2025 Reflections and 2026 Outlook
2025 was the most transformative year for the Safe project. Combined revenue generated grew from $0 to over $10M annualized in under two years. The Safe project now ranks in the Top 40 on Token Terminal by revenue and continues to be one of very few that showed strong adoption without the need for token subsidies.
While marked by big milestones (Safe Shield, Circle partnership, countless network rollouts, new mobile app, etc.) and continuous adoption, much of this was overshadowed by the essential need for deep organizational changes. This was a fundamental overhaul required to build a structure capable of supporting our scale and ambitions.
I want to share where we stand now and why I believe Safe is better positioned than ever going into 2026. Some community members have raised questions about transparency. This post also aims to address those.
This year’s evolution was driven by four core strategic pillars:
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Organizational Clarity: Establishing unambiguous roles, decision-making processes, and a shared understanding of our short- and long-term objectives across all teams and entities and the wider community.
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Strategic Focus: Directing our resources, both financial and human, onto the initiatives that deliver the highest impact for our users and the ecosystem’s integrity. This meant hard calls, like deprecating Safenet.
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Resilience: Fortifying our infrastructure, creating more efficient funding mechanisms, and building an organisational framework that does not rely on trust.
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Sustainability: Ensuring the long-term viability of the Safe Foundation through responsible treasury management, efficient operational expenditures, and focus on scaling revenue-drivers.
The internal work has laid critical groundwork. It has streamlined our operations and, most importantly, solidified the foundation for our next phase of growth.
Organisational Structure
Misaligned incentives between project entities and stakeholders have plagued the industry (UNI Token vs. Uniswap Labs, AaveDAO vs. Aave Labs, AXL Token vs. Interop Labs). Safe learned from this. Also, historically, Safe relied on third-party service providers and teams, which often led to inefficiencies, additional costs or lack of impact and risked leaking value.
Therefore we transitioned from a “patchwork” setup to a a new integrated setup:
Old “patchwork” Setup
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Treasury: kpk through the joint treasury
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Development / Hosting: Core Contributors GmbH acted as a DevCo, responsible for developing Safe{Wallet} open-source technology. It also hosted an instance of the Safe{Wallet} interface. Other teams like Protofire, Palmera, Onchain Den also host instances of Safe{Wallet} interfaces.
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Governance / Community: Stablelabs, Areta and others
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Grants / Funding: DAO-elected Grants council or direct delegate decisions
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Ecosystem Stewarding: Safe Foundation acted as a steward between loosely connected teams
New Integrated Setup
To ensure full alignment, and long-term commitment to token holders, three distinct entities have been established:
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Safe Foundation (Est. 2022): Focuses on governance, external relations, regulatory affairs, R&D, marketing/PR, and fostering the protocol development ecosystem.
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Safe Labs GmbH (Est. 2025): The commercial product company and “revenue engine” primarily driving the Safe{Wallet} product.
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Hecate Ventures AG (Est. 2025): Manages on- and off-chain treasury operations, driving the Safe{Treasury} initiative.
Full Alignment with Token Holders
The Safe Foundation is a shareholder-less organization. Both Safe Labs GmbH and Hecate Ventures AG are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Foundation. This structure guarantees that there is no external interest in the project equity. It also eliminates “value leakage” to independent companies (like separate DevCos) and ensures core strategic initiatives are long-term aligned with the token holder community. We’ve seen similar setups emerge in the industry this year based on the same motivations like Morpho’s structure or Rainbow.
Increased Agility and Efficiency
The teams also have become significantly leaner. While the team reductions earlier this year were difficult, they have resulted in considerably increased agility and efficiency. Starting 2025 with nearly 100 Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs) across the core teams, we are expecting to close the year with slightly below 60 FTEs across all Safe project entities. This reduced headcount has led to more impact, not less, thanks to a sharper focus, streamlined decision-making, less organizational overhead, and a reduction in middle management.
Reinforced Culture and New Leadership
We are fundamentally long-term builders, committed to creating enduring value rather than optimizing for a quick exit for insiders. This past year was focused on refactoring the organization for greater resilience and sustainability. A key achievement was establishing renewed leadership, including the appointment of Rahul Rumalla as CEO of Safe Labs. In parallel, a necessary culture transformation took place, emphasizing cost-consciousness and a more business-minded approach across the different initiatives.
We strive to embody cypherpunk values while simultaneously integrating enterprise rigor and necessary pragmatism into our work. This year, we’ve been able to re-confirm some of these core values and in some ways even been leaning more into them (see Safe{Research} Manifesto).
Key Value-Driving Initiatives
The current strategy is built upon the following initiatives, each designed to generate value for the Safe Foundation, SafeDAO, and the SAFE Token ecosystem. Each of them is designed to be value-generating in their own, but they will be amplifying each other in the long-run:
1. Safe{Wallet} by Safe Labs GmbH: Safe Labs acts as the product company, developing Safe{Wallet} and other future products. Focus on enterprise adoption.
2. Safe{Ventures}: Investing in and fostering the ecosystem to generate valuable insights and financial upside as well as expand the addressable market for Safe Labs and Safe{Research} initiatives.
3. Safe{Treasury} by Hecate Ventures AG: Managing the Safe Foundation’s treasury.
4. Safe{Research}: Establishing token utility through the decentralization of the Safe Stack. A protocol is scheduled for release near the end of Q1 / beginning of Q2.
Financial Performance and Outlook
The project achieved significant financial growth since the beginning of 2024. Starting with $0 revenue less than two years ago, as the initial focus was solely on ecosystem expansion. At the end of 2024 saw the first steps towards sustainability with revenue of approximately $2M across relevant entities. Skip forward one year (notably a year with many challenges), the project reports over $10M in annualized revenue. While not all of this revenue is onchain, this does put the Safe project into the Top 40 projects tracked on Token Terminal based on annualized revenue.
While the project is not yet profitable, this rapid growth has extended the operational runway to over 100 months (!), enabling more extensive long-term planning, accelerated investment in further growth initiatives of the Safe ecosystem. The project’s key financial goals are to reach break-even (securing an effectively "unlimited runway”) and double the revenue in 2026. This will set the foundations to generate $100M in annual recurring revenue across all entities by 2030.
SAFE Token Strategy
Our strategy for 2026 will employ a dual approach to manage both supply and demand for SAFE Tokens:
Supply-side (Token Reserve): Cash flow generated from commercial initiatives, such as Safe Labs, may be utilized for token purchase programs as part of the Safe{Treasury} initiative to build up a strategic token reserve.
Demand-side (Token Utility): The Safe{Research} initiative is developing a protocol that will significantly enhance the utility of the SAFE Token and turn it from a mostly governance token into a full-fledged network token. This should be ready to be announced by the end of Q1.
Summary/Outlook
SAFE Token holders are right to question the token performance. I am personally convinced that this year’s token development does not reflect the progress made and that the project is in a better place than ever before.
Financially: The project achieved the strongest financial performance yet, marked by robust revenue and greater cost efficiency. This secures long-term sustainability, enables major investments going forward, and funds strategic growth. Safe is one of very few token projects in the industry that shows long-term sustainable adoption and significant revenues that do not rely on token subsidies or purely speculative use-cases.
Structurally: A new structure and leadership was intentionally established to align with the expectations of stakeholders and long-term ambitions of the project. The new structure features better accountability, clarified roles, faster decision-making, and improved value alignment. The culture has been reinforced and is clearer than ever. Safe{Wallet} development got a lot more focus on becoming a truly enterprise-grade platform for self-custody. Expect faster development cycles and a more opinionated Safe{Wallet} product in 2026.
Going forward in 2026, we expect to have a lot more transparency/updates and discussions on this forum. The forum was started primarily for exchange around governance-related topics with a special focus on resource allocation as part of the OBRA framework. We now decided to deprecate the Discord channel in favor of doubling-down on this forum as the single home for the token holder community.
With this, I am wishing everyone a joyful holiday season and happy new year!