could add more features as you go along which then also helped uh teams move into Dow where suddenly wasn't just four multi6 signers but like a thousand multi6 signers controlling in a con um and yeah that kind of uh took off and at some point the community around safe became big enough that it it Justified spinning it out and just say like this goes its own path with its own mission uh while still having its ties to to nosis um and you mention nosis 3.0 which is like U yeah kind of the uh the summary of how nosis sees the next few years to to look like so nosis 1.0 is prediction markets uh nosis 2.0 is this like infrastructure Venture Builder and nosis 3.

0 is really how can we now leverage this important infrastructure that was built in a way to democratize payments and and financial services and can actually show something here we're going to see some live demos this is great no no demos except if you have a a terminal where I can buy something but like this is kind of like the centerpiece of of nosis 3.0 so nosis pay or nosis card which is like a self custodial solution to uh pay for for anything like for your coffee or anything the cool thing here is that it actually Builds on top of safe so safe is like the the ownership layer there uh and the the funds that are associated with the cart they're in full self- custody up to the point that you actually go into the the store you you buy something and that the merchant terminal then you you pay for it and at this point only there's like a a Fiat on off-ramp happening um which is just cool for people who like self custody but it also by doing that this intermediates about like six to 10 kind of stakeholders of like a regular payment process and and just massively reduces the cost of uh of payments that's like uh that's just like the first product that's that's built on this kind of infrastructure around nosis which consists of like nosis chain like a a chain specifically for for payments it's U safe is included there but also like a bunch of other things that noses have been been building um and yeah that's kind of like the hopefully next years of like actually bringing the technology the infrastructure we've been building to like millions of people out there that's awesome uh we're actually we're going to go into nosis pay uh in a little bit because we have a another interview on on actually talking about how it actually works behind the scenes which is super fascinating um well the scene was like a lot of stuff has happened in the world of safe so maybe one kind of thing I'm curious about is just overall what what is the current state of safe right now like are there any kind of high level stats you can share how do you actually measure success is just purely money that you're securing or some other metric what's uh what actually gets you excited about the growth of safe yeah so actually the single single thing that safe is after is make every account in we free a smart account like that's kind of like the the the end goal that's what we are after U so that's also how we we measure the success of the project is like how many accounts are not EAS anymore uh but rather smart accounts and uh like I would even say like it's it it's it doesn't even matter like longterm whether that's like the safe smart account or any other smart account like the project is really about of making this transition happening um so yeah just curious in here um who is using safe right now so maybe half not not not as well as chances are they've all interacted or used one without knowing either it's it's a good OD here who who who here has a has a world coin ID there you go if you didn't know that it's a it's a safe right yeah everyone who here has ever used or worked with a dow of any sort in the last few years also a safe hopefully um but uh that's great that's actually a good point like the the idea is also that like this technology safe becomes also invisible like it shouldn't matter you shouldn't even know that you it but like it's uh it's kind of like this fundamental infrastructure that just makes your experience with with web free better and just actually makes you feel web free less and less like you shouldn't care about gas fees you shouldn't care about like what network you're you're interacting with and so on like and these things will be enabled through through smart accounts um but yeah also in terms of adoption I think uh what was good is that through the bare Market there was actually more adoption coming to Smart accounts and save specifically so that that's cool to see like we just recently passed like a 100 billion uh dollars worth of assets on save like that's obviously like a huge number that's like the second uh or like in terms of like smart contracts kind of securing value that's like after the eve staking deposit contract the second most used contract um but like it it's also a number that's like yeah I mean some erc20 tokens have like a a big price but like a low float and like this it's kind of like a the number but it's definitely like a huge number uh like 7 million saves created so far a million monthly active users so it's uh Seely have has been picking up lately nice um we sort of already in a way covered a little bit about the smart smart accounts uh when we did the account abstraction panel but uh the thing I'm curious about is um is there a difference in definition of what a safe smart account is and and are there any small kind of differences on what people think is a smart account or a smart wallet and uh and what you think a same version but that's a safe default is and um how should we think about that yeah I mean we've also seen with the other panel like there's a little bit of a general confusion around these terms what they mean how they differ um I mean safe smart account existed pre pre ERC 457 um so they're not uh it doesn't depend on 457 but but it it kind of matches together that's also something like people were asking like now with 457 like what's the point of save like kind of asking like whether they're uh substitutes where definitely they they're not like 457 enable Smart accounts they kind of like the logic of how smart account transactions are being processed on on uh ethereum um and so generally um like a lot of safe smart accounts right now don't leverage 457 yet uh I think that's something where uh the way the safe smart account works is that you can just add 457 as a feature to it if you for example require as like a Plugin or as an upgrade exct yeah yeah like U we've got like safe modules which we call which is uh part part of the contract architecture and you can add like a 457 module that enables you then to interact with this like decentralized me pool uh that kind of is is made out of 4337 and if you then want if you then have an app that wants to sponsor your transaction and this requires 457 at this point then only you will activate 457 um or there's like wallets that are built on safe right now that have deploy save with 457 module right from the start uh but like most deployed ones don't yet use it so it looks like that everybody effectively is trying to just become more modular and and it's it makes total sense because you give the flexibility to the end users on being able to customize that experience um what is that look like in in safes in terms of you obviously have a plug-in Library you're talking about modularizing uh smart accounts are they the same thing here um are there different kind of Standards you're working on are there obvious ways we can think about improving certain things like how should we think about these yeah so in in the safe smart account you have different types of modules um like um or types of plugins like one is like a module that extends the logic of your account which you can have to uh have like a a spending limits feature for example added um we've got guards which are adding additional restrictions on transactions or additional verification Logic on the transaction so every transaction then goes through the guard and checks uh whatever checks you have there implemented so do I interact with a smart contract that's not audited revert the transaction for example is like a a logic you could Implement like this um like safe has been the architecture has been this way for like 5 years or so uh but now as if like 457 more smart accounts being created like there was the need of like somehow standardizing this modular architecture of smart accounts because it's um yeah otherwise you will have the the case where like there's a new feature coming out for for one smart account but it doesn't work with with your smart account because it uses a different technical interface and that just not uh how it should be but rather it should be like uh like the minimum uh architecture should somehow be standardized and then U kind of smar accounts can still extend logic as as they want and now like there's actually two standards that came up last year around this uh one is ERC 6900 and the other one is ERC 7579 um and yeah it it's interesting Dynamic right now a quick oneliner on just we don't have to go in depth but I'll just be good to know what the differences are yeah I mean the both try to to standardize the types of plugins in a way uh but 6900 goes one step further and has also like a permissioning system like how do give permissions to these plugins as like a security feature um and that was something that was initially pushed very much by Alchemy uh as they wanted to launch their their own modular account and they said like this is how we think modular account should look like and they proposed it as an ERC and then kind of had uh the community collaborate on that but then some parts of the community said like this is trying to solve too many problems at the same time like the modularity plus the permission uh part and they uh and then a few other projects it's like okx B economy rhinestone others um said like let's let's make a standard to really solve the the basic modularity of smart accounts uh the standard is about like uh simple modular accounts and uh the permissioning system might still be needed at some point but it can be solved uh in independently um and yeah that's so there's currently these two camps of of like what what standard we should really go for I mean for for safe it's um I think the pathway is that like it shouldn't matter what standard is getting adopted most like with safe you should actually be able to use an adapter to be compatible with both of these so we we see safe even kind of like a yeah standard agnostic you're the base layer anyway so the modularity in this case helps you because you get comp either scenario but prefer one to be slightly um interesting um one thing I'm also curious about is um does anything break or get complicated when we think about kind of interoperability between different chains a lot of things yeah that's a preparing ourselves for the answer I think when it comes to cross chain smart accounts will make it first worse and then actually make it better at a later point because like how smart accounts work how do they make it worse yeah um like how smart accounts work is like they actually smart contracts that are deployed on each chain specifically which then have their logic and um you can deploy a smart account with the same configuration on all chains maybe even at the same address and kind of have this illusion of like this just being one account but like on a low level they're actually different accounts and like they if you change something on this account it doesn't automatically change something on on the account on optimism when when it's change on polygon and something like that so that's quite complicated where people using like the EAS like regular private key accounts like they just expect them to work out of box on all networks um so that's definitely a bit of a of a challenge also from a ux perspective like um because also people then expect that if they create a smart account in optimism they can receive assets on polygon where in like worst case scenario they they don't actually uh retrieve assess it um but in that sense it Mak it worse but in the long run actually I think accounts will uh actually be on its own roll up at some point um oh that's an interesting prediction or foreshadowing I mean there are uh there are proposals out there also balic put forward like a kind of a high level idea about this it's called like a key store rollup and this then has says like you're your account in one specific rollup and then you sort of propagate or you see the state of the uh the account with all the other have Sub sub accounts or or linked accounts on all the other networks uh via like a state root uh propagation and that's uh something that I think will eventually come and then actually it shouldn't matter anymore on what networks you're interacting with because this will also then paired with like an intent Centric architecture people should just say I want to achieve this and there's like some kind of intent Network that would then figures it out execute that whatever chain that that's the best way to to to achieve that uh and I think that will uh so that that's kind of the I know two that's actually a really cool no that's a good point because uh like that actually does simplify a lot of the interfacing because you're effectively delegating it to some service that'll just make it happen but you don't have to be opinionated about how you want it to happen uh per se um that's actually super cool I did not know about this at all um so I I learned something new as well this is this is awesome uh my final question to you Lucas is um we've kind of talked about how the last few years have been for safe but uh what can we look forward to in uh for the rest of the year we're only in in uh March right now we got nine more months to go what uh what's exciting in the works I mean one one thing I'm personally excited about is um like how can we have better recovery systems for uh for people in web fre and there's I don't know if this is going to be a cool thing for for many people but at least I think it's cool is like they're like a Signum which is like a Swiss licensed Bank they're working on a uh on like a Recovery Solution where you can come with your smart wallet your smart account and you can say I activate Signum in a actually like nice way where they don't have full access over your account but only with some time lock and and so on as as a recovery agent and um you will have to go through kyc with them and like typical banking stuff but like you kind of full in self custody until the point where you lose your keys and you actually want to recover your account and then you go to Signum and and kind of say hey guys can you rotate my keys and and give me back access to my account and that's just like I mean there's going to be a lot of Recovery Solutions like social recovery or like U yeah but but I think that's something where people actually like I don't know if it's very popular but like a lot of people Trust Banks unfortunately uh not in this room but like out out in the the the world and like at least this might be a way to to get in some new type of of people like I know my mom my mom would never use I am impressed that a bank moved fast enough to make this happen uh but that that's actually really cool and is this live or is this in the works about to be live soon I've seen a demo last week so it's going to be live soon um this is super cool yeah and one one more thing I'm also excited about is like pass keys where we also here today about it but like that's also something that that's in the works like having how can you save with with pass Keys also in like a like very secure way um like formally verified and everything and uh by the way like all the the smart contracts sa uses going forward are going to be formally verified by by default so like we're going to put like a lot of focus on making sure like uh everything is going to be super secure because I think when more people start using smart accounts like we cannot allow us to have like another parody kind of situation where like some smart contract box get gets people scared of you don't want Mass damage at that scale at that point yeah well this is super exciting Lucas thank you so much for this chat and I can't wait to see a lot of this uh Integrations come into play in real life thanks thank you so much