Two ways to build one
Bitcoin wrote the idea into its rules early. BIP-11, a proposal assigned on October 18, 2011 that is now marked as deployed, made “M-of-N” transactions a standard type. One of its examples is a 2-of-3 escrow in which the buyer and the seller each hold a key and a dispute agent holds the third. Any two can release the coins.
On Ethereum, where an ordinary account has a single private key, multisig runs as a smart contract account. Safe, a smart account with multi-signature logic at its core, keeps a list of owners and a threshold of how many must confirm a transaction before it executes, its developer documentation says. An owner does not have to be a person’s key, since another contract or a passkey also qualifies.
Safe’s homepage claimed more than 60 million accounts and over $60 billion in assets on November 8, 2026.
Nine of twelve, checked on November 8, 2026
Arbitrum DAO, which governs the Arbitrum chains, describes its Security Council as 12 members who are “signers of a multi-sig wallet.” Its constitution requires a 9-of-12 approval for emergency actions and the same for routine upgrades. Does the wallet itself match the rulebook?
The DAO’s deployment addresses page lists the council’s emergency Safe as 0x4235…1641. Asked for its owners and threshold at 08:39 UTC, a public Arbitrum One node at around block 522,322,513 returned 12 owners and a threshold of 9, on Safe contract version 1.3.0. The non-emergency Safe, 0xADd6…a941, gave the same answer.
So the rule on paper and the setting on the chain agree. Anyone can repeat the check.
Where a threshold falls short
A high threshold guards only the path it covers. Safe’s documentation says modules can let a Safe execute transactions “without requiring all confirmations,” although adding a module itself takes the required threshold of owners. The list of enabled modules belongs in any review of a Safe, next to the owner count.
Signers can also share one weak point. In its announcement of September 3, 2024 on North Korean attacks against the crypto industry, the FBI advised companies to require “approvals from several different unconnected networks” before moving funds.
Nine signatures collected from people who all trust the same compromised web page add up to fewer than nine real checks. Reading each transaction on a separate hardware wallet screen before signing is the stronger habit.