The account contract
Your wallet is not an app’s private data structure. It is a Safe v1.4.1 smart account — the same contract used to hold treasuries far larger than anything Vela will ever see — deployed exactly as Safe publishes it, with no modification.
That sentence is short and the consequences are not, so this page spells them out.
Nothing in the path is ours
Four contracts stand between you and your money. Vela wrote none of them:
| Contract | Who wrote it |
|---|---|
| Safe v1.4.1 (the account itself, a proxy) | Safe |
| Safe 4337 Module | Safe |
| SafeWebAuthnSharedSigner (verifies your P-256 key) | Safe |
| ERC-4337 EntryPoint v0.7 | The ERC-4337 authors |
There is no Vela contract. The repository contains no Solidity at all — you can check that in one command:
git clone https://github.com/mondaylabsltd/vela-wallet
find vela-wallet -name '*.sol' # prints nothingWhen Vela adds a network, it deploys those contracts at their canonical addresses. It does not deploy a contract of its own design, and it holds no privileged role on yours: no admin key, no upgrade path, no module we can add.
Why “unmodified” is the word that matters
Plenty of wallets are built on “a Safe” or “a fork of Safe” or “a Safe-inspired account”. A fork is a new contract with an old reputation. The differences, practically:
The audits apply to what you are actually using. Safe’s audit reports cover the bytecode at these exact releases. A fork’s audits cover the code before the fork. If a wallet has modified the account contract, every audit it cites is an audit of something else, and the modification is the part nobody looked at.
The ecosystem treats your account as a Safe, because it is one. Block explorers decode it. Safe’s own transaction tooling understands it. If Vela is gone tomorrow, your wallet is not an orphan format — it is the most widely tooled smart account on Ethereum, and any Safe-compatible interface can drive it. This is what makes “if Vela disappears, your wallet does not” a statement about contracts rather than about our intentions.
The attack surface is one everybody else is also watching. A bespoke account contract is a contract only its author is looking at. This one is looked at by everybody who holds money in a Safe.
What it costs
Being standard is not free, and the trade-offs are real:
- Gas. A smart account verifies a signature on-chain. Expect roughly 1.5–3× the gas of a plain EOA transfer, depending on the chain. See networks & fees.
- The account must be deployed. Your address is computed with
CREATE2before anything exists on-chain, so you can receive at it immediately, but the first outgoing transaction pays to deploy the contract. - Not every chain qualifies. The WebAuthn signer verifies a P-256 signature on-chain, which needs the RIP-7212 precompile. Vela refuses to enable a network without it rather than fall back to a weaker verifier.
- Safe’s risk is now your risk. Trusting a widely-used contract is still trusting a contract. What Vela can say is that it has not added a second thing for you to trust on top.
What is and is not audited
Safe’s contracts and the WebAuthn signer module are audited, by third parties, and those reports are public. Vela’s own app code has not been independently audited, and no audit is scheduled — it is a goal for when the project can fund one, not a commitment with a date. Every contract Vela depends on, its audit report, and the issues we track are listed in audits & known issues.
See for yourself
Your account is on-chain. Open it in a block explorer and read the implementation address: it will be Safe’s canonical deployment at v1.4.1, byte for byte, on every network Vela supports.