Safe Labs Launches New Development Unit to Focus on Consolidated Operations and Sharpened Product Roadmap

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

Popular multiparty crypto wallet Safe, previously known as Gnosis Safe, is launching a new development unit, Safe Labs, as part of a broader move to consolidate its operations and sharpen its product roadmap after it was targeted in February’s $1.4 billion ByBit hack — the largest crypto heist to date.

The new entity, which will serve as the core development arm of Safe, will be launching on Wednesday and will report directly to the Safe Foundation, a nonprofit organization.

The startup, which until now had outsourced technical work to a separate development firm, a structure commonly used across the crypto industry, is pulling together those functions and enlisting new talent to build out Safe Labs.

In an interview with , Rahul Rumalla, Chief Executive of Safe Labs, said the transition reflects a broader strategic shift as Safe pivots to build 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, which saw North Korea’s Lazarus Group forge a malicious payload into Safe’s user-facing web application, was a “catalyst” for the creation of Safe Labs.

While Safe’s core smart contracts were not compromised in the attack, the hackers were able to siphon billions of dollars from ByBit by tricking the exchange’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, which occurred earlier this year, Rumalla said user confidence in the Safe platform, which processes 10% of all transaction volume across Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible networks, remained strong. The application, which saw "practically no churn" in the aftermath of the hack, is used by major decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols like Aave (CRYPTO:AAVE) and Balancer, and is a critical piece of infrastructure for the rapidly growing decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) sector.

“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 comes as other major protocols, like Morpho and Polygon, are making similar shifts. Both Morpho, a large liquidity aggregator, and Polygon, a scaling solution for Ethereum, have recently announced 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.”

With more than $60 billion in total value locked and over $1 trillion in historical transaction volume, according to Rumalla, Safe is 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."