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.
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 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.
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.