Safe outpaces bundler competition as Pectra drives smart account

Safe hits revenue milestones

Safe processed $600 billion in transaction volume during 2025, which is 43% of its lifetime volume. The project earned over $10 million in annualized revenue, up from $2 million at the end of 2024. Lukas Schor, co-founder of Safe, reported these figures in a community forum post. Users deployed 18.3 million new smart accounts in 2025, which means a new account appeared every 1.7 seconds. The network handled 326 million transactions. Most activity occurs on Layer 2 networks, where 98% of new deployments happen. Base is the top retail chain, while Gnosis acts as the automation engine where AI agents live. Institutional users adopted the protocol. The Ethereum Foundation migrated 160,000 ETH, which is worth $650 million, to Safe. Circle holds $2.5 billion in USDC across Safe accounts. Bitpanda uses the infrastructure for its self-custodial wallet. Ledger launched an enterprise multisig product built on Safe smart contracts. Safe Labs also launched Safe Shield for 5,000 teams managing over $10 million in assets. Safe has processed over $1.4 trillion in total value. The project targets break-even and a doubling of revenue in 2026, with $100 million in annual recurring revenue expected by 2030. I find the dominance of Safe on Layer 2 networks a clear sign of its market lead.

EIP-7702 changes the EOA game

The Pectra upgrade arrived on May 7, 2025, and brought EIP-7702 to the Ethereum mainnet. This protocol allows an externally owned account to delegate execution to a smart contract for a single transaction. The EOA signs an authorization that specifies which smart contract code to use. The code executes with the EOA context, and then the EOA returns to its standard state. This differs from ERC-4337, which requires users to migrate to a fully smart contract wallet architecture. ERC-4337 works through a separate transaction system using bundlers and paymasters. EIP-7702 works through a new transaction type that is part of the consensus layer. You already know how frustrating gas fees are, so the ability to pay fees in tokens like USDC or to batch transactions helps. Within the first week of the Pectra upgrade, 11,000 EIP-7702 authorizations occurred on mainnet, with exchanges like OKX and WhiteBIT leading the way in adopting the new transaction type. EIP-7702 also enables session keys for gaming and spending controls like daily withdrawal caps. However, the delegation model creates new vulnerabilities. Security researchers found that 65% to 70% of early EIP-7702 delegations linked to phishing or scam activity. Can developers eliminate these risks before mass adoption?

Comparing smart account standards

Developers use different tools depending on whether they need immediate deployment or protocol-level integration. The infrastructure behind these accounts scales with user demand. Alchemy processed 798,158,890 UserOperations and earned $1,262,308 in revenue. Coinbase processed 118,280,598 UserOperations. Pimlico processed 28% of paymaster volume in December 2023. Biconomy processed 18,989,506 UserOperations. Stackup processed 662,438 UserOperations.

Pectra also included EIP-7251, which raises the maximum effective balance for validators from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH. This allows for easier reward compounding. EIP-6110 reduces validator deposit times from hours to 13 minutes. EIP-7691 doubles the number of blobs per block to 6, which helps Layer 2 capacity. The two standards work together. Teams onboarding first-time users use ERC-4337 because the account is programmable from day one. Teams upgrading an existing user base use EIP-7702 because it adds batching and sponsored gas without asking anyone to migrate. This provides a path for users to use social recovery instead of relying on a single seed phrase.