An Open Letter to the SAFE Community
Posted by Greenfield Capital - October 4th 2026
This week, Greenfield filed a supervisory complaint (Aufsichtsanzeige) with the Swiss Federal Supervisory Authority for Foundations (ESA) concerning the Safe Ecosystem Foundation. We are publishing this letter at the same time because we believe the SAFE community has a right to know what has been happening over the past year, why we have taken this step, and what we are asking for.
This is not a step we take lightly. It is the end of a long process that began with concern, moved through research and private dialogue, and ended with the conclusion that the issues we identified will not be resolved from inside the current structure.
1. Where Greenfield stands
Greenfield has been a backer of Safe since 2022, when we invested in the financing round that accompanied Safe’s spin-off from Gnosis. We were early, and we remain invested.
We have never sold a single SAFE token. We hold our full position today, as we did on day one. We are not writing as a departing investor, but as one that is staying.
We have always intended to be a constructive participant in the ecosystem. Among other things, we co-authored and put forward SEP-50, a proposal to establish a DAO oversight committee that would bring strategy, process and accountability to the treasury management of SafeDAO. We operate a Safenet validator that today ranks as the biggest by delegations after Gnosis. We believe in self-custody, in the Safe protocol as its most important piece of infrastructure, and in the long-term opportunity that comes with it.
2. Where Safe stands
Safe is not in good shape, and the numbers the Foundation itself has published make that clear. In 2022, the project raised approximately $93.5M. According to the Foundation’s own MiCA disclosures of May 2026, roughly $60M of that has since been spent, with around $34M remaining in cash. In addition, the Foundation holds 8.5% of the total SAFE supply in a strategic reserve and a further 45% on its balance sheet. Over the same period, the SAFE token has lost more than 95% of its value, and with it most of the value of the Foundation’s treasury.
Meaningful monetization of a protocol that secures tens of billions of dollars in assets has not materialized either. At the end of 2025, the Foundation reported “more than $10M in project-wide annualized revenue”, a fivefold increase on the roughly $2M annualized at the end of 2024, and set itself the target of doubling revenue and reaching break-even in 2026, on the way to $100M ARR by 2030. The Q1 2026 report in April repeated the “$10M+ ARR” figure for 2025 but disclosed no actual revenue for the quarter. The Q2 2026 report then showed $1.98M in quarterly revenue, up 42% year over year but equivalent to an annualized run-rate of roughly $8M, below the level claimed for the end of 2025 and less than half of the roughly $20M the 2026 target implies. For a protocol with roughly $30B in assets and a cost base that has consumed around $60M in four years, this is not a sustainable monetization story.
None of this happened in a shrinking market. It happened while the broader DeFi and stablecoin markets grew significantly. Between January 2024 and August 2026, the total value held in Safe accounts fell from $66B to roughly $30B, a decline of more than 50%, while total DeFi TVL grew by around 40% over the same period; measured against the DeFi market, Safe’s relative footprint has shrunk by about two thirds. Stablecoins are the clearest case. Total stablecoin supply grew from about $130B to over $300B, an increase of roughly 135%, yet stablecoins held in Safes (on Ethereum mainnet) grew by only about 11%, from $5.9B to $6.6B. Safe’s share of all USDC in circulation fell from 12.8% to 2.5% over the same period. In the category that has grown the most and that self-custody infrastructure is best placed to serve, Safe has been losing ground for two and a half years.
The contrast with regulated custodians is also stark. Coinbase’s institutional assets under custody grew from around $100B at the end of 2023 to roughly $250B by mid-2025, and BitGo’s from around $60B to over $90B ahead of its January 2026 IPO. The demand for secure custody of digital assets has never been greater; it is simply not being met by Safe.
3. How we got here
Growing concern
In early 2025, we became increasingly concerned about the state of Safe. Our concerns were partly about progress and growth relative to the market, but just as much about governance, communication with investors and token holders, and the level of accountability within the organization.
Then came the Bybit incident of February 2025, the largest theft in crypto history, originating in the compromised developer environment of the company that built and operated the most widely used Safe{Wallet} instance and developed and maintained the core protocol on behalf of the Foundation. Things did not get better afterward. Safe lost a significant amount of talent in the months that followed, and trust, both inside and outside the organization, was severely damaged.
Our review
About a year ago we concluded that we could not form a reliable picture from the information we were being given, and that we had to assemble one ourselves. Throughout Q3 and Q4 of 2025, we conducted a broad, independent review of Safe’s position, strategy and execution. We spoke with former employees and key talent, with major users such as foundations and treasury teams, with independent developers building in the Safe ecosystem, and with other investors and stakeholders.
Our original intention was to aggregate what we learned and share it with the Safe team as an independent outside perspective. What we found changed that intention. The findings were serious enough that we concluded the organization needed a fundamental reorganization of its governance, because every problem we identified traced back to the same root: the way decisions are made, by whom, and with what accountability.
Once we had finished our review process, we summarized our findings for Safe leadership in a deck in late 2025, which we are sharing here in full: Safe Status Quo – Investor View, December 2025. In short, our findings were:
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Governance. No independent voices on the Foundation board, which at the time consisted of only two members. Major decisions, including cost-cutting measures and the status of key initiatives, were taken without consultation or transparency. Additionally, a clear conflict of interest on the board existed: Stefan George, a Gnosis co-founder, serves as a board member while Gnosis developed, launched and operated two wallet products that competed directly with Safe{Wallet}.
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Organization. Leadership perceived as unreceptive to critical feedback, an engagement survey in which the large majority of staff said they would not recommend Safe as a workplace, and an accelerating loss of senior talent, including people leaving with large unvested token packages.
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Product. Core UX still too complex, no coherent enterprise or treasury layer, security investments that came only after the exploit, and a platform that repeatedly ends up competing with the ecosystem projects built on top of it.
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Strategy and token. No structured business development towards the treasuries and institutions that are Safe’s natural customers, no pricing or monetization discipline, and no token strategy, with leadership publicly stating that token utility was not a priority.
On that basis, our asks to the Foundation were equally clear: renew the Foundation board with experienced and independent board members; refresh the leadership team with external operators who have scaled product-led infrastructure businesses; and run a board-led review of strategy, product, organization and token economics with measurable KPIs.
We want to be fair about what has changed since December. Some of the product and commercial shortcomings we identified are visibly being worked on. Safe Labs has begun to build a commercial motion toward enterprise and treasury users, is investing in the security and policy tooling those users have long asked for, and has shown a willingness to revisit earlier strategic choices. Safenet has been relaunched in beta. We recognize this progress, and we do not want it lost in what follows. But none of it touches the issue at the root of our concerns: the governance of the Foundation. In particular, the Foundation board still lacks balanced, independent and experienced decision-making, and that is the condition on which everything else ultimately depends.
4. A serious finding: conduct on the board after Bybit
One concerning element to emerge from our review was the conduct within the Foundation’s board in the aftermath of the Bybit hack.
At the time, the board consisted of Lukas Schor and Christoph Simmchen, two of the four Safe co-founders and former Gnosis employees, and Stefan George, co-founder and CTO of Gnosis. Christoph Simmchen left the board in the months after the hack and later his role with Safe altogether.
In the course of our conversations with Safe stakeholders, we learned that, in the direct aftermath of the hack, Stefan George, together with his Gnosis co-founder Martin Köppelmann, demanded that the other board members and co-founders of Safe give up a significant portion of their SAFE token holdings. The demand was backed by a threat: should the board members and co-founders refuse, Gnosis would sell its entire SAFE position, roughly 10% of the total supply, and publicly distance itself from the project. At that moment, days after the largest hack in the history of crypto and with public confidence in Safe at its lowest point, a move of that kind could well have been the final nail in the coffin for the project. The board members and co-founders gave in, and the redistribution took place. These events were reported and subsequently confirmed to us by different sources. We further understand that Gnosis was able to exert material influence on how the Foundation handled the Bybit incident.
We want to be unambiguous about our view. Conduct of this kind has no place in a professional environment, and no place on the board of a foundation that raised close to $100M from investors and that stewards infrastructure securing tens of billions of dollars of user assets. We have zero tolerance for it. Beyond the conduct itself, it is a textbook illustration of the structural problem: a board that is not independent cannot act independently when it counts.
5. What happened next
From the end of 2025 onward, we engaged the Foundation directly and in good faith, verbally and through a series of formal letters from our counsel. Our asks were simple:
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Restructure the governance of the Foundation.
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Replace Stefan George, whose past conduct and permanent conflict of interest as a Gnosis co-founder and board member are, in our view and that of our counsel, incompatible with a seat on the board of the Foundation under Swiss foundation law.
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Expand the board with independent, externally recruited members bringing the competencies it currently lacks to responsibly and sustainably develop, promote and steward the Safe ecosystem: corporate governance and leadership experience, finance and treasury management, risk management and information security, legal and compliance, and business development and ecosystem strategy.
To be explicit on one point: we never requested a Greenfield seat on the board. We would have definitely appreciated a representation of ecosystem backers and participants on the board of the Foundation and been more than open to engaging at the board level, but this was never about Greenfield per se. What we ultimately asked for was a responsible, experienced and balanced composition of the board.
We are aware of the Foundation’s own steps in this direction. In March 2026, after several months of our engagement, the Foundation invited backers and ecosystem experts to nominate candidates for three possible participation models, ranging from an advisory board to guest participation on the Foundation board and full board membership. In June, the Foundation announced that it had formally established a “Strategy Commission” as a dedicated body of the Foundation, tasked with helping shape the strategy for the Foundation, the SAFE token and the broader ecosystem, with external participants to be finalized in July. We welcome any widening of the circle. But of the three models put forward, the Foundation chose the one that changes the least. A strategy commission is an advisory body. It is appointed by the board, it reports to the board, and it has no decision-making authority over the board. The board itself, the body that carries responsibility for the overall management, organization and supervision of the Foundation, remains the same three people it was before, and not one of the options that would have changed that has been taken up.
The Foundation also had a statutory problem to solve. Its deed requires a minimum of three board members, and between September 2025 and April 2026 it had only two, in the most sensitive period of its existence. Instead of using that vacancy to bring in a truly independent member, the board appointed Richard Meissner.
Richard Meissner is a Safe co-founder and like all others, a former Gnosis employee. He was one of two co-shareholders and co-managing directors of the German Core Contributors GmbH, that entity which, until October 2025, operated the most widely used Safe{Wallet} instance and developed and maintained the core Safe protocol on behalf of the Foundation, funded substantially by the Foundation. Within that company, he was the key technical lead and responsible for backend and DevOps, the very area in which the Bybit attack originated. He now sits on the board that oversees the Foundation’s relationship with that company’s successor, Safe Labs, and with that company itself. We do not question his technical ability. We question whether someone with that history and those ongoing ties is the right addition to the board, and we think the answer is clearly no. Once again, as with the Strategy Commission, the board chose the option that kept things within its own circle.
Every point we raised was rejected by the Foundation, through its counsel. The problems were not remedied. After several months of this, we concluded that the board either does not recognize the issues as serious, or is so conflicted that it cannot address them.
6. What we have filed, and what it means
A supervisory complaint is the mechanism by which any party can inform the ESA, the Swiss federal authority that supervises Swiss foundations of national or international significance, about potential irregularities in the governance or the management of a foundation under its supervision. Its purpose is to ensure that the foundations it supervises are governed and managed in accordance with the law, their articles of incorporation, and their organizational regulations. The ESA has broad powers to examine and, where necessary, to order corrective measures.
We want to be clear about what this is and is not. It is not a lawsuit against individuals, and it is not an attempt to take control of Safe. It is a request that the supervisory authority, with the powers and the mandate to do so, looks at how the Foundation is governed and decides whether that is acceptable for an organization in its position. We believe it is not. We are now requesting the supervisor to form its own view.
7. Why we are still here
We remain committed to Safe, to its mission, and to the broader cause of self-custody. The opportunity is as large as it has ever been. Nothing in this letter changes that.
We also want to be clear about whom this letter concerns. Our concerns are with the governance of the Safe Ecosystem Foundation and the composition of its board. They are not directed at the operating team at Safe Labs led by Rahul Rumalla, where we see real progress and with whom we continue to work constructively as an ecosystem participant and Safenet validator. It is precisely because that team deserves proper oversight, and the ecosystem deserves a Foundation board capable of providing it, that we have taken this step.
But we have come to believe, after more than a year of research, dialogue and patience, that Safe will not reach its potential under its current governance. Good infrastructure deserves good stewardship. Token holders, users and the many builders in this ecosystem deserve a Foundation board that is independent, competent across the disciplines its responsibility demands, and accountable to the people it serves.
We will keep the community informed about any new developments, to the extent we are able. We welcome questions from fellow token holders here in the forum and will do our best to answer them.
Jascha Samadi, Founding Partner - Greenfield Capital