Gnosis Safe’s Multichain Future
Rolling out Gnosis Safe on L2s and EVM-compatible networks
This article outlines how we will approach the emergence of a multichain Ethereum ecosystem. It contains our vision for the future of Ethereum and the role that Gnosis Safe will play in it.
Tl;dr
- We plan to make Gnosis Safe available on all relevant, EVM-compatible networks. For this, we release a new version of the Gnosis Safe smart contracts: The Gnosis Safe L2 contracts
- We will start officially supporting Arbitrum, Polygon, and BSC within the next 2 months
- During summer, we will roll out support for even more networks
The Future of Ethereum
Gas prices have reached new heights this year, forcing many users into a search for lower-cost alternatives for their DeFi activity. This coincided with the launch of many networks that have been developed in the past years in anticipation of this scalability bottleneck. Those networks suddenly had a very clear value proposition for users and projects alike.
In his January post An Incomplete Guide to Rollups, Vitalik Buterin expressed conviction that solutions like zkSync, Optimism, and Arbitrum will be the primary path to scalability for the Ethereum ecosystem. However, at least in the short- to mid-term, there will be a full range of other EVM-compatible layer 1 networks (so-called sidechains) that will also benefit from the scalability pressure of Ethereum L1. Some, like Binance Smart Chain, Polygon and xDai, might be able to foster sustainable developer ecosystems. Others might offer a specific consensus/security model, attracting distinct types of users or applications.
The Role of Ethereum L1
We see great potential in these new ecosystems emerging on other networks and L2s. And we expect a large amount of future economic activity to happen outside of the core Ethereum L1 chain. However, we are still long Ethereum (and have been so for years) and continue to see Ethereum L1 as core to this multichain future:
- Ethereum L1 continues to be the global, censorship-resistant settlement layer
- Most high-value interactions are still expected to take place on Ethereum L1. For these use-cases, the security guarantees and censorship resistance are more important than low transaction fees.
- Ethereum L1 continues to be the anchor for finality and security such as storing transaction data of rollups or enabling merkle root checkpoints in commit chains.
- While ETH 2.0. itself will not solve all scalability issues, it will enable Ethereum L1 to be an even better basis for rollups and other L2 scaling solutions.
Gnosis Safe: The Operating System for Ethereum
We think Gnosis Safe will play a crucial role in enabling a multichain future for Ethereum:
- We see Gnosis Safe as the future operating system for Ethereum and EVM-based networks: A programmable account that is use-case agnostic, and therefore network-agnostic.
- Gnosis Safe is an essential infrastructure component required to secure critical systems in decentralized networks. This includes cross-chain bridges, upgradable smart contract protocols, DAO Treasuries, and much more.
- On every network where a lot of value is being secured, there is a need for an account that facilitates advanced access/control to make sure there is no single point of failure when managing significant amounts of digital assets.
All of these factors inform an “L2 strategy” that can’t settle on just one network. Rather, we see the need for Gnosis Safe to be available on all relevant, production-ready, and EVM-compatible networks.
Gnosis Safe L2 Contracts
Unfortunately, we couldn’t just deploy the existing Gnosis Safe infrastructure on other chains, as the Gnosis Safe solution on Ethereum L1 requires a tracing node for gas optimizations. This tracing feature is often not available on alternative networks.
Luckily, on L2s and EVM-based sidechains, gas optimization is not as critical. This is what allowed us to remove the requirement for a tracing node, by emitting the required transactions data as events instead. We call this new instance of the Gnosis Safe contracts: Gnosis Safe L2
Multichain Rollout Timeline
We have just concluded the security audit for the new Gnosis Safe L2 contracts. But with every contract change, however minor, we are committed to following a diligent security process before officially supporting any new contract versions.
This commitment extends to the Gnosis Safe L2 contracts. For this, we have now started a 1-month bug bounty program to have the contract integrity being challenged by the wider community of security experts. We also increased the maximum bounty reward to $1,000,000 per critical bug found!
In June we will start rolling out support for new networks, starting with the most commonly requested by users: Arbitrum, Polygon, and Binance Smart Chain.
Build dApps for Gnosis Safe on Other Networks
We recently launched a new way to easily integrate your dApp with Gnosis Safe. Allowing dApps to be accessible directly from the Gnosis Safe interface. We are very much looking forward to dApps being built specifically for L2 / sidechains, leveraging the new possibilities of high transaction throughput on these networks.
Developers won’t have to wait for the official launch of Gnosis Safe on a specific chain to get started building and testing these dApps with Gnosis Safe. We just launched a designated Developer Interface that allows developers to create Safes on any EVM compatible network and test their dApps even before Gnosis Safe launches for users on the respective network.
Get in touch!
We’re here to help the developer communities of these L2s and EVM-compatible sidechains integrate with Gnosis Safe! You can reach us in the #safe channel of the Gnosis Discord server at chat.gnosis.io.
