Safe’s $60B security stack: Formal verification, audits, and $1M bounties | Richard Meissner

Safe's smart account infrastructure secures $60B+ in TVL while handling over $1 trillion in cumulative transaction volume. Co-founder, Richard Meissner reveals how Safe is rebuilding its collaboration layer from scratch—replacing centralized transaction services with encrypted on-chain queues while preparing smart accounts for post-quantum cryptography through deterministic deployment standards.

Topics discussed:

• Safe Harbor's permissionless transaction queue migrating from contract storage to event-based and blob storage to reduce costs while maintaining consensus-layer availability guarantees
• Validator network architecture in frictionless queues performing spam protection and integrity checks on encrypted payloads before paymaster-sponsored on-chain submission
• Asymmetric encryption implementation using shared keys among Safe signers to hide transaction intent, with blob storage providing shorter data availability windows than permanent contract storage
• ERC-7955's elimination of nonce-dependent deployment attacks by publicly exposing factory private keys through EIP-7702, preventing address spoofing exploits that caused historical fund losses
• Four-layer security methodology: audits during development, dual auditors from different firms at release, formal verification with Runtime Verification and Certora, and $1M+ bug bounties during phased rollouts
• Phased production deployment strategy starting with foundation Safes as front runners for months before prompting user upgrades to new contract versions
• Smart account migration pathways for post-quantum algorithms using passkey implementations (non-native curve support) as proof-of-concept for lattice-based signature schemes
• Organizational structure separating Safe Labs' enterprise custody focus from Research team's permissionless protocol development to balance adoption velocity with decentralization roadmap