Gnosis Safe Spending Limits
A new way to access funds from Gnosis Safe accounts through (recurring) allowances
Tl;dr
- Gnosis Safe is solving the inherent access/control issues of regular Ethereum accounts by enabling custom access rules in a flexible and modular way.
- The “Spending Limits” feature showcases the power of Safe Modules by allowing Gnosis Safe users to create fund allowances for specific account owners.
- A tutorial on setting Spending Limits is available in the Gnosis Safe Help Center.
Most accounts on Ethereum today are EOAs (short for Externally Owned Accounts). These accounts consist of a simple private-public key-pair, meaning whoever has access to the private key of the account has access to all digital assets associated with it. This also means those regular accounts are prone to hackers gaining access over single private keys or users losing their seed phrases, both resulting in permanent loss of all digital assets associated with them. Even more, there is a direct conflict between keeping a private key secure and having it easily accessible at any time.
Our mission is to establish a new account standard resolving the issues inherent to EOAs. This is why we’ve built Gnosis Safe.
Enter Smart Contract Accounts
Gnosis Safe does not need to compromise between security and convenience as it is a programmable account. It can be controlled by multiple private keys and users can define how many of those private keys are required to send a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain (so-called Multisig transactions).
Defining private key access rules means creating and enabling a personalized account security scheme that can involve multiple people, backup devices, or multi-factor authentication for individuals.
The Next Frontier: Safe Modules
The real power of the Gnosis Safe account comes from its modular design — additional account logic can be freely added and removed by users to have an even more finely grained security and access setup.
Safe Modules are written as an Ethereum smart contract, defining additional access-control logic. These modules can, in theory, be arbitrarily complex and range from features such as role-based access, account automation, and even recovery mechanisms.
Introducing: Spending Limits
Permissioned, limited access has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to finally provide it to Gnosis Safe users!
As a first official implementation of a Safe Module into our solution, we now launch the Spending Limit feature. With Spending Limits, small transactions can be made without the overhead of getting approval from multiple signers of the Safe.
Setting Spending Limits facilitates expanded access while maintaining a secure setup, to avoid compromising on convenience when conducting smaller, less critical transactions.
The Spending Limits feature has a flexible implementation, allowing for a wide range of use-cases. A Gnosis Safe user can define Spending Limits by setting the following parameters:
- Beneficiary: The Ethereum address that benefits from the limit. This can be a regular account or a smart contract. The beneficiary does not necessarily have to be an owner of the Safe, although the Gnosis Safe Web app does not yet support non-owners to access their limit.
- Asset: Select any asset type (Ether or ERC-20 token) for which the Spending Limit should be valid.
- Amount: Set the exact amount of the Spending Limit for this asset.
- Reset time: Select the Spending Limit’s scope —it can be a one-time allowance or one that replenishes itself after a pre-defined time period (daily, weekly, monthly).
Here’s a tutorial on how to set up a Spending Limit for your Gnosis Safe.
One feature for many use-cases
Because the parameters of Spending Limits can be defined freely, this opens the door to many different account customizations.
Easy Access
Don’t want to go through the overhead of collectible multiple signatures for smaller transfers? Set an allowance to make less significant transactions with ease.
Recurring payments
No need to send the same transaction on a regular basis. Just set a recurring Spending Limit once and disable it once it is not needed anymore.
Recovery
Keep a secure setup for your Gnosis Safe account, yet have a backup option to slowly withdraw funds from the account in case you don’t have access to the required amount of signer keys anymore.
We are incredibly excited about seeing what other use-cases will engage Gnosis Safe users to leverage the Spending Limit feature — we are really just at the beginning of seeing the full potential of Safe Modules.
If you have not yet set up your own Gnosis Safe account, make sure to do so here.
For questions and discussion about Gnosis Safe, please join us in the #safe channel on the Gnosis Discord Server at chat.gnosis.io, and in Gnosis Forum at forum.gnosis.io. We’re also on Twitter @GnosisSafe.
