There are a few key reasons why you might want to consider building your application on top of Safe's smart contract account standard. Overall, building your application on top of Safe can provide a range of benefits, including enhanced security, improved user experience, and greater flexibility and integration.
Multi-signature control is the tip of the iceberg and Safe accounts unlock a wide range of possibilities for new form of custody, ownership, and identity.
New forms of custody are possible with smart contract accounts
Safe's multi-signature functionality allows you to define a list of owner accounts and a threshold number of accounts required to confirm a transaction. Once the threshold of owner accounts have confirmed a transaction, the Safe transaction can be executed. Owners can either be EOAs or other smart contract accounts.
It is possible to make use of different Safe Library contracts to perform complex transactions. A very common example of this is batched transactions where multiple simple Ethereum transactions are combined and executed at once. That means instead of having to sign several transactions sequentially, a user just needs to sign one batched transaction.
You can add Safe Modules to your Safe. Thereby it is possible to implement more fine-grained access management. For instance, it is possible to define a module that can only be used to recover access to a Safe under specific circumstances. A popular version of this is the Social Recovery Module. A different example is allowance modules that allow owners of a Safe to grant limited execution permission, such as a daily limit to external accounts.
Many new tokens require wallet contracts to implement callbacks. Token standards like ERC721 and ERC1155 allow contracts to immediately react to receiving tokens through these and make it even possible to reject the transfer completely.
Another core functionality of the Safe is token payment. Generally, Ethereum transactions require ETH for paying transaction fees (“gas”). With the Safe, users can pay transaction fees in a number of supported ERC20 tokens. This is realized via a transaction relay service that accepts those tokens and submits the transactions to the blockchain, therefore paying the gas fee in ETH. With the same functionality, Ether-less transactions can be implemented, where a 3rd party pays transaction fees on behalf of a Gnosis Safe via the same relay service.