Benjamin Bollen

Today was the toughest day since starting Safe: We are restructuring the teams and parting ways with 14 teammates, people we deeply respect, who've each contributed meaningfully to our journey. We know this is incredibly hard. There’s no perfect way to do this, and no words that make it feel okay. The co-founders, Richard, Christoph, Tobias, and myself, take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here. To those leaving: I’m sorry. You’ve helped build the foundation we’re now refining. I have personally ensured that we will go beyond the legal requirements to support team members: - Severance: Increase the severance payments beyond what’s required - Garden Leave: Extended garden leave to allow affected team members to plan their next chapter - Vesting: We will convert ‘backloaded’ token vestings into linear vestings, ensuring that team members get their fair share relative to the amount of time they spent in the team - Employment support: We want to ensure people can quickly find new opportunities within the Ethereum ecosystem, and I will reach out to trusted founders and teams to source matching roles. Some of the best talent in crypto is now looking for a place to call home. If you’re hiring, feel free to DM me, I’m happy to make intros! Here's the context 👇 From day one, Safe has been a mission-driven team working on core infrastructure to enable self-custody for individuals and teams in order to move the world’s GDP onchain. Over the past year, complexity has grown. As the ecosystem evolved and opportunities expanded, we scaled our efforts to explore new paths. But that growth came with increased coordination challenges, and over time, it started to affect our ability to move at the pace we expect of ourselves. Expectations from teams building on Safe have grown, and rightfully so. It’s clear that Safe’s role in the ecosystem is more critical, and more exposed, than ever before. So we made the difficult decision to realign for clarity, speed, and long-term resilience. I’m proud of how far we’ve come. Yet, as we stepped back and looked at what’s ahead, it became clear that the structure and roles that got us here won’t carry us into the next chapter. We’re taking the first steps toward a more modular and accountable team structure. Going forward, Safe will operate through three distinct teams: a revenue-focused product company, an innovation-focused R&D lab, and an ecosystem-focused foundation. Stay tuned for more on this… Each team will have the autonomy to optimize for its core goal, develop its own culture and cadence, and take full ownership of outcomes. We believe this structure will make us more focused, more agile, and better aligned with what the ecosystem expects from us. Our mission remains unchanged. Safe exists to make self-custody secure and easy. If anything, that mission is more urgent than ever. In a world increasingly defined by geopolitical instability and systemic risk, people need infrastructure they can trust and control. We are committed to building our next chapter with sharper focus, stronger execution, and deeper alignment to our roots and culture that brought us here. - Lukas