Christoph Simmchen

❇️GM SAFENET❇️ Blockchains started with atomicity. This allowed easy composability in web3, birthing DeFi. To level up breaking this atomicity is necessary. Safenet separates the execution of any DeFi action and the settlement of it. With this we can move the world's GDP onchain. Why do we need to break the atomicity? While it is theoretically possible to (nearly) compute anything on Ethereum, this comes at a cost. When we look at CowSwap we have solvers that optimize on the trades and prices within a batch. These are computation heavy operations. On Ethereum we have to pay gas for these operations and are capped by the gas limit. So it would be impossible to perform these computations onchain. With Safenet we will provide strong guarantees on the execution. Proving these guarantees can be very computation heavy. While it would be possible to leverage technologies like Zero Knowledge Proofs, these are still quite cost heavy. By breaking the atomicity into Execution and Settlement, we can choose where we optimize our flows for what parameters. As the Execution is what the User “feels” when they interact with Ethereum, it has to happen as fast as possible and as cheap as possible. Therefore we optimize here for simplicity and gas costs. The Settlement process optimizes on strong guarantees and security. As we do not have to optimize for speed we can choose an optimistic approach, utilizing Validators to bring in the security and trust. The optimistic approach additionally has the advantage that the gas cost associated to the process of proving the guarantees, will only apply if a settlement has to be challenged. This allowed us to take a step back on optimizing for gas costs and rather focus on security and scalability. The core of the Safenet protocol will follow the highest security standards (incl formal verification). It will be designed in a way that new functionality can be plugged into it without adjustments being necessary. With this we now create a secure basis that allows us to iterate quickly and bring cross-network guarantees of any kind to Safe users. To get an overview of the different components of Safenet and how they interact with each other take a look at our docs: docs.safe.global/safenet/ove…